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 do that from time to time but we don’t have short stories written about us (not always). The book is written in first person and present tense and calls upon a reliable and hidden narrator to propel things along. There is a lack of backstory. In a sense, each character, each man, is encountered by the reader in the present and is poor in context—this is not a criticism but an observation. Szalay has a distinctive style, making liberal use of free indirect speech and many sentence fragments. Mr. Szalay, in a Paris Review interview from 2015 says: “ What does it mean to write a ­series like this? It means that each story isn’t expected to carry its own solitary burden of meaning. It means you get a richer texture. It also imposes a kind of economy. This is important. Each story is short, ten to fifteen thousand words approximately. I think part of the problem, when I contemplated writing a new novel, was that all the masses of incidental detail—which you need in a novel, if only to make it long enough—seemed pointless. None of the characters in this book have elaborate backstories. You don’t know much about their pasts. You don’t know much about their family backgrounds. They’re points on an arc, rather than being arcs in themselves. That let me focus on narrative. It’s not as if a huge amount happens in each story, but they’re not nothing-happens stories either. There’s a very clear—simple, I hope—­narrative progression. Working in that smaller form was a relief and a pleasure. I didn’t have to elaborate for the sake of elaboration, which is how it can sometimes feel to write a novel, or how it had come to feel.” Kevin Porter, in a recent New York Review  article (All the Sad Unliterary Men, January 15 th , 2026), writes about Szalay’s loyalty to the realist tradition in his fiction. He quotes Szalay: “As I see it, the purpose of writing fiction isn’t to have original ideas, but to express platitudes—that is, ideas that almost everyone would accept as true—in an imaginatively compelling way.” Hmmm. The stories in All That Man Is  do present the characters in a realistic way, and address common human themes of love, death, ageing, car accidents, and parenting—the meaning of life thing. I wouldn’t necessarily call them platitudes, that characterization seems to me to be more about how these themes are addressed rather than if. Perhaps Mr. Szalay is being rather hard on himself, I think he’s written a very fine book about the human condition, in particular, the male half. Mr. Szalay’s protagonists are often inarticulate and prone to using violence to solve problems. They are caught up in somewhat petty, self-centered concerns but in each story, reach a point where they are confronted with existence and mortality. Let’s consider the first story as an example. Like the rest, it has no title, only the number 1. And then an epigram: Seventeen, I fell in love… It begins: “Berlin-Hauptbahnhof It is where the trains from Poland get in and the two young Englishmen are newly arrived from Krakow…One of them, Simon, stares listlessly at nothing. He is a handsome boy, high- cheekboned, with a solemn, inexpressive, nervous face.” We immediately get the realist style, and the sense of an unnamed narrator observing and explaining. We know where we are—Berlin, and who the story is about—two young Englishmen, one named Simon. We get some sense of what the story is about from the epigram: An “I” is or was seventeen and imagines or does fall in love. Questions arise! In love with whom? Why are these lads arriving in Berlin from Poland? Why does Simon have a solemn and nervous face? What would that look like? Most importantly, we wonder what the story is about. We are not in a story about whether the lads do or don’t arrive in Berlin from Poland, nor are we in a story about whether or not someone falls in love (or imagines they do). No sir. These questions are decided for us by the story, making us focus on other questions. Mr. Szalay comments: “…your question isn’t what’s going to happen but how will it happen and how will the characters react. That creates far more tension than the question of what’s going to happen. Because the question of  what ’s going to happen is often just too open-ended, you know? After all, anything could happen.” The first scene of the story involves Simon and his companion, Ferdinand, being in the train station. Ferdinand is attempting to arrange a visit with someone he knows. While he is phoning, the narrator uses the simple past tense to provide context: “There was an altercation with the waiter—whether it would be possible to have two cups with a single Kaffeekanchen . It was not possible…The waiter had been insolent with them.” Please note that this is an example of free indirect speech, that is, the comment about the waiter shows Simon’s thoughts instead of saying, “He thinks about how the waiter was insolent with them.” Simon observes the waiter dealing with an older customer. “The waiter literally bows to the suited man.” Although it is not written, there’s a sense that Simon makes meaning of this encounter with the waiter and concludes the man mistreats he and Ferdinand because they are young. Then: “The life of the station plunges and swirls like a dirty stream. People. People moving through the station like a dirty stream. And that question again - What am I doing here? The text is written just like this with that existential question tabbed several times, and one can imagine Mr. Szalay telling the publisher, “Bro, I want it done just like that!” Kevin Porter notes a pervasive influence of the British poet Philip Larkin in Mr. Szalay’s work, and sure enough, Larkin’s poetry is full of expressive indents. And—this passage is a fine example of the story presenting a character moved to make heavy meaning of a somewhat mundane situation. Simon observes the station and the waiter and almost disassociates, comparing the people to a dirty stream of water. He (or the narrator) poses the question: What am I doing here? ‘Kay. Let’s stop here and seek answers next time. Till then. #AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray

