BWBC 18: Hearn Manuel
A thousand apologies!
I missed posting last week and I have no excuse. In fact, I’m a bit ahead with the reading, so much so that this week might have two posts. We’ll see how ambitious I get. But today’s post will be on the stories “Of a Promise Kept” by Lafcadio Hearn and “The Wizard Postponed” by Juan Manuel.
They aren’t dazzlers and are on the shorter end of stories, but they’re all right. I’m getting the feel for Manguel’s rhythm and how he’s putting together this mix-tape of an anthology. Some stories are long hefty numbers, while others are short little ditties.
And these two stories are definitely ditties.
“Of a Promise Kept” by Lafcadio Hearn
I’m a big Hearn fan. That might not be cool to admit, and I recognize that much of his fame is wrapped thick in Orientalism and Exoticism, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am a fan. Maybe it’s the journalistic angle he brings to his work. Maybe it’s some melodramatic kindred spirit bull-spit. Whatever reason it is (it’s probably the latter), I am always excited to read his work.
“Of a Promise Kept” is typical Japanese-era Hearn. There are two samurai. They are “foster brothers” and love each other very much. One needs to go far away, but promises his friend that he’ll be back on such-and-such a holiday. The holiday approaches, and the friend preps a big feast. Everyone tells him he’s crazy, because no one can guarantee when the other samurai will arrive, but the friend won’t hear it, and commands the feast be prepared. Of course, the day arrives and the feast is set out and hour after house goes by and the samurai doesn’t show. Despite this, the friend refuses to accept defeat, and stays up well into the night after everyone else goes to sleep. At which point the samurai arrives and sits with his friend, and tells a story about why he was so late. Turns out his family disapproved of his behavior and tried to keep him a prisoner in their house. But the samurai knew a way to travel a thousand miles in one day, using that one weird trick known as suicide. So that’s what he did, and he’s dead now, but he kept his promise.
All this makes the friend, the “foster brother”, get pretty angry with his dead friend’s family, so he travels to them and kills them, but he gets away and no one’s angry with him because he only did what was right. The End.
It’s not bad, but there’s better Hearn to be had – or maybe more Hearn. He might be the sort of writer that improves with quantity consumed in a single sitting.
“The Wizard Postponed” by Juan Manuel
Don Juan Manuel was a 15th century Spanish nobleman with a reputation for political maneuvering. He was also a writer and wrote some Aesop style fables in among all his other treatises. “The Wizard Postponed” is one such fable, and it’s not bad.
A certain learned dean travels to Toledo to learn magic from one don Illan. When he tells don Illan his desire, the don tells his maid to prepare dinner while the men go apart into an enclosed room. While they are in the room a messenger arrives for the dean saying his uncle is dead and won’t he come to the funeral. The dean says no and stays with don Illan, agreeing to help the don’s son find a position once the magical education is done. Days later another messenger arrives telling the dean he’s inherited a powerful position from his dead uncle. The dean leaves to take the position and don Illan accompanies him. From that position the dean inherits another and another, and with every success, don Illan asks for some position for his son. But each time the dean refuses the request saying he must appoint some other person instead. This goes on all the way until the dean becomes pope and still refuses to give don Illan’s son a position, at which point the maid arrives to tell the men that dinner is ready.
It turns out everything was an illusion made by don Illan to show how the dean would never repay the don for teaching him magic. The dean’s shown the door and don Illan goes to eat dinner by himself. The End.
It’s entirely possible that Jorge Borges made this story up.
Next: a monkey’s paw and a bottle imp!
BWBC 17: Pushkin!
This week’s story is a gem.
It has ghosts, gamblers, tragic love affairs, and hints of black magic. All that in a short story set against the backdrop of 19th century Russian high society.
“The Queen of Spades” by Alexander Pushkin
Hermann is a young soldier from a poor German family. He is obsessed with improving his station, but lack of prospects, money, and connections. He regularly joins his friends at gambling halls, but he never gambles, because he knows he doesn’t have the money to risk. This, however, doesn’t prevent him from developing a passion for cards. If only there was some way to guarantee he could win every time he played. Enter his rich buddy, Tomsky.
