My Diverse Week in Books

Last week I wasn’t very busy posting, but I was busy reading. I read three books – the first a collection of short stories by Alice Munro called Runaway. It’s easy to see why she receives such acclaim as a writer – it’s because she pens such classic stories, ones that transcend her Canadian place and that seem rather timeless. One theme that drew these short stories together was old culture values clashing with new cultural values. Younger characters spar with older characters over moral conundrums, and, in many stories, thirty pages will contain a vast sweep of time – from the protagonist as an adolescent to a geriatric – and their own values will have aged. I could feel, as I read, that this was from an older writer, one looking back on her life, and telling stories of her friends and contemporaries. Since I spend so much of my time reading younger authors – short stories of my colleagues, up-and-coming hotshots – I recognize that what they often lack is the ability to portray older people convincingly. And yes, I tire of reading too many stories about teenagers and twenty-somethings. So, in a way, it was refreshing to read a work like this, yet at the same time (and paradoxically, I know), I relate more to the sex-suffused stories of Mary Gaitskill or to the sophisticated urban tales of Deborah Eisenberg.

The second book I read was by an up-and-comer: Alex Mindt. Male of the Species is his first collection of short stories, and a good balance after Munro: she primarily dealt with women, he with men, specifically fathers. The fiction that leads off this collection, “Sabor a Mi”, won a 2006 Pushcart Prize, and several others were published in Missouri Review. Mindt’s best talent is in channeling the voice of the immigrant – whether they be Mexican or Chinese. In narration as well as dialogue, he manages to capture the rhythms of speech, the broken phrases, the difficult of speaking in a language not your own. The concepts of many of the stories were intriguing as well – the young black performance artist who burns a cross on his front lawn, and the high school teacher who continues to fail the star running back despite death threats on his family. What I found frustrating was that his portrayal of female voices was not as spot-on – I couldn’t tell they were female, and they didn’t seem to be distinguishable from his male voices. But all in all, a good debut.

The last book I read this week I never would have read if one of my book club members hadn’t chosen it. Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon in 1940, and it’s the story of a Russian man who has been imprisoned by the new-guard communists. I read it in one sitting, late at night, even though I should have gone to bed about halfway through, but I couldn’t stop because I love stories inside closed parameters, whether it be a floating hospital or a sanatorium or a prison (don’t psychoanalyze me on this one). It’s painful to read of the mechanized, emotionless obedience of the new-guard communists as they interrogate the old-guard protagonist, but all the psychological stratagems and subterfuge during the series of interrogations reveals much about Stalin-era Russia.