“A Pet Dog’s Safe Birthing,” by Yasunari Kawabata Nobel Laureate in Literature of nineteen-sixty eight – From “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.”
Animals – pets, they were all around me in my younger days. The family always had a pet dog. It started with a chocolate cocker spaniel, and then a blonde one – who by memory we picked because, she was the cute little puppy cowering underneath the table, not wanting to come out and play and have attention like her brothers and sisters. Then in the same period we had that blonde cocker spaniel we came into contact with a Siberian husky crossed with something else. People do not like when they say a husky is chaos on four paws. A few years later, we got two cats. One had to go away because we did not get him neutered, and he kept spraying. The other one was given to us, and he was fully neutered, not to mention fat and lazy. In the same period a few years later, after the blonde cocker spaniels, death, we got another cocker spaniel. A black little one, whose shy and asocial attitude, is something that we all laugh at. Eventually the husky died a few years after the black cocker spaniel came into her life. However in their short time, together they certainly were partners in their chaotic crimes together. A few years later, a feisty almost non-compliment and manic grey cat had entered our lives. He tormented the older fat and lazy cat and even put a bit a bit of spring back in his step. Then something happened to the older cat, he disappeared, and the mystery is still unresolved and not the most pleasant conversation to have. Now there is still the slightly mellowed manic cat, and a very fat and a very lazy cat who is more interested in food and sleep then exploring the outdoors like the other one. But there have always been animals in my lives. They were the lullabies at night that lulled me to sleep, as they barked without reason or warning in the middle of those cold winter nights. The cows of nearby farmer’s fields were something to look at, and be amazed at when I was younger. The great horned owl that haunted the town one summer when I was younger. Not to mention the countless other animals that have passed through my life. The stray cats, which wander the streets like vagrants, but rather then ask for scraps for food they, glare angrily from their posts, or from the chinks in which they hide. The unseen coyotes in the farmer’s fields, their howls in the autumn and in the winter, were something that could make your hair stand up on end. Those shapeless predators were my first thought of fear, and what lurks outside the safety of the light of the town. The river not far from where I grew up, offered another natural place where in the right moments nature could be briefly be spotted. There was that time that, I saw a beaver’s dam. There was the time that the husky came running back to us one time around, when she lost a fight with a porcupine. These experiences have all been wonderful and haunting to me. I’ve never really thought about how fortunate I was to see, what I have, and have been blessed with nature, and all its splendid beauties and animals it has allowed me to see.
I’ve never been (depending on how you look at it) blessed or cursed with the fact of having to witness a dogs birthing. However, they are complicated matters, from what I have heard. But with birth of any kind, I have learned over the years, they can be very complicated. Yasunari Kawabata’s stories, tell us about the preciousness of life – all life including animals; and opens up with the more rotten parts of life, where during the childbirth the animal has died, or the kittens or the pups die as well. It’s rotten luck or chance. I know people who have gotten so distraught over the matter, do their best to console their pets. They tell me they lay the poor dead pup down for the mom to nudge, and kiss, and say her final goodbye to the pup. It’s a terrible scene full of melancholy and futility. A feeling of what was the point in the end? Yet one looks at the bright side in the end, and they can visibly see that there are however many pups still alive.
Yasunari Kawabata writes with this story, the difficult births and the miracles of the safe births. The sweetness of the small meows that breathe life into the room and sing joy throughout the house. Then of course when they are puppies they have personality and are very playful, and we are quicker to forgive those nasty little puppy teeth that they use so free willingly. Then they grow older, and mature and mellow, and become great companions, for walks, and for late night movies, and for waking you up in the morning to inform you that it is time to let them go outside.
This story rang true to the heart of my pet lover side. Though the discussion and anatomical descriptions of birth were less then appeasing. It would have been nicer if there were less of those. Never seen a birth, never want to – be it human or animal; and I never was a medicine student and do not plan on it either. Yet it is a story for anyone who has loved a dog from the moment they were puppies to the moments, that they are the cantankerous old peculiar beast who has earned their life and their laziness as they have gotten older.
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“The Monologue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo,” by Gabriel García Márquez the Nobel Laureate in Literature of nineteen-eighty two – From “Leaf Storm: and Other Stories.”