One night after coming back from the gambling hall Tomsky tells Hermann a story about how his grandmother, the Countess Anna Fedotovna, was a great beauty in her youth with a spendthrift gambling habit. When her husband refused to pay her debts, she turned to noted disreputable historical figure Saint-Germain for help. He taught her the three cards that will always win every game. The fact that the old woman now lives in the city makes Hermann concoct a scheme to seduce the Countess’s ward,
Lizaveta Ivanovna, in order to get close enough to the Countess to learn the secret. Lizaveta at first resists, but soon she’s in love with Hermann despite his true intentions. Eventually, Hermann convinces her to let him into the house one night while everyone is at a ball, and while he’s supposed to wait in Lizaveta’s room, he in fact hides in the Countess’s.
There he waits until everyone returns from the ball. From hiding he witnesses the “hideous mysteries” of the Countess’s toilet as the old woman prepares for bed. Finally she retires, at which point out comes Hermann to beg for the secret. The old woman is shocked and refuses to give it to him (is the story even true or simply gossip?). He then gets angry and pulls a gun, causing the Countess to drop dead from fright. Hermann flees to Lizaveta and tells her everything. He threatens to reveal her role in the scheme if she doesn’t help him to escape. She agrees and provides Hermann a key to a secret passage that leads to the street. He flees.
Then comes the Countess’s funeral and the entire town comes out to attend. Hermann goes too, in order to pay his respects to the family and the woman he’s accidentally killed, but when he approaches the coffin, the body appears to wink at him. This makes him have a breakdown and require being carried out from the church. Later as he lies with a fever in his quarters, the Countess appears to him in all the finery of her youth, and she teaches him the three cards that will win every game.
There are some rules that go along with their usage. First, only one card can be played an hour, and second, once the third card is played the player must never gamble again. Hermann agrees to all this and memorizes the cards, eager to try them out the next time his friends go gambling. Of course, everything goes side-ways at the end, because hahaha the Countess’s ghost was messing with Hermann the whole time.
Believe me folks, this story is great, an absolute ride that has made me happy that I chose to read through this book. I’m even excited for the end of the year when I’m done with this project and putting together my highlight list. “The Queen of Spades” will be high upon it.
If you like the yesterweird at all, then search this one out, or one of the movie adaptions of it. You’ll dig it.
BWBC 16: Allegorical Realism and Fantasy
And we’re back!
Two stories today: Italo Calvino’s novella “The Argentine Ant” and John Collier’s “Lady on the Grey”. They could not be more different from each other.
“The Argentine Ant” by Italo Calvino
In a lot of ways this story is a straight realist story about a young couple that moves to a new town and have their hopes of finding an easy life there all dashed by the ants that infest the village. As the couple is increasingly tormented they seek help from their neighbors, all of who have pursued different methods to deal with the ant problem. One builds elaborate mechanical traps, another adheres to a complicated routine of poison application, a third lives in complete denial of the ants’ existence even though they torment her. And that’s when you start to think maybe the ants are a metaphor and underneath the realist veneer this story is an allegory for life.
What the ants represent is open to debate. My take is that they embody unfettered nature that contains pleasure and pain, stability and entropy, and which can’t ever be stopped only accommodated. As the story progresses and the ants become more of a nuisance, the situation deteriorates until the couple finally seeks out the man from the Ant Company. He’s supposed to be exterminating the ants on behalf of the government, but no one trusts him and most people in the district believe he’s in league with the ants.
The only relief comes when the family leaves the neighborhood and goes to the beach where the sight of the waves and the sun break the hold the Argentine ants have over them, but there’s no sense that the couple have escaped, only that they’ve discovered a balm for a time.
Give it a read sometime and let me know what you think.
“The Lady on the Grey” by John Collier
Ringwood and Bates are two roguish fail-sons of the penniless aristocrat sort. They’re hangers-on and leeches, living on modest allowances as they travel Ireland in search of game, be it fish, fowl, fox, or human female. Neither are the letter writing sort, and their communications are done via third persons: mutual acquaintances, train agents, barmen, etc. One day while Ringwood’s wondering at his prospects, a message arrives via one-eyed horse dealer that Bates has gone to Knockderry and if anyone saw Ringwood they should tell him that. Ringwood assumes Bates has come upon something good and sets off for Knockderry at once. Of course, when he arrives there’s no sign of Bates and no one in the village knows where he can be found. No matter, thinks Ringwood, he’ll see for himself what the town has to offer (mostly in the way of farm maids he can assault). As he spies a potential victim, he’s interrupted by the arrival of a beautiful woman on a grey horse and the mangy dog that travels behind her. She initiates a seduction and Ringwood can’t believe his luck, despite how annoying her dog is. He doesn’t care that the dog keeps accosting him. So she tells him to come by her lonesome tower house later that night, and Ringwood goes back to the inn to prepare himself. From the innkeeper he learns the woman is the last of an ancient Irish family, and from that Ringwood’s predatory fantasies blossom.