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 refugee from Turin and also an old paramour. They resume their romance, and at this point, the story possesses a fairly identifiable form. A narrator, who struggles with being alone meets an old lover by chance. He could run away from her but pursues she and her son whom the narrator believes may be his own. The narrator is hopeful he and Cate have overcome the problems that had previously drawn them apart and, for a time, all is well—except for the war. Then, as I mentioned last time, disaster strikes when the Germans arrest Cate for being a partisan. One might expect the narrator to try to rescue her, but he does not. He is not a partisan but expects arrest even so, and runs away, and this is where I believe the story diverges from more conventional storytelling to focus on the destruction—both external and internal—caused by war. The narrator initially finds refuge in a seminary but fears he will be pursued there and arrested. He receives a letter from his parents who live in the even more remote countryside and decides to journey there for safety. “The last time I’d been up there the year before the war, even then I’d said: ‘If only I could die up here,’ because, when you imagine it in advance, war is a rest, a piece.” An interesting comment. When you imagine war in advance, it doesn’t seem dreadful but like a different time, set apart from normal time. On the way to his childhood home, the narrator meets with considerable danger. There are German patrols, Fascist Italian patrols—he must even deal with partisans who are fighting the Germans but who are suspicious of him. He survives the partisan ambush of Fascists, experiencing the horror of war, the dead. Later, he reflects: “But I have seen those unknown dead, the little men of the Republic. It was they who woke me up. If a stranger, an enemy, becomes a thing like that when he dies, if one stops short and is afraid to walk over him, it means that even beaten our enemy is someone, that after having shed his blood, one must placate it, give this blood a voice, justify the man who shed it: One has the impression that the same fate that threw these bodies to the ground holds us nailed to the spot to see them, to fill our eyes with the sight. It’s not fear, not our usual cowardice. One feels humiliated because one understands…that we might be in their place ourselves; that there would be no difference, and if we live we owe it to this dirtied corpse. That is why every war is a civil war; every fallen man resembles one who remains and calls him to account.” So the experience of war gives the narrator a sense of tragic connection to those who have been vilified as the enemy—the other. The narrator escapes the polarization that occurs during war and broods on the human tragedy of death for both sides. He finally reaches his parents’ home. Although, he remains fearful about arrest, it seems he is much safer in that remote location. The narration switches to present tense: “Nothing has happened. I’ve been at home for six months and the war still goes on.” Of course, this is the vantage point of the beginning of the story when the narrator refers to the hills where he grew up. He is safe but alone. He wonders what became of Cate and Dino but one gets the sense he thinks of them at a vast distance, one he could not cross. The war and the fear of death has contributed to his passivity and fatalism. He experiences the world, not as an arena for action and purpose, but as a place where one must endure things done. We have a novella that follows a standard form—the protagonist is conflicted about human connection and then connects with an old lover and her son. For a time, he nearly finds happiness, but the state of siege shatters his life and this part of the story. From there on, he is on a quest to survive, alone. It should be noted that the novella is very close to memoir, following the real events of Pavese’s life, but memoir must have a narrative form too. Perhaps, although written in 1949, The House on the Hill  speaks to us in our time of daily dismay and struggle against oppression. There is a choice shown in the story: when you live in a state of siege where the rules are arbitrary, either you respond by fighting back or by running to refuge. The story shows the psychological cost to someone who loses almost everything and despairs. Next time, a new story, best B. Till then. #TheHouseOnTheHill #CesarePavese #AlanBray

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, one without responsibility for others. However, he is very conflicted and also yearns for human connection. An initial turning point occurs when, in the countryside, he meets a woman—Cate —he’d had a love affair with ten years before and had broken off. She too is trying to escape the war’s devastation. Cate has a son whom the narrator suspects is his own. The narrator rationalizes his breaking up with Cate in terms of what he saw as her faults, denying his own, and rationalizes their renewed relationship in terms of how she’s changed for the better: “Now I was forty and here were Cate and Dino. No matter whose son he was, what mattered was that we were together again this summer after the absurd harshness of before, that Cate now knew what she was living for and for whom. Cate had a purpose, the will to be outraged, a full life and her own. Was I being futile once more, hanging around her half-lost, half-humiliated?” He spends more time with Cate: “Now Cate and I were walking in silence, arm in arm like lovers and between us walked a hope, a summer restlessness…Everything seemed resolved, promising, forgivable…The new thing that had entered the world that evening was canceling out all harshnesses, rancors, defenses. There seemed almost nothing to be afraid of. We could talk.” The story takes place during a “state of siege” and refers to this state explicitly. A state of siege is a legal/political condition where the military imposes martial law on an area in response to invasion, rebellion and war. Normal civil liberties are suspended; dissent is suppressed. In this particular case, the story occurs just before and during Benito Mussolini’s 1943 abdication during WWII in response to the Allies landing troops in Sicily. Mussolini escaped and established a smaller fascist state known as Salo, and the Germans—unwilling to lose Italy—took up the fight against the invading Allies. It was a period of chaos and violence, of people who were opposed to Mussolini’s rule feeling empowered to fight him and dissent. “There was no more room for doubt. What had been happening all over Europe, was now happening to us—cities and countrysides in equal terror, crossed by armies and by fearful voices. Not only the autumn was dying…The winter came and it was I who was afraid…It wasn’t discomfort or the ruins, perhaps not even a threat of death from the sky; rather it was a final grasp of the truth that sweet hills could exist, a city softened by fog, a comfortable tomorrow, while at any moment bestial things might be taking place only a few yards away, things people discussed only in whispers.” The narrator resumes his affair with Cate, although she denies Dino is his son. They are, apparently close, and as we see in the above quote, the narrator contemplates a long-term relationship, possibly marriage. The group of friends that spends the nights at the inn in the countryside discuss what should be done in the face of the civil war that is raging. However, there is a sense that the narrator believes taking any action—particularly political—is ill-advised. He denies his personal agency and believes it’s best to stay out of trouble. But the war worsens. Partisans store weapons at the inn, and some of the narrator’s friends are arrested. He thinks: “Suppose I had to flee, I asked myself, had to hide. Where would I go, where would I sleep or find something to eat?