When I first read the title of this story I knew, I wanted to read it so bad. But I restrained myself. I knew first and foremost that there are other stories that need to be read before that. Though back in December, on a snowy night, and after a frustrating day’s work of dealing with the Christmas shoppers stressed out to the max with their annoyances of the season itself, I decided to do something. On a whim. Laying on the sofa, the dull light bulbs in over head, sending their glow all around the room, I picked “Leaf Storm: and Other Stories,” by Gabriel García Márquez the Nobel Laureate in Literature of nineteen-eighty two and read it and my usual quick scanning pace. At first I didn’t even feel like I had read it at all, and placed it back on my pile of short story collections, and just lay on the sofa, watching television. The people moving from frame to frame, they held meaningless conversations to me. I took my glasses off, covered up in a blanket and closed my eyes. At that moment I felt like that poor cow in the story trapped in the mud. Its head hung in shame, and weighted down by the embarrassment of the rain falling over head, only causing for more build to build up, and the texture of the place to become more a sticky glue. The weight of the day’s events had weighed heavy on me. The fact of the matter was, that the people, themselves were the Indian’s throwing sticks at me – the cow. I could not give a reasonable answer why the book was not released yet. I did understand that yes it was Christmas, but no I could not change the fact of the reality, that the book was not released yet.
That was the first time, that I can name personally that the restrained that I had placed upon myself, were broken. Today though was the first time since that day, which the story has been read by my eyes again. It took hold though this time. First and foremost, the concept of magical realisms time distortion can be seen. In this story time is not a solidly built structure. It’s more like water or mud or the runny clay of the story. It flows, it moves, and sometimes you get stuck in it. Isbel herself gets lost in time. She begins to recount how and when the rain started. But eventually her concept of time – and even her grasp on reality begins to drift away, and wash away like the water down the street or had become drowned like the trees or the flowers in the story. Such an example can be seen when Isbel is awakened by her mother’s voice from some deep thoughts when her mother tells her that she is going to catch pneumonia. It is then does she first realize that the house has flooded.
“…I heard my mother’s voice warning me from her room that I might catch pneumonia. Only then did I realize that the water was up to my ankles, that the house was flooded, the floor covered by a think surface of viscous, dead water.”
Gabriel García Márquez is also known for his visual writing capabilities; which allows for a great sense of imagery to take place, in his wonderfully phantasmagoric hallucinations, that are Gabriel García Márquez’s stories. Touch, intuitions, the senses of smell, taste, sight and hearing are all brought for by his stories. It does not matter if they have any connection with the characters, at all, but there is that sense that they are part of the imagery of the background. The earthly smell of the soft soil or clay, like a toothless gaping mouth can suck your foot in; or the cleansing smell of the rain, pouring down on the earth, rich with moisture and nutrients to the parched lips of the ground.
“At noon the reverberation of the earth stopped and a smell of turned earth, of awakened and renovated vegetation mingled with the cool and healthful odour of the rain in the rosemary.”
The distortion of time, the dream like qualities, and then all of a sudden the cliff hanger, might drive some readers crazy. Other might wonder if Isbel was an ever a sound narrator in the first place. Did she ever appear all that reliable? Her sense of reality was fading, and she did appear lost at times in herself. Then again, fantasy and reality in a Márquez piece of work go hand in hand. She certainly does fall into awkward situations. Talking with her husband who is not there, when she turns around, or the last bit where she remarks that she is dead. One begins to question if she is alive or if she has ever been sound of mind, and was ever at all a reliable narrator. The question is true, and valid, but it is up to the reader to decide if she is or is not. Though any psychoanalyst or psychologist would certainly say that she is not in her right mind.
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“Waiting for Winter,” by Antonio Tabucchi – From “Little Misunderstandings of No Importance.”
In his authors note Antonio Tabucchi shows himself as a very modest author whose modesty and appears practically on the verge of shyness. He remarks himself, that he wished Henry James wrote “Waiting for Winter.” Guilty and in need to confess, I shall admit that, the stories of Henry James, have never been read by these eyes. It does not matter though if Henry James wrote this story or if it were Antonio Tabucchi; who has ended up in the end to write this story. Even though these eyes have yet to take in Henry James, and this mind has not processed the words, and what is to be formed from his writing, Antonio Tabucchi does not need to fear, or be so modest or shy about the success of this story that he has given the reader – or at least the pleasure of this reader.