But, of course, things aren’t as they seem.
This is one of those stories you enjoy not because you’re rooting for the characters, but because you like seeing the trap spread around them. When Ringwood finally gets his, you can’t help but feel satisfied.
Do people still talk about John Collier? I feel like he’s one of those writers no one ever talks about but whom provided the seed-story to a dozen well-remembered Twilight Zone episodes. Like Bradbury, he’s the sort of writer you think you know based on one story or book, but whose work as a whole offers a lot more complexity than you realize. Also, there’s the sheer level of craft on display in his stories. The plot might be predictable, but the joy’s in the execution. They’re perfectly designed little narratives.
If you like the Neil Gaiman/Michael Chabon style you might want to check John Collier out.
Next week, a long one from Pushkin!
BW BC 15: In This the Year of Our Lord Entropy
Among the many unsettling things this year of our lord entropy 2020 has revealed, one that snuck up on me is how much all those weird, surrealistic Eastern European writers from the 1930s are starting to make sense. Case in point, Bruno Schulz.
I know I read Schulz back in university and thought him “weird”, but his full eeriness never quite strike me until I read this story of his “Father’s Last Escape” in Black Water. It’s nothing particular or prescient. It’s simply the fact that as weird as things get, the characters all respond to it with an exhausted numbness that I now recognize all too well.
“Father’s Last Escape” by Bruno Schulz
The cleaning girl has no bones and makes a sauce by boiling old letters.
The fur coat in the hall has become alive and attacks everyone that gets too close to it.
And father has drifted away, first into the wallpaper, and then into something crab-like that scuttles and crawls.
Why? Who knows?
The world is in some mutable state and reality can’t be relied upon to behave as one would wish. Father has dreamt too long and deep, and has been transformed. (Although everyone comments on how striking the resemblance is to when father had a human form.)
Schulz is clear in his nods to Kafka, but there’s that banal note to it all that Manguel favors: All the other characters accept the transformation in stride. Sort of. Eventually fate intervenes, but even then it does so in a dreamlike fugue state.
Reality is no longer fixed. Everything is in flux. Father is retreating into a mythic fantasy world and everything seems capable of changing at a moment’s notice. So much so that we’re all numb to it.
Nothing at all familiar in that…
“A Man By the Name of Ziegler” by Herman Hesse
Herman Hesse brings us back to familiar territory, giving us a tale in the classic genre of Guy Gets High, Guy Loses His Mind.
Here our guy is one Ziegler. A typical specimen of his culture and era, well-dressed and confident in his belief that he exists at the pinnacle of culture. He’s smug, he’s proud, he’s self-righteous, and he has a day off so he’s decided to go to the museum and the zoo. But first, we get a full glimpse at how superior he believes himself to be. At the museum he chuckles at how primitive people were in the past, and the way they believed such foolish things. He’s particularly scathing in his views of fortune-telling and the like. But alchemy was all right because it led to chemistry. So while standing before the alchemy exhibit, he pilfers a small pill on display and stuffs it into his pocket. Later at lunch he gives the pill a more thorough examination, and finds its resin scent pleasant. This leads him to tasting the pill, then swallowing it. And then like all novice stoners, he goes to the zoo.
At which point he realizes the drug has allowed him to understand the speech of animals, and they do nothing but mock and insult all the people who stop by their cages. Ziegler’s particularly incensed by the insults from the lions and gets into a shouting match with them. This of course makes the other zoo patrons nervous, and they call the guards, who arrive and take Ziegler away because in true Reefer Madness-style he’s now insane.
So, don’t do drugs!
Or, maybe, if you do drugs, don’t be a smug prick!
Next week… ants!
BW BC 14: Lady Into Fox
David Garnett’s Lady into Fox is a short novella from 1922 about a woman who turns into a fox and the problems this causes for her husband.
In its day Lady Into Fox was highly regarded, winning awards and earning praise from the likes of Virginia Wolfe, Joseph Conrad, and HG Wells. It’s one of those English fantasy stories from the early 20th century, the same era that gave us Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. But, despite a reprint in 2004, its legacy hasn’t lasted as well as those other books.