…I felt hunted and guilty, ashamed of my quiet days. But I thought of the rumors and stories of people who had taken refuge in towers, convents, sacristies.” The narrator experiences a moment of peace and grace while in a local church. Then the Germans raid the inn while the narrator is out walking. He returns to observe from a hiding place that everyone—including Cate—is arrested. Only Dino escapes. He despairs, but Elvira takes Dino in and finds the narrator a refuge in a seminary. Given the relationship between the narrator and Cate, and his desire for connection, we might expect that, next, he would insist on staying and trying to free Cate. But he does not. He journeys to the refuge and essentially abandons Cate and Dino and all his friends. A key question is whether this abandonment and emotional break is due to the war, the state of siege that shatters connection, or is it an expression of who the narrator is on a deeper level? Probably both, best B. Let’s stop there and resume next time. Till then. #TheHouseOnTheHill #CesarePavese @AlanBray

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 motion, an event that “hooks” some kind of desire of the character to achieve a goal. The goal is related to the transformation; the character will be aware of the goal but not the transformation. In the bulk of the story, the character struggles to achieve the goal, meeting with many setbacks along the way. Near the end, a climax produces a crisis which may be resolved by the transformation or failure to transform. There are many variations on this structure, and it is all achieved (hopefully) with craft and artistry. It’s interesting to look for these features in the stories we read. Last time, we left off with the narrator of Cesare Pavese’s 1949 novel, The House on the Hill , going off to see who was singing in the night—also in the middle of a world war, for cryin’ out loud. “When I came out on the road and stopped to look around, I heard the alarm sounding on the other side of the ridge, almost drowned by the noise of the crickets. I could sense as if I were there the city freezing up, the trample of feet, the slamming of doors, the scared and empty streets. Here the stars poured light.” This is a wonderful description of the contrast between the city, besieged from the air, and the peace of the countryside. I love “the stars poured light.” It is also the culmination of the first structure described above (and in last week’s post): the showing of what the central character’s life is like before the events of the story. Now we enter the second structure—the precipitating incident that sets the events of the story in motion. Belbo the dog is no stranger to the singers. “He had found a courtyard and was jumping around some people who had come out of a house…’I thought you were all dancing,’ I ventured. ‘Good idea,’ said the shadow of a young man who had been talking to Belbo before.” This man is identified as Fonso. It is night, and there is no light due to the blackout. We have some exposition: “The innkeeper, a big old man, poured me a glass (of wine). It was a sort of inn, all of them were more or less related, and they came up from Turin as a group.” “There was something in these people, the young men, their joking, their easy friendliness of wine and company, that I knew from the city in earlier times, other evenings…old love affairs.” ‘Kay. “A voice (a woman’s) said to me: ‘And you, what are you doing? On vacation?’” “I recognized the voice. Now, thinking back, I am sure I did. I recognized it but didn’t ask myself whose it was—a somewhat hoarse, abrupt and challenging voice…” Here, we get a reminder that the story is being told from the future, looking back—which, among other things, gives us an assurance that the narrator survived the events of the story. “I said jokingly that I was looking for truffles with my dog. She asked me if they ate truffles at the school where I taught. ‘Who said I was a teacher?’ ‘One can tell,’ she answered out of the darkness. “There was a trace of mockery in her voice. Or was it the game to pretend that we were masked?” The all -clear sirens sounds and the group of people are louder now, more boisterous. “She had remained where she was, leaning back against the wall, and when I said: ‘You are Cate. You’re Cate,’ she said nothing. The narrator returns to the villa where he stays with Elvira and her mother. “As I ate, I thought of the meeting, what had happened. I was more struck by the interval, the years, than by Cate. It was incredible. Eight, ten? I seemed to have re-opened a room, a forgotten cupboard, and to have found another man’s life inside, a futile life, full of risks. It was this that I had forgotten. Not so much Cate, not the poor pleasures of those days, the rash young man who ran away from things thinking they might still happen anyway, who thought of himself as a grown man and was always waiting for his life to begin in earnest, this person amazed me. What did the two of us have in common? What had I done for him? Thos banal, emotional evenings, those easy adventures, those hopes as familiar as a bed or a window—it all seemed like the memory of a distant country, of a life of agitation, thinking back, one wondered how it could have been possibly both to enjoy and betray it in that fashion.” This is a beautiful statement of memory and of a comparison between an old and current self. Again, we get some exposition: “The next thing I asked myself was if Cate, the old Cate, had been as deluded as I had been. Eight years ago, what was she like?…She went out with me, went to the movies or out to the fields with me.” The narrator describes an affair with Cate that he broke off and never thought he’d see her again—and hadn’t for eight years. She lived in a different neighborhood of Turin than he did. So, because of the war, the narrator leaves his job as a teacher in Turin to go to the countryside for safety. By coincidence, her meets a woman there who he’d had an affair with eight years before. She evidently recognizes him before he recognizes her. The discovery leads him to ruminate over the passage of time and memory, as well as showing how he has avoided intimacy. So, we have a story about a solitary man who receives a second chance at an old love affair. Now the question becomes: what does he do?     Let’s pause there. Next time, we’ll look at the next section of structure in the story. Till then. #TheHouseOnTheHill #CesarePavese #AlanBray