“Waiting for Winter,” is the tale of a widow who recounts and describes the later hours of her husband’s death, and his death – a man of letters. The entire story is what, seems to be forming as a truth with this collection, is that all the stories here have the small misunderstandings of no importance in them, and yet these slight changes or misunderstandings, are what make the difference in these stories. They change life in just the smallest of ways. Yet the story itself as also remarked in the note about ambiguity and obscurity can also be seen.
The best way to look at this story – and in theory all of Antonio Tabucchi’s stories; is that they are ice bergs. What one reads, is just the tip of the ice berg. The rest is a unfulfilled world of meaning, just waiting to be discovered, by the reader, upon holding ones breath and taking a dive into the chilly waters below, to discover the beauty and magnificence of the subtle meaning of the writer.
An accomplished story of a widow though, who does her best to accept the fact that her husband is dead, and also deal with the commodity that her death leaves behind, for her to pick up the pieces. There’s the discussion of his journal to be published. Perhaps his poetry? Further reflection may lead to it best to publish his plays; and yet his journal does appear to be the most appropriate to publish now after his death. As people in their mourning over the man of letters, they will surely pick up the journal and hold it close, and pretend or act like they know the man they have lost. A man they hold dear in their hearts. The kind of man though they may not have known personally, well was known enough that at times he felt like one could sit down and have coffee with him – or the shadowy ghost of himself. The entire business though of his death, and acting upon it, as a new marketing plans to market the book after his death, all appear to have no one else’s feelings or emotional state in mind, other than their own desire to make money. The widow herself though is the epiphany of strength throughout the entire funeral procession, and the business that seems to creep up on her as she tries and does her best, to deal with the entire matters at hand.
My apologies at hand for this review appear so awkward, and feeling a bit forced. Its early morning, of coffee and yawns from a terrible night sleep. The story itself was read last night, and now it appears to have escaped my minds grasp this early morning.
Memory serves correct in this case. Everything word was carefully mulled over. The texture, the sound, the feel, the taste, everything was carefully considered in its choice, before being used. A ten page story does not have time to waste around filling the edges with a bit of filler and fat. Antonio Tabucchi’s story is lean and avoids all filler and fat. Focusing simply and easily on the first and foremost on the character, and the atmosphere and avoiding all melodramatic sentimentalism or melodramatic writing. For no reason at all the main character does not break down and start weeping. The widow at all does not all of a sudden cry out and ask herself why now, or why has it happened to her. He remarks on the nauseating flowers, and the nausea of the entire situation, but all funerals are a funereal and sombre nightmares or dreams, that one cannot happen but feel that this is just not happening.
The only issue that I found was not in the writing of Antonio Tabucchi but just a small mistake most likely done on the translator’s part. The mistake was when the German man was speaking, briefly it was noted he had spoken in German at the beginning, and then briefly it was noted that he spoke in French, and then it was changed back to German. But it is simply a misunderstanding on a minutiae detail and is a misunderstanding of simple no importance.
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“(Summer) A Saturday of Sun, Sand, and Sleep,” by Italo Calvino – From “Marcovaldo or The Seasons in The City”
If there has ever been a literary fictional character that has the worst luck, and admires (and also wishes to harvest nature) it most certainly must be the black comedic, Marcovaldo whose misadventures and get rich quick schemes, always fail, and usually in a comedic sense they allow for a sardonic smile on the readers face.
Yet there are complexities with Italo Calvino’s little tales here. They are short, but not quick to the point, nor are they moral fables, teaching us a lesson in ethics and doing the right thing in life, or the golden rule or anything like that really. In these stories, one can clearly see the war being waged on the natural between, the urban and the rural. With this story in particular Italo Calvino describes the (folk medicine) sand treatment that Marcovaldo’s doctor had prescribed to him. Bringing his feisty and rambunctious children along to the beach he has them burry him in the sand. However the beach is populated by the urban and industrial equipment of construction works. Cranes, dump trucks, bulldozers and all sorts of other equipment sit along the beach, beginning the new landscaping and proving once again that mankind and progress engine of the urban world, cannot be held back at all. But Marcovaldo could easily prove that such thought process, is never going to work. Had he not learned from the mushrooms, how deceitful nature could be? The attack of the wasps taught him that nature’s sting is more painful and mighty then that of a prick of a sword.