Wikipedia calls Lady into Fox allegorical, but if it is I’m not sure what the allegory is supposed to be. The story’s like one of those old movies that is so fraught with possible interpretations you can easily find contradictory ones. You can read it as feminist. You can read it as misogynist. You can read it as a defense of polyamory and an attack upon it. You can read it as one of those books that could only have been written in a society where uptight, closeted gay men regularly married unconventional, heterosexual women in the hopes of satisfying a society that wanted to pretend neither one existed.
Whatever it is, it’s quite good and worth the afternoon it would take to read it. I’ll put a link to the Gutenberg version down at the bottom. That one has great wood cut illustrations in it by Rachel Marshall, Garnett’s first wife.
A word of warning though: this is one of those stories where a dog dies, and that lets you know that no matter how good things are for the characters at any given moment, a dog has died and therefore everyone’s destined for ruin.
Lady Into Fox
One day, Richard Tebrick is walking with his wife, Sylvia, when suddenly she is transformed into a fox. Why? Who knows. The only explanation given is that her maiden name was “Fox” and maybe that pointed to some “feyness” in her background. Whatever the reason, her transformation causes no end of trouble for poor Mr. Tebrick, because he still loves his wife despite her new form.
And at first, at least after he gets rid of the servants and kills his dogs, everything appears like it will be fine. Sylvia remains human enough in mind to wear dresses, take tea, and play cards. In effect she stays a Lady. But in time her more animal nature asserts itself, and as she grows more fox-like and in line with her new nature, Mr. Tebrick grows more miserable. Yet, despite it all he still loves his wife* and increasingly tolerates her growing more and more wild. Even when she takes completely to living in the forest and mates with another fox, Richard overcomes his jealousy by reasoning no true man can be brought down by a beast, and so his love goes on, untarnished. When the kits are born he calls himself the godfather to her litter and takes to regularly bringing them food and playing with them. Never is the man so happy as when he renounces society and embraces the unconventional. At those times, he doesn’t care at all what form his wife takes, nor how she behaves.
But society can’t abide with those who refuse to fit into it and the bark of the foxhound is never far distant. Tragedy is waiting in the wings and as things roll along it’s only a matter of time before that tragedy comes crashing down. After all, a dog died, and in that act the Tebricks doomed themselves.
Like I said at the start Lady Into Fox is a good little book, even if it’s ultimately a downer. It has that richness to it that makes you want to pick away at it while it draws you in and captivates you.
You can check it out for yourself here.
Even if you don’t download it, you should check that out for the Rachel Marshall illustrations.
And here’s the Wikipedia entry for David Garnett. Why does everything I read about the Bloomsbury Group make me believe they were awful people?
And if you’d like to read another review of Lady Into Fox, I quite liked this one.
Next week, Bruno Schultz!
*I didn’t want to distract from my review, but at one point when Mr. Tebrick goes on a self-loathing drinking binge it’s implied that there’s bestiality. Which… if I go with my take that this is a story about a closeted gay man who can’t handle his wife’s sexuality, then there’s your metaphoric ick-factor.
Thousand Year Old Vampire: Thoughts and Impressions
I’ve done a couple of play-throughs now of the game Thousand Year Old Vampire and thought I’d put my impressions down here.
This isn’t quite a review, just thoughts and reactions, and I’m dividing it into two posts, this one with my impressions, and another post with the write-ups of the stories the game created. That one screams of “Let me tell you all about my D&D character” and no one who doesn’t want that needs to experience that.
A tl;dr review would Thousand Year Old Vampire is good. Is it a game or is it an activity? I don’t know and I don’t care. I liked it and thought it a great way to simultaneously create and enjoy a story.
For folks who don’t know Thousand Year Old Vampire is a beautiful little game-book by Tim Hutchings of numbered entries that each contain a writing prompt that allows you to live the many centuries long life of a vampire. The way the game works is you create a character with a limited number of traits, connections, and memories. Then you become immortal and you roll dice to discover what happens to you. Events unfold mimicking the passing years and decades, each roll causing you to gain and lose memories until you’re making desperate choices about what to forget and what to remember. Soon the game becomes about whether it’s possible to retain any aspect of your original humanity as you slowly succumb to your vampirism and the toll of years.
It can be sad. It can be enlightening. It can be comical. Whatever it is, it’s certainly emotional.
And it’s random, so the story that emerges is at best messy and at worst incoherent.