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 future to tell the tale. “I used to go there…” the narrator says, referring to the countryside where he goes each night. “I saw no difference between those hills and these ancient ones where I played as a child and where I live now.” Modernism? Best B. You know it. The narrator apparently is telling us the story from a different geographical space where he once played a s a child. Then we have a shift to simple past—"We began to climb, everyone discussing the doomed city, the night, and the terrors to come.” The “we” refers to he and the others who are escaping the city at night by going to the countryside, the “hills.” The story’s final paragraph returns us to the narrator’s future vantage point: “I don’t believe that it can end. Now that I’ve seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: ‘And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?’ I wouldn’t know what to say. Not now at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only the dead know and only for them is the war really over.” Let’s come back to this ending later. The first thing that strikes me about The House on the Hill  is the lack of exposition. The narrator and implied author assume the reader knows a lot or is capable of doing some independent research, or perhaps really doesn’t need to know much about the context for the story. In the first paragraph, the aforementioned hills and city are unnamed. There is mention of air-raid alarms, of people escaping the city at night to head for the hills. Then on the second page, the narrator writes that the city is Turin, Italy, and that his work kept him there during the day. So we learn that we are in Italy and that there are nightly air raids—‘kay, with a modest amount of historical knowledge, we can surmise that the story takes place during WWII—the text doesn’t say so. Sure enough, the narrator writes in line with this that “blame for what happened to me cannot be laid to the war.” There is a dog named Belbo who lives in the hills and waits for the narrator to appear at night, greeting him happily. “Since childhood it has seemed to me that a trip through the woods without a dog means losing too much of the life and the hidden parts of the earth.” The narrator writes that his destination is a villa and that he has “landladies,” who wait for him to give them news, “to make me pay for the trouble they took on my account and their affability, with the tortuous, casual opinions on the war and things in general that I kept at hand.” The landladies are an unnamed mother, “calm and earthy,” and her daughter Elvira, the first named character (besides Belbo). There is a sense here, I think, that this story is not tethered to the Italy of 1943 but could be about living through any war. The lack of names goes a long way toward achieving this effect, as does the first-person narration which gives the reader a feeling of being very close to what’s going on, as opposed to distanced from a real historical event. The narrator doesn’t spend a lot of time describing his external world, he focuses inward on his conflicts and issues and memories: “All the war did was to remove my last scruple about keeping to myself, about consuming the years and my heart alone; and one fine day, I realized that Belbo, the big dog, was the last, honest confidant I still had.” “I began in those days to enjoy my childhood memories. One might have said that between bitterness and uncertainties, behind the need to be alone, I was finding my boyhood just to have a companion, a colleague, a son…We were alone together, the boy and myself; I relieved the wild discoveries of earlier days. I was suffering of course, but in the peevish spirit of someone who neither recognizes nor loves his neighbor. And I talked to myself incessantly…” In an ironic twist, the narrator will soon encounter a real boy who may be his son. More on that to come. So here, we have a very self-involved character in a dramatic situation. There is no sense that the narrator feels much connection with anyone. He writes: “I liked to be alone and to imagine that no one was waiting for me.” However, others are waiting for him—his “landladies” whom he experiences as annoyances, and Belbo, of course. Then, “…that evening, a buzz of voices came up the slope, mixed with songs. They came from the other side, (of the valley where he’s staying) where I had never explored, and sounded like an echo of earlier times, a voice from my youth.” The narrator reflects on the wonder that, despite the war, some people can sing and, apparently, enjoy the summer evening and each other. But he writes, “For my part, I was happy to have in my life neither any real affection nor embarrassment, to be alone, tied to no one.” Yet, finally, he goes with Belbo to see who the others are, thereby showing how torn he is between wanting human connection vs. solitude. Let’s pick this up next time. Till then. #TheHouseOnTheHill #CesarePavese #AlanBray

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 friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “You are the book’s book,” meaning, I think, that a book reads you, that is, who you are at the time you read, makes an enormous difference to your reading. If you have the motivation to re-read a text, you will probably get a lot out of the experience. Let’s consider Eye in the Throat . I mentioned that the beginning of the story raises questions that are only answered at the end—specifically, why is the father of the narrator receiving phone calls in which the caller is silent, and who is calling? Related to this, the father believes the caller is a man named Morris, who owns a gas station used by the family—is the father correct? One can certainly read through the whole thing and eventually find the answers to these questions. However, there is considerable foreshadowing along the way, foreshadowing that may be missed if one doesn’t know the story. I believe this is less satisfying. In a sense, Eye in the Throat is a story about the dissolution of a marriage. Of course, it is as much the story of the growing distance between father and son, but neither theme is apparent at the beginning. There, the reader is only confronted with a mystery: the phone call. The first shift