Yet this makes me wonder after reading a few of Italo Calvino’s stories from this collection “Marcovaldo or The Seasons in The City,” what is Italo Calvin’s purpose with this set of collection. Obviously he has crafted some stories of entertainment, but what is his true meaning or purpose behind these stories. Is Italo Calvino in a sardonic and comedic way remarking on the absurdities of city life? Italo Calvino does not appear to have any sympathies for his character, yet he uses him as an awkward ambassador, of the man whose life is more enjoyed or brought forth in the greatest of lights, by being with nature. Farming, or working at a vineyard or anything that deals with nature itself. Yet the main character finds himself, in the stank oil and grease smell of a industrial workshop. A place of smoke, fire, sparks, tools, and the cacophonous sound of metal scrapping against metal.
Yet even if Marcovaldo, is an ambassador of the natural world and the urban world he is not very good at it. He shows his own selfishness, when trying to harvest woodcock and ends up with an underfed grey pigeon trapped to the roof. Not to mention this go around when he attempts at doing something for his health, and decides to get some sand treatment, he ends up drifting away and catapulting into a river of people; who like himself went to escape the hot Saturday sun.
To call Marcovaldo a poor pitiful proletarian would not be right. His suffering is not something, which eventually leads him to some self-righteous act of changing the social order. No Marcovaldo may share some traits of the proletarian class, but he himself, does not seek or have the idolized communist ideals. He’s the poor man unable to enjoy nature to its fullest, like others. Instead he must find nature in other areas. Though nature often in a sardonic act of irritation often takes its vengeance out on him for disrupting or getting to close or being overtly selfish in all matters that do not pertain to him at all.
If anything Italo Calvino has created some interesting entertaining stories, which do not lament the crippling and overpowering of nature and the natural world, but shows how both the urban world that can both live side by side peacefully and yet like warring neighbours they take small jabs at each other whenever have they chance, and it is in those jabs that Italo Calvino finds humour and entertainment.
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“In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” by Amy Hempel – From “The Collected Stories,” by Amy Hempel – Section: “Reasons to Live.”
There is no anthology that Amy Hempel has been placed in that, “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” was the chosen ambassador to represent her work. There is very little to say about this story introductory wise. It’s one of the most anthologized stories of the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was one of Amy Hempel’s first stories, written during her time as a student of Gordon Lish; and if memory serves correct as well, the shaping of the story came around from an assignment. The assignment was to write about their worst secret. The following product of that assignment is Amy Hempel’s famous story: “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.” It sounds rather trite, and riddled with the melodramatic cliché’s of the ‘troubled artist, finds inspiration in their greatest pain and agony of the past.’ However I shall assure you otherwise. As trite as it sounds and most likely is on how the story came to be, it is not some mediocre melodramatic and bathetic story at all.
It is emotionally charging of a tale for sure. What makes it an emotional charging story is exactly what makes one think it’s a written cliché! The fact is however, knowing this is a painful moment, and very personal moment for the author makes it a emotional charged story, filled with the language of grief.
It is a story that rings true to the core to all of us as readers, and as human beings who have emotional lives, and feel those feelings, for what they are. The entire spectrum is open to us all. Happiness, mellowness, sadness, anger, grief – the richness of it all, is for everyone to enjoy. Part of the emotions and the emotional attachment that grows between character and reader, is something that most authors intend to give their work more of an emotional impact. However, stories are not always given that luxury of having a larger format for the reader and the character to connect and to bond with each other, over a period of time, that the book takes place. Stories are much different. They do not have the luxury of giving the reader, time to bond and to connect with the characters, like a novel or a book series would allow. However stories can offer a fragment’s of the characters life.
The write of a story needs to make very important choices, before writing the story. The focus of the story is one of them, how to get that emotional gain or if they want to completely ignore it and try something different, and how to achieve the end goal. The intended effect, that lasting impression that will last with the reader. Some stories start in the middle and move backwards briefly then finish it up by moving forwards. Others focus on a specific and precise moment. They focus on the emotional landscape of the characters and then work the epiphany of the characters, and leave the rest for the reader to make sense of. Other use minute details, in a seemingly random order, but what happens after careful scrutiny and patience, is a puzzle of words, and moments or fragments that lead up to tell the story. Others use, relative subjects and themes and subject matter that allow for us to sympathize and empathize with the characters. Such subject matter can be from anything – from the consumerist shallow petty moments like finding that perfect dress for the prom; to the moments that one is faced with some very difficult decisions, such as the realization of our own mortality and the mortality of those around us. This is what Amy Hempel has done with “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” dealing with the grief and the human situations in which we are all forced to deal with: the loss of siblings, parents, grandparents, family members, children and friends all unexpectedly or not. It is a situation we are all forced to deal with or will have to confront sometime during our life time.
Ms. Amy Hempel caught the feeling of the hospital perfectly, and the necessary and etiquette induced reaction that one must accommodate the one who is ill and or dying but more importantly it is attempt to normalize the situation and or completely refuse the existence of the situation all together. However throughout it all though Amy Hempel does not try and steer the reader’s emotions. She writes with a cold subjective stand point, and yet it is an emotional story based on our individual responses to the story itself. Hempel writes about the loss of youth and uses very simple sentences to pack that punch: “men we used to think we wanted to sleep with.” Among other comments. However the real clincher is that little dark secret that each of us hopes we won’t become us in such a situation. “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” is not just about the dying friend, and what one does for them and that it’s just not enough; it’s about not wanting to have done enough for the dying. That sense, that this is not ones concern anymore, or never was in the first place. It is an incredibly personal story, and deals with something that most readers can relate to on one level or another.
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“Freehand,” by Ersi Sotiropoulos – “From Landscape with Dog,”
This is the first story – or to be more accurate and precise, the first time I have ever read anything by the Greek author Ersi Sotiropoulos. Thinking about Greece now brings to mind, a country that has now paying its dues for its lack of resources, and its life of credit. The languish lifestyle, that they lived, has now come to an end. The government is on the needle end of toppling over. Suicide in the last report that had met my eyes had risen to forty percent and violence and has increased to a full complete one-hundred percent. The pristine country that once left me with such awe now fills me with despair and fear. Where once the great human Greek gods sat perched on Mount Olympus, and the philosophical and political thinking of Athens, not to mention the brute strength of Sparta, had eagerly been something that my curious childhood mind devoured now has become some warped nightmare. Sometimes, while sitting on the sofa or laying in bed, I think to myself, which the country is going to fall into the Mediterranean Sea. That it’s going to just be sucked up in to the depths of the sea, because of the weight of the uncertainty of the country’s future, that the only reasonable or humane motion the gods could do is just let it be swallowed in the estuary gob of the sea.
Ersi Sotiropoulos is an avant-garde writer – though in my opinion one of the most readable avant-garde writers that I have had the pleasure of reading. She was born in nineteen-fifty three, and studied philosophy and cultural anthropology in Florence Italy, and went on to work at the Greek embassy in Rome Italy.
“Freehand,” is a subtle story. It is not adequate to call the story strange or peculiar in any means. It is just a wonderful story, which is filled with that quiet hum of life itself. The Greece (I assume Greek) that is presented in this story is much different than the current and present state of the country. It is a story that concerns some philosophical questions and two people who love each other. It’s full of mundane events and that special order and practical way of life. There are there are the characters own personalities, who clash and mingle. Their souls intertwine with each other and yet the sutures that tie them together often unlace themselves as well.
Through naked prose and simplicity of writing, with great imagery – some many lines stand out. Lingering on the very edges of my mind form the story; the writer has accomplished to show a great depth of writing in just a few pages and vivid and grand images.
There are moments, of philosophical musings, in these naked prose. The musings of the face of being the mirror of the soul. Yet when a man who is only known by his name Giacometti, begins to draw a face, it always turns out looking like a skull. Is it easy to just push that aside as just simple imagery with no real importance. Poetics with no driving force, behind it – yet like the cow itself who exists not because one see’s it but exists because it exists whether or not you see it or not.
The conclusion of the story if one could call it a conclusion at all – feels more like a dead end, or a epiphany or a sense of understanding, but beneath it all the story is far from over – even though the words end, there is still a feeling that story continues. Maybe it does, in other ways then what we as a reader know it does or not. It is not an abrupt ending nor does it just end in a petering out way either. It just ends. The words just stop at the perfect ending image. That is it and that is all.
“Her voice was colo[u]rless, with a tinge of disappointment.”
That is just one of the lines, which leaves one with the impression, of the story. A small indent, left on the skin. A lasting tingle of ticklish pleasure, as someone who has just traced ones naval gently with their finger nail. Those small moments of pleasure, make the skin of one’s body prickle with goose flesh, and yet it still feels warm, with the nostalgia.
The prose of Ersi Sotiropoulos is reminiscent of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, in his paintings. This story especially left that indent upon me, of a quiet viewing of those paintings.
This blog is dedicated to my friend Samuel