You don’t get to choose what happens to you. What might seem like a cool foundation for a grand narrative early-on becomes a dead-end that never gets developed. This was the case in my first play-through, and while the experience was still fun, it didn’t feel coherent like a good book or movie would. What I did feel was like I was creating a living breathing character with a rich history, and certainly someone who could be useful in another situation. For example, Waldemar the Wolf has the makings of at least three different RPG villains depending on what stage of his incarnation you took him: the bandit wolf, the mercenary captain, or the sinister opera fanatic.
One thing I loved about it was that it’s backwards story telling: you tumble forward at random, but can craft a narrative by looking back and seeing the connection points. Do you nudge it and shape it? Yes, probably. Or I should say, it’s fine to give in to the temptation to nudge, because the game invites that just as much as it invites not doing that by churning up a series of unrelated random events.
Overall, each game took about 90 minutes or so, and at the end I felt like I had watched a pretty good horror movie either in its own right, or because it suggested other stories. When I played I went back and forth between two word documents: my vampire’s character sheet and the journal of their life while consulting wikipedia to create the concrete details.
Is it sort of like homework?
Kinda.
But so is Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and I love that game. If you like vampires and story-telling, this game is well-worth checking out. While I did get the book via the kickstarter, there’s a PDF available at DrivethruRPG.
And here’s another link to the second part where I tell you all about my vampires Waldemar and Antonio.
You have been warned!
Thousand Year Old Vampire: A Tale of Two Vampires
Read this post for my overall thoughts on Thousand Year Old Vampire.
Continue reading here to learn all about the much checkered careers of Waldemar the Wolf and Antonio the Alchemist.
When I played I used two word documents. One was a character sheet. The other was a timeline where I recorded the events of their lives. I also had a few wikipedia pages open dealing with whatever epoch and area my vampires found themselves. For most of it I stuck to Italy starting in the Roman era and going forward as far as the game allowed. Waldemar died wretched and inhuman sometime in the 17th century, while Antonio made it all the way into the early half of the 20th century before he died a hero fighting against Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Read on to learn the particulars…
Waldemar the Wolf
Waldemar started life as a Visigoth slave in the latter days of the Roman Empire. He had a gift for canines and a charming smile. He was also having an affair with his master’s concubine. All that ended when he gets attacked by a vampire (a decadent Roman senator) and changes. His first victim proves to be his lover, only she’s transformed into a vampire, and the two end up at odds with each other. She betrays him to the authorities and Waldemar flees into the Alps where he spends so much time among the wolves that he starts to resemble them. His vampire marks take the form of sharp teeth and a whispering voice. Eventually an avalanche buries his lair and he spends centuries entombed in a cave.
It’s not until the Middle Ages that Waldemar emerges to join the mercenary free companies. Over time he attracts many followers and gains a reputation for ruthless brutality. The whole while he’s pillaging and amassing a vast fortune that he hides in the countryside near Venice. But in time, the other mercenary captains grow jealous of him and denounce him as a satanic monster. This sends him packing for Germany where he returns to more wolfish banditry, preying upon the unwary.
It’s in Germany that he gains a new mark: gnarled claws for hands. And it’s also there that he falls in love with classical music and opera.
At some point in the 16th century he remembers his hidden fortune and returns to Italy. There in a Venetian villa he starts to take a keen interest in the theater. Meanwhile, his hands become more painful, and he hires a shady doctor to inject narcotized blood into his knuckles. He’s also keeping an old crone around to look after him, because she reminds him of his mother.
He tries to write an opera and it fails catastrophically. He takes to brooding in his villa.
It is there one day that he first espies the doctor’s daughter. And so would begin a new obsession, but the doctor realizes what’s happening and kills Waldemar by injecting him with toxic blood.
So long, Waldemar.
Antonio the Alchemist
I pretty much stuck with the Rome theme and had Antonio be another young man made into a vampire by a decadent Roman senator (the same one that would go on to bite Waldemar a century or two later).
Antonio’s an urban youth, caught between his petty criminal brother, an early Christian street preacher, and a noblewoman lover. The one with the strongest pull over him is the preacher, who will unfortunately become Antonio’s first victim when he’s turned into a vampire. Antonio will take the preacher’s place and establish himself as a messianic figure in the early church. His brother and lover will join him and the three will use the cult to benefit themselves. However, when the Emperor passes some anti-Christian laws, Antonio’s cult collapses leaving only the most fanatical behind. These he preys upon until a betrayal by his brother sees Antonio entombed alive.