from this beginning was discussed last time. We learn that, “almost six months before,” there was a major accident that left the narrator of the story (never named), breathing through his throat after a tracheotomy that has left his vocal cords permanently damaged. Prior to this, the two-year-old narrator and his father were very close, but the father blames himself for the accident and begins to withdraw—something the narrator doesn’t understand. But the reader does understand, having the omniscient perspective of the story that can see into the father’s perspective (as well as the mother’s). Then, we go forward in time, but not as far as the beginning. The family is on a car journey to Buenos Aires to get medical testing done for the narrator. They stop at a gas station and the father encounters Morris—the reader perceives it is the same Morris mentioned in the beginning. Morris says, as the father searches his pockets for money to pay for the gas, “Why am I always the one who has to wait for you?” This comment, which certainly speaks to Morris’ bullying character and the tension between the father and Morris, sets up the reason why the father believes it’s Morris who’s making prank phone calls to him later, also speaks to foreshadowing—it is not just Morris who waits for the father, it is also the son. In a major development, perhaps the story’s main development, we learn that as the parents leave the gas station, the narrator somehow disappears from the parents’ car and reappears at the gas station owned by the enigmatic Morris. The parents blame themselves and each other, and this incident precipitates their separation. It is explicit that the son is in the car at this point: “’I’m sleeping on the other side of the glass, stretched out with my feet touching the car seat…” However, once the parents return to the car and drive off, there is no longer mention of the narrator being with them. When they return to the car, the mother begins to check on the boy, but the father says, “Leave him be,” and she does, getting into the front seat after reassuring herself with the sight of the boy’s blanket. The narration, mentioned last week, is ambiguous, as it is not strictly from the boy’s perspective. “When she closes her door, the light turns off, and the yellow blanket darkens, momentarily putting distance between me and my mother’s worries.” A surface reading of this sentence might make it seem to be from the boy’s perspective, that he is safely beneath the blanket. But a closer reading shows no actual mention of him, only a reference to “my mother’s worries,” which certainly may be part of a looking back analysis. It is only after a number of miles of travel and the mother falling asleep (!) that the parents realize he’s missing. “’He’s not here!’ screams Mom. ‘He’s not here!’” Frantically, the parents retrace their journey to the gas station. “It’s strange not to be there. I am nothing of what remains: not the back seat, not the yellow blanket, not my empty car seat. Still there is something of me in everything that has been mine. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me,  I say to my father.” This is important foreshadowing of the narrator being aware of the growing distance between he and his father. It’s as if the narrator is still there but has become invisible. With his omniscience, he sees inside both his father and mother. And he sees them sitting in the car. “But me—where am I, if not here? The plastic I breathe through (his tracheotomy tube) is an orifice, not a nose. (Yet he’s able to smell things—how can this be?). If I’m here, if here is where I’m smelling and yet I don’t know where my body is, where am I exactly?” “Kay, this is very mysterioso. Where’d this kid go? “From where am I looking at them? Whatever has happened to me, it has turned me into something else. It has disarmed and expanded me, enlarged me. It is a pain that is outside my body. I am an open plastic valve, and whatever is happening inside me emerges and touches others.” The best I can make of this, best B, is that the narrator somehow disappears from his parents’ car and claims he has no understanding of how it happened. A realist might demand more explanation, but there is none. And there is no neat tying up of this mystery by the end of the story. His parents find him back at the gas station, where he’s being cared for by Morris’ wife. She says that her husband, Morris, found the boy and brought him in but doesn’t know where he was found. The boy embraces his mother, but when his father calls him, he stays in his mother’s arms. “My father’s voice calls to me again, But I’m no longer able (to respond). I no longer want to, I think. No, no because no. No because it’s not the same now …How is this possible? The child has never rejected his father. Something has happened…Did someone do something to him?” The family returns home. That night comes the first prank phone call to the boy’s father. As they continue, the narrator describes him: “He thinks he is learning to listen, for the first time in his life. He thinks that a salesman exposed to such meaninglessness can only develop extraordinary listening skills…my father finds that his telephone sessions bring him an unexpected calm. Whatever it is that comes through the receiver begins to seem ever more familiar. He no longer hangs up but wants to be hung up on.” This is a beautiful metaphor for the process of maturing beyond one’s parents. The narrator grows up and is successful. The mother has moved out long ago. The father still gets the calls, only more sporadically. He no longer seems hostile to them. They are reassuring. He lives far away from his son but thinks this distance is good. “He sleeps better knowing the phone isn’t disconnected.” Twenty years later, he visits the gas station again. Morris explains that, at the time of his disappearance from his parents’ car, the narrator wanted to call his father, and Morris pretended to do it, dialing the number and handing him the phone. Although it’s not said explicitly, the reader realizes that it’s the narrator who’s been phoning his father and not speaking—this is what’s shown at the beginning of the story. The story concludes with the narrator describing his reaction to his father’s death seventeen years later. (This story covers a lot of time). “I sit beside his bed…and I tell him in silence: Don’t worry, Dad, we were happy, at first, and that’s enough. Everything’s going to be okay, Dad . And since he doesn’t answer me, since he has never answered me, I put my finger inside that hole that’s like an eye and I touch inside. I touch my father inside, and I let him go.” This refers to an earlier fantasy the narrator had that he could reach inside his tracheotomy opening and somehow touch his parents. Perhaps there is a middle ground between a first reading and a second, and this would be a slow and careful first reading with frequent looks back to what one has already covered. In a story as complex as Eyes in the Throat , this strategy might reveal some of the things mentioned above. Next time, a new one, best B. Till then. #GoodAndEvil #SamantaSchweblin #AlanBray

