I was going to embark on a new story this week, a new book, that is, but I’ve been enjoying the David Szalay book, All That Man Is , so much that I wanted to focus on one more of its stories, the third one, also untitled. As we’ve noted, all the stories in this collection have as their protagonist, a man of a particular age. This story has to do with Balazs, a Hungarian man in his late twenties. So, in keeping with the rest of the book, we would expect this story to explore i

Last time, we left off amidst David Szalay’s linked short story collection All That Man Is . We were studying the final story which deals with Tony, a man near the end of his life. Unfortunately for Tony, he has just been in a serious car accident and is recovering. We the readers wonder if this traumatic experience leads to some transformation in a character who is darkly focused on the meaninglessness of his life. Tony’s wife Joanna drives him home from the hospital. “On th

Hello. We are in the middle of examining the final, untitled story in David Szalay’s collection All That Man Is . Last time, we noted how things begin with the protagonist, a seventy-three-year-old man named Tony, pre-occupied with thoughts of death and the end of his individual existence which seems to make his life lack meaning. As we continue, Tony talks to the cleaning lady and has breakfast. He checks email and reads one from his daughter Cordelia (King Lear fans take no

Hello, we’re back! Today, we’ll examine the final (ninth of nine) story in David Szalay’s book, All That Man Is . To begin this one, there is no title, but we have an epigraph:   Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.   This is the beginning of W.H. Auden’s 1940 poem, If I Could Tell You. We’ve noted how Mr. Szalay seems to appreciate the poet Philip Larkin and weave Larkin’s style into his

Last time, we left off studying the fourth, unnamed story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is , a tale of a man in his early thirties, an English graduate student who is involved in a love affair with a woman named Waleria. The protagonist (whose name is Karel—I forgot that he was named last time) is delivering an expensive, leased car to a man in Poland, a man who happens to be Valeria’s father, and plans to meet Valeria and spend a few days with her at a German resort. We saw

This time, let’s examine the fourth story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is . It is untitled and tells a tale about an unnamed man who we can infer is about thirty years old. He is English, a graduate student at Oxford in Medieval German Languages, and is involved with a Polish woman, who is named, Waleria. He has a side job of delivering leased luxury cars throughout Europe, and the story occurs during one of these deliveries when he’s arranged to meet up with Waleria and st

We left off seeking answers to the question, “What Am I Doing Here?” which is posed in the first story in David Szalay’s linked story collection All That Man Is . Each story in this book covers different men who progress in age from youth to old age, so in this first story where the protagonist, Simon, is seventeen, the question is, what is a seventeen-year-old doing here in his life? Last time, I mentioned the influence of the British poet Philip Larkin on this story and the

Today, let’s look at David Szalay’s (pronounced SOL-loy) 2015 book, “ All That Man Is .” Mr. Szalay recently won the Booker Prize for his novel, “ Flesh .” The book is a series of nine linked short stories—not that they share characters but have similar themes. Each concerns a man of a defined age, beginning with seventeen and continuing up to seventy-three, who is usually away from home and becomes pre-occupied with questioning the meaning of his life. Well, okay, all of us

Cesar Pavese’s novella The House on the Hill  has an unconventional structure, one that lulls the reader into thinking things will be one way, and then showing them as being different, thereby underscoring the story’s point about wartime trauma. As mentioned last time, the story, which takes place during a “state of siege” in 1943 Italy, has to do with a man—the narrator—who escapes the nightly bombing of Turin by going to the countryside. There he meets Cate, a fellow refuge

Last time, we talked about how Pavese’s The House on the Hill  fits/doesn’t fit into expectations of traditional story structure. Essentially, this is the story of a 40-year-old man, a teacher, who is living in the midst of WWII in Turin, Italy. To escape the nightly Allied bombing raids, he and many others go to the countryside to sleep, returning to the city in the morning to work. The narrator—this man—is single; he ruminates at length about how a solitary life is the best

I have decided not to do a post this week on Pavese's The House on the Hill . Why? you ask. I had one ready but was not satisfied. The story is so great, and I felt my post was not doing it justice. I will return next week, never fear.

I'm happy to announce that my short story "The Return" is a finalist in Narrative Magazine's Fall Story Contest. Many thanks to Tom Jenks and everyone at Narrative. I haven't done so much with short stories recently as I've been working on a novel which I hope will be done soon. So, this news from Narrative was very encouraging. Thanks again.

Traditionally, stories, long and short, follow a structure—in fact one who veers very far out of this structure risks losing a reader’s attention, conditioned as we are to the familiar. A story is typically about the transformation or failed transformation of a central character who may or may not be the narrator. A story begins with the showing of this character’s existence pre-transformation. A short way in, an event occurs which sets the process of transformation into moti

This week, a new work, Cesare Pavese’s semi-autobiographical 1949 novella, The House on the Hill . I am reading a 1968 New York Review of Books edition that includes three other of Pavese’s short novels, The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese . The story begins: “For a long time we had talked of the hill as we might have talked of the sea or the woods.” In classic story-telling fashion, we the readers are presented with a first person narrator, an “I,” who looks back from the fu

Last time, during my discussion of Samanta Schweblin’s story Eye in the Throat,  an audience member questioned the value of re-reading fiction, and today, I hope to address these concerns. (The audience member has been silenced). I suppose the best reason to re-read a story or novel would be that you like it. I want to argue that because of the complexity of fiction, re-reading also enriches your understanding of a text. Every reading is different, a savant has said. Our frie

The second story I’d like to discuss in Samanta Schweblin’s collection Good and Evil and Other Stories is called Eye in the Throat.  It’s long, forty pages, a size that pushes it into novella range. Yes, please note the use of the present tense combined with first person narration. It begins: “My father picks up the phone.” What follows is a description of how the narrator’s father, in 1990s Argentina, received phone calls during the night in which no one spoke. “The silence

Hello to all. Today, I want to write about Samanta Schweblin’s brand new collection of long short stories, translated as Good and Evil  from the Spanish El Buen Mal . I will discuss two of the stories, first William in the Window  and then An Eye in the Throat . Samanta Schweblin has published two novels and, counting Good and Evil , three short story collections. She is originally from Argentina.   The Spanish speakers among us might say, “Hold up! Good and Evil is not a lit

Last time, I wrote about the ambiguity of certain elements in Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now , and I’d like to continue—especially since we’re dealing with scary scenes, and it’s a week closer to Halloween! I gave away the ending last time, so there’s no use pretending I didn’t. John, the narrator, pursues a figure he thinks is a child in peril who turns out to be an adult murderer (a dwarf) who kills John. The last thing he remembers is the vision he had of his wife Laur

Last time, we talked about several different ways to look at the supernatural features of Daphne Du Maurier’s short story, Don’t Look Now . In part to recover from the death of their young daughter, a British couple are vacationing in Venice where they encounter a mysterious pair of sisters who tell them their daughter is present and concerned that something bad will happen to them. Their son, at a boarding school in England, falls ill, and the boy’s mother, Laura, returns to

Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now  is a long short story (some 60 pages), originally published in 1970, thirty-two years after the publication of our previous selection, Rebecca, which speaks to Ms. Du Maurier’s long career. It was first published in Great Britain under a different title, Not After Midnight . The edition I’m reading is a short story collection of Ms. Du Maurier’s work entitled Don’t Look Now , published by The New York Review of Books. A famous film version