There he waits out the centuries, until a priest unseals his tomb and returns him to life. Antonio bends the priest to his will and takes up once more feeding upon a Christian congregation. He might have gone on this way, if not for the arrival of a powerful wizard known simply as the Woman From Across the Sea. She takes Antonio with her on a mystic quest where their fates become bound. In the end, she claims a favor from him.
The experience somewhat unhinges Antonio’s mind and he heavily rewrites his journal to hide his more atrocious crimes. Yet, guilt plagues him and he becomes obsessed with the question of salvation. This makes him take actual religious vows.
In the Church, he gains a reputation as an alchemist and scholar, but he no longer remembers his brother, his lover, or even how he became a vampire.
At this point the Woman From Across the Sea returns claiming her favor: a vial of Antonio’s blood. She uses it to create an elixir that satisfies his blood cravings.
Meanwhile, Antonio’s skills as an alchemist have earned him many patrons and he has no problem taking money trying to transform lead into gold. This makes him wealthy and disliked. But his enemies are no match for his quick-wits.
Alchemy gives way to astrology which gives way to astronomy. Antonio becomes obsessed with the stars and starts experimenting with telescopes. He wants to see the sun again. This leads him to study solar eclipses. Despite it being the 16th century, he starts constructing a device with which he might view the sun’s corona during an eclipse. This gets him in trouble with the church and denounced as a heretic. But it doesn’t stop him from making the attempt. This ends in failure, and leaves him almost blind. But his reputation as an expert on optics remains. His next attempt succeeds, and he manages to capture an image of the sun’s corona.
And for a generation Antonio’s the darling of the scientific world. It’s only later when a new generation unearths his alchemical poetry that his reputation falters, and he gets viewed out as a quack.
This sends Antonio into seclusion, where the Woman From Across the Sea finds him again. They speak of many thing, the nature of transformation being the most prominent. Something in Antonio once more stirs.
It’s around here that Antonio takes up poetry, using it to veil his esoteric ideas.
By now it’s the 19th century, and Antonio’s poetry has come into favor with a new generation. He once more has disciples and devotees. But he’s a little bit more wary, knowing how fickle fashion can be. He establishes a school for metaphysical research, and it’s there that the Woman From Across the Sea finds him one last time. Together they manage to conceive a child.
Before long, it’s the 1920s, and Antonio’s Metaphysical Institute is viewed as subversive by the Fascist government. The Blackshirts arrive in the dead of night ready to do their worst, but Antonio is there ready for them. He fights them singlehandedly allowing his disciples enough time to escape. He dies, burned to death by the Fascists, but future generations remember him as a hero.
The End.
Each story was a wild ride, full of unpredictable twists and turns. Waldemar met three other vampires early in his life, but never interacted with them again. Antonio had a weird relationship with the immortal Woman From Across the Sea. That came about quite nicely, and whenever the story prompted me for an immortal character I had her appear again.
Here’s the link again to my other post on my impressions of the overall game.
BW BC 13: And Now the Strangeness Starts
Hello, welcome back, I’m glad you could make it.
Three more stories this week: one a flash-length excerpt from a longer story, the other two your standard slightly shorter than average short stories. Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen gives us our flash length story, an excerpt from ”Peter and Rosa”. After that is a bit of decadent literature from Junichiro Tanizaki called “Tattoo”, and a humorous story from Flann O’Brien called “John Duffy’s Brother”.
From “Peter and Rosa” by Isak Dinesen
Did you know that when Isak Dinesen sent the manuscript for her collector “Winter’s Tales” to her publisher it was right at the start of World War 2, and she had no way of knowing if it was received or published until after the war when former soldiers wrote to tell her how much they loved her book? While that story is wild on multiple accounts, I like to imagine what kind of guys these soldiers were who read Dinesen during the war.
An old friend of mine described Dinesen as a writer who readers always feel like they alone have discovered, and I think there’s something to that. When one of her stories clicks, that feeling of some truth being revealed to you and you alone is overwhelming. You might have to read a few of her stories for that to happen, but when it does… mmm, chef’s kiss.
Sadly, the excerpt Manguel includes here from “Peter and Rosa” is not enough to generate that feeling. If anything it gives only the barest hint with its short tale of a ship captain, his ship, and his wife’s jealousy that has all the qualities one recognizes from fairy tales.
All I can say is find yourself a Dinesen collection. She’s well worth the read.