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 that calls him every night sticks with him throughout the day and he can’t help but think about Morris. About Morris and the three gas pump islands in the service station in General Acha, about the eighteen hoses hanging from their handles, about the nocturnal lights at that YPF station on the side of the flat, endless highway through the pampa.” We the readers, on a first read through, immediately have questions: who is calling the narrator’s father, why is she/he not speaking? Who is Morris and what is the gas station in General Acha, and why does the father think about Morris when he listens in vain to the telephone? This is classic story stuff, best B; questions raised at the beginning that draw the reader in, expecting answers. And they come, eventually. There’s some nice foreshadowing about the family’s telephone which uses a lithium battery. Then, after a line break, the story establishes that it’s six months earlier and proceeds to tell the story of how the narrator, a toddler age boy, lost his ability to speak. At the beginning of this post, I described the narration as first-person, but it is not quite so simple. A notable feature of this story is the presence of what some might call an omniscient narrator who can “see” into the heads of other characters. This, combined with the first person narration, creates some interesting effects. These excursions into other’s consciousness are often (not always) set off in italics. Thus, in a passage where the narrator describes being bathed by his father, the text reads, “ I have to keep the water out , thinks my father…” The narrator might infer that his father thinks this, although it’s unlikely since he’s two years old, but the comment isn’t presented as an inference, but as a thought. Again, in a passage showing the family making a long car trip, we have, “ Oh, the miracle at last , my mother thinks.” This occurs when the narrator finally falls asleep, a scenario any parent can relate to. Then, when the family stops for gas, we have an extended scene from the father’s perspective. Here, the father encounters Morris, the gas station owner who is mentioned in the beginning, the person the father suspects of making the prank phone calls. (at this point, the reader has no reason to doubt this). Morris impatiently waits for his money which the father has trouble finding in his pockets. “ And all you have to do now is find the money.” The father thinks. Morris says enigmatically: “Why am I always the one who has to wait for you?” This comment refers to a theme in the story, that the father keeps others waiting, often with disastrous consequences. This is shown after the first paragraph break, when the narrator is injured. His father is watching him, but he, being a toddler, swallows the lithium battery for a digital clock while his father is momentarily distracted. In distress, he is rushed to the ER by his parents. The father “checks all the objects I have been playing with. He opens and closes the digital clock on the shelf…opens, but doesn’t close…the small black cover.” An operation is done; the battery is removed, but the lithium has damaged the narrator’s throat. The father blames himself, the mother apparently blames him too, they become estranged and eventually separate after another traumatic incident involving the narrator. While the family is traveling by car (and encountering Morris) the two-year old narrator disappears from the back seat while the parents are at the gas station. They don’t notice he’s missing till they are several miles down the road and turn back, searching for him frantically. All these events are recounted by a narrator who is an adult in the future, a narrator who tries to make sense of why his father withdrew from him after they were very close. But this narration does raise the question: How could a two-year old understand his family and himself the way an adult would? Is the story all about an adult looking back and imagining his very first years, perhaps relying on parents’ stories for the details? I don’t think so, best B. It is our old friend the implied author who is telling the story, darting around and getting into the heads of the different characters. Let’s stop there today and resume next week. Suddenly, an audience member stands up and shouts: “Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker! I have a question. Why is this important? Who cares about the so-called implied author and the narrative style? What a snooze fest! If you want to read the story, just read it! Shut up and read it—and once is enough. Am I right?” The member looks around the audience, nodding, apparently trying to enlist others to his cause, but most people turn away, shaking their heads. Someone shouts: “Sit down!” “Order! Order, please, I’d like to respond to this question—indeed, what is the point of this analysis?” (indistinct shouting) “All right, please settle down. It certainly is possible to read any work of fiction without being aware of the mechanics of how it is done. It certainly can be quite satisfying and sufficient to read a text once only, responding, perhaps, on an emotional level. One can read a book or short story and enjoy it without thinking why. I do not mean to criticize this sort of reading but only to say there are different ways to read, ways that probably do require more than one reading. Eyes in the Throat  provides an excellent example. But I have been warned about making these posts over-long, so again, let me stop and pick up next time. Till then. #GoodAndEvil #SamantaSchweblin #AlanBray

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 literal translation of El Buen Mal.” I don’t know what to say. Ms. Schweblin must have approved the translation. El Buen Mal does seem more like The Good Bad Person, which would give the title a different meaning—stories about a bad person (or people) doing good things. Hmm. It is of significance—story titles and book titles are not randomly picked. They have meaning. Both stories under consideration—as well as most of Ms. Schweblin’s work—are written with a first-person narrator, an “I” who uses the simple past tense to tell the story as if it happened to her/him, a testimonial if not a confession, if you will. Of course, this is true with a lot of modern fiction, some might even say it’s a necessary part of the current style. We may take it for granted, but it does have some interesting implications. The use of first-person narration establishes a persona, a character-narrator who is very self-conscious. Solipsistic come to mind. "’Solipsistic’ describes someone or something that is extremely self-centered, to the point of believing only one's own mind is sure to exist . In a philosophical sense, it relates to solipsism, the theory that only one's own consciousness is certain to exist. In a more common, everyday usage, it describes extreme egocentricity, selfishness, and a focus on one's own needs and desires while disregarding others.” Well, that is kind of a negative take on first-person narration, a blanket condemnation. But in these stories there is an isolation, a sense of an “I” struggling with loneliness. A sense that no one else—even intimates—really understands the narrator. The stories present an “I” suffering from a feeling of alienation and of how she/he resolves it, often by finding connection. William in the Window  begins with “I went to Shanghai a few months after we got the news of his illness and shortly before his treatment started.” The narrator is a writer trying to complete a novel who journeys from Buenos Aires to Shanghai to attend a writer’s retreat. Her husband, Andres, has cancer and may die. As explanation for leaving him, the narrator says, “I was frightened by the suspicion that if Andres died, I might die with him.” This, best B, is the heart of the story. Can one survive the loss of a mate? The narrator befriends another writer at the retreat, Denyce, and learns Denyce is very concerned about her elderly cat, William, who remains in Ireland with Denyce’s husband. At Denyce’s birthday party, Denyce learns William has died. She asks the narrator to return later and confesses she believes William is present there in Shanghai as a sort of ghost. The narrator initially reacts with disbelief but then hears the sound of a cat scratching.    “Then I heard it. Clear and crackling, a slow scratch over soft fabric, like hundreds of tiny bubbles exploding in the air…My heart was pounding just like it had when I’d told Denyce about the marks Andres left in the bathroom.” (This refers to what the narrator said when asked why she loves Andres—she names a particular detail of their life together, that when he stands before the toilet to urinate, he touches the tiled wall, leaving a mark). The narrator becomes quite upset, hearing William’s “call” in Shanghai. “What if Andres was already dead but no one had been able to reach me? What if I was crazy too and I was losing all control over my life? What if I really did die when Andres died, but alone and twelve thousand miles away?” Then she realizes: “The cat was dead but Denyce was still alive.” She winds up talking to Andres on the phone, standing in the bathroom the way he does before the toilet. She wants to tell him that she’ll be on the flight home tomorrow. Here’s the last line: “And then I saw him. William in the Kilkenny window, upright and attentive, finally turning toward me, recognizing me, granting me the certainty of his gaze. Like Denyce, she will survive. Thinking back to the story collection’s title, is the narrator a bad person doing good things? It’s a stretch to try to fit this story into that meaning, my friends. The narrator worries that she’s wrong to leave her husband, however, it’s never made explicit that she abandoned him, more that her departure was agreed on. Her husband never seems to blame her. We the readers get a sense of her inner turmoil, and most of all, her fear that with Andres’ death, her life will end. Denyce’s experience seems to reassure her and perhaps allow her to return to Buenos Aires, less afraid. Till next time. #GoodAndEvil #SamantaSchweblin #AlanBray

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 Laura returning to Venice in the company of the two psychic sisters who had foreseen he was in danger. At the end, he understands the vision’s meaning: Laura is returning to his funeral, accompanied by the sisters. And in the reality of the story, it is a vision—a paranormal thing indeed. By the way, best B, if the narrator dies at the end, who is, in retrospect, telling the story? Hmm? (I detect the implied author lurking). When John “sees” Laura returning to Venice, he does what the reader does and tries to make sense of it. “What the hell had happened? There must have been a holdup with the charter flight and it had never taken off, but in that case why had Laura not telephoned…? And what were those damned sisters doing?…He could think of no explanation.” John then seeks this explanation, interrogating hotel and restaurant managers and finally going to the police. Laura is nowhere to be found. It seems here, in contrast to the initial incident of the sisters telling Laura her dead daughter is present, there is less ambiguity. John’s vision is pretty straightforward and there is nothing overtly supernatural about it in the moment. John sees his wife with the two sisters—she does not see him and seems oblivious. It is really as it would be if someone were seen at a distance—a real person, not a vision. And John’s reaction is, again, quite logical. There is nothing so far to make the reader think there is anything “spooky.” However, John takes a call from England regarding his son and is shaken when Laura gets on the line: “’Darling? Darling, are you there?’ He could not answer. He felt the hand holding the receiver go clammy cold with sweat. ‘I’m here,’ he whispered. … ‘I thought,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought I saw you in a vaporetto with those two sisters.’ … ‘How could you have seen me with the sisters?’ she said. ‘You know I’d gone to the airport. Really, darling, you are an idiot.’” After this call, John drinks heavily. We the readers (through John) are presented with a logically impossible situation (a person being in two places at once) but so far, are not encouraged to view this as a supernatural phenomenon. Our puzzlement is mediated by John’s growing unease, and this begins to suggest something spooky. After he realizes he’s falsely accused the pair of sisters of wrongdoing, John apologizes. The blind sister tells him: “You saw us,” she said, “and your wife too. But not today. You saw us in the future.” However, she is characterized by the other sister as tired and frail. The other sister fears her sister might go into a trance and need days to recover. Again, as we saw last time, the person who presents “spooky” material in this story is marked as unreliable and compromised, calling the accuracy of what they say into question. When John and the sisters reach the sisters’ hotel, the blind one takes John’s hand. “’The child,’ she said, speaking in an odd staccato voice, ‘The child…I can see the child…’ and then to his dismay, a bead of froth appeared at the corner of her mouth, her head jerked back, and she half-collapsed in her sister’s arms.” Here, John’s death at the hands of the dwarf is foreshadowed although the first-time reader doesn’t realize it. It may seem as if the old woman is referring to John’s daughter. John leaves the sisters, appalled at the blind sister’s collapse. He quickly becomes lost but then spots the “child” he’d seen earlier. “It was the same little girl with the pixie-hood who had leapt between the tethered boats the preceding night.” He pursues her, thinking she is in danger and that he will rescue her. Of course, this desire to save ties in well with his feelings of grief over the death of his own daughter. He pursues the “child” into a building, but at the last moment, the “child” throws back her hood, revealing that she is a maniacal dwarf who pulls a knife just as the police close in. She throws it at John, catching him in the neck, and dying, he realizes the meaning of his vision of Laura. By the way, this is a 1970 story and sadly, doesn’t present dwarves in a very positive light. My apologies. ‘Kay. So despite all my cautions, there is genuine spookiness here. John has a premonition of his death but doesn’t realize it. Despite all the ambiguity over the reliability of the blind sister, she ultimately is shown to be correct in her fears for John. John, who throughout the story, is presented as a sturdy champion of reason, ignores a warning because his rationality won’t allow him to believe in visions and “spookiness.” Is Don’t Look Now  “spooky?” Tragically ironic is more like it. The character of the killer-dwarf is arguably frightening because it is relentlessly one-dimensional. We do not know why the dwarf kills John, and it is doubly unsettling because the character is first presented as a child in peril—a sympathetic character if there ever was one. One-dimensional characters are inherently frightening because the reader is not privy to their internal life. Till next time when we will embark on a new venture. A new fictional world, my friends. Till then. #DontLookNow #DaphneDuMaurier #AlanBray

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 care for him. The father/husband, John, believes he sees Laura returning to Venice at the same time he knows she is on a plane headed north. John tries to make sense of this and blames the sisters for influencing Laura to return. Eventually, he runs afoul of a maniacal killer. At the end, he dies, realizing—in his mind—that seeing Laura coming back to Venice was a vision of her in the future, returning for his funeral. ‘Kay. One way to appreciate the story is to embrace the supernatural elements as true. Whether or not one believes in ghosts and visions, one can read the story with an acceptance of the idea that—in this story, at least—they are true. Perhaps this would be an appropriate strategy to adopt on a first reading. Another way is to read with an eye as to how the author constructs the story and its “spooky” elements. Is it truly a tale of Gothic horror or is it actually something more ambiguous? You knew which one I was going to pick—#2, please! Do you have to believe in the supernatural in order to appreciate this story? No, best B, you don’t. In fact, it’s not necessary to believe in ghosts in order to be scared (so said a wise person commenting on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw , another famous ghost story). Boo! A fair question concerns the author’s intent: is Ms. Du Maurier writing a story that treats the supernatural as real? Does she want to scare us? Maybe, but I think a careful reading reveals something more complex. Let’s dig in. The first spooky thing that occurs in the story is when Laura tells her husband what one of the sisters has told her: “You see, she isn’t dead, she’s still with us. That’s why they kept staring at us, those two sisters. They could see Christine.” She continues, recounting more of what the woman told her: “Don’t be unhappy any more. My sister has seen your little girl. She was sitting between you and your husband, laughing…Oh, John, don’t look like that. I swear I’m not making it up, this is what she told me, it’s all true.” ‘Kay. Interesting, but what is the context for these passages? John and Laura are having lunch and note the sisters. Immediately, they jokingly tell each other that the sisters are transvestites who have criminal designs. (remember this was written in 1970). The couple mocks the sisters and contextualizes them for the reader as unreliable and possibly bad. They are “trying to hypnotize” John. “They’re not old girls at all…They’re male twins in drag…They’re criminals doing the sights of Europe, changing sex at each stop…Jewel thieves or murderers?” But Laura presents a different interpretation: “’The things is,’ she said after a moment. ‘We’ve got them all wrong. They’re neither murderers nor thieves. They’re a couple of pathetic old schoolmistresses on holiday, who’ve saved up all their lives to visit Venice…They’re called Tilly and Tiny.” John is delighted that his wife, who has been so grief-stricken by their daughter’s death, seems light and having fun. In this vein, Laura resolves to follow one of the sisters into the bathroom to see if they switch into male clothing, and that is where the sister tells her that her blind psychic sister has seen dead Christine.   So. This shocking message to Laura occurs within a context where the sisters are ridiculed and generally presented as unreliable. This makes what the sister says highly ambiguous—should the reader accept this ghost-sighting as “real” or the ravings of an unreliable person? Laura, who mediates the reader’s experience, believes the story. Of course, Laura herself has been presented as unreliable. She is described as depressed, as not herself in the wake of Christine’s death. She says Christine is alive, when it’s clear she is dead. John, who has the authority of narrator, does not believe the story. He thinks the sisters are trying to trick Laura.    The story is very ambiguous. It can easily be read as a story of an attempted con-job, as easily as it can be read as a ghost-story. If we the readers read a blurb or synopsis, it might describe a ghost story. But this is misleading. Of course, the beautiful and frightening irony is that something scary and awful really does happen. More on this next time. Till then. #Don'tLookNow #DaphneDuMaurier #AlanBray