“Tattoo” by Junichiro Tanizaki
I have to imagine that when Edgar Allan Poe’s work was translated into Japanese, they arrived alongside Oscar Wilde’s and Charles Baudelaire’s, making like this stew of decadent weirdness that the edgelordier sections of early 20th century Japanese writers must have loved. This story is direct from that main vein about one Seikichi, a sadistic tattoo artist, being gifted with a teenage girl to decorate as he pleases in the days before she is to start her training as an elite courtesan.
The ick-factor is strong here.
Seikichi starts the session by showing the girl his collection of erotic torture etchings. This terrify-titillates her, leading to an all-night tattoo session that leaves both exhausted. In the morning the artist knows he has reached his peak, but is more alarmed at the change in the girl. She has been transformed from the shy girl into a cruel woman. And as the sun rises, its light appears to set fire to the new tattoo.
And what is the tattoo of? A spider.
That’s it. The end. No moral. No comeuppance. No attack by the suddenly living spider, just a whole heap of decadence with a few extremely vivid images. Which is in no way a bad thing, but maybe not everyone’s cup of tea.
“John Duffy’s Brother” by Flann O’Brien
This is a story about a man who wakes up one day and thinks he is a train. He goes to work and does his job, and says things like he’s a train, then he goes home to lunch and realizes that he is in fact not a train. He’s then mortified by his morning’s behavior, but no one there ever mentions it. In fact they hardly noticed. Beyond a newfound particular-ness with sticking to a timetable, the man hadn’t really changed all that much. But still, those hours when John Duffy’s brother thought himself train would go on to haunt him for the rest of his life.
Initially, this story didn’t make much of an impression, but now a few days later I see it’s quite funny. Like what if Gregor Samsa did wake up one morning as a giant cockroach but nobody cared or noticed? That would be funny.
Next week… more transformations! Or, at least one transformation because it looks like a long story.
Until then, stay safe!
BW BC 12: Days of Future Present
And we’re back with three short stories this week. The first one was my favorite of the bunch.
“Split Second” Daphne Du Maurier
Mrs. Ellis is a fussy widow. She likes everything to be in its proper place and stresses a lot about her adolescent daughter who’s away at school. While taking a post-lunch stroll, a delivery van narrowly misses Mrs. Ellis, and things turn strange after that. As she attempts to make sense of the new world she finds herself in, we, the readers, get a deep dive into a story of paranoia and fear.
Is Mrs. Ellis insane? Has she been an unreliable narrator this whole time?
Why are all the details she gives to prove her identity partially right but partially wrong?
Du Maurier adds layer upon layer of details, and this is very much one of those claustrophobic stories where you wonder whether you could prove your own identity if everyone around you denied you were who you said you were. Not my favorite style of story to be sure, but Du Maurier makes it real and the slow progression from detail to detail makes the escalating tension masterfully done. It’s good, but maybe not for everyone. Du Maurier’s worth tracking down, but she’s a writer that you can’t rush and she’ll take as long as she needs to tell her story.
“August 25, 1983” Jorge Borges
A young man named Jorge Borges visits an old man named Jorge Borges, but they are both the same man and each claims to be dreaming the other. How does this work? Who knows! It’s a Jorge Borges story with a lot of talk of doubles, mirrors, suicide, and who can tell what is real and what is truth and yadda yadda. The whole thing has a masturbatory air. There’s better Borges to read.
“How Wang-Fo Was Saved” by Marguerite Yourcenar
Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman to be admitted into the French Academy. Her novel about Hadrian was a big deal when it came out, as it was an exploration of post-war Europe through characters from Antiquity. As a fan of Graves’s I, Claudius I hope to track it down some day. “How Wang-Fo Was Saved” is her rendition of a classical Chinese tale. Or at least so Manguel says. I have my doubts. My take is that Yourcenar used Orientalism to write fantasy that bordered on the Conte cruel.
Wang-Fo is an itinerant painter and little more than a beggar. Ling is his apprentice and deeply devoted to his master. But before they met Ling was a privileged aristocrat with a beautiful wife and a vast fortune. His life changed abruptly the moment he met Wang-Fo in a tea house and the old man described the world in a way that opened Ling’s eyes to wonder.
However, not everyone is pleased with Wang Fo. In particular the Emperor is more than a little pissed at him. You see all through the emperor’s youth he was kept in seclusion with nothing but Wang Fo’s paintings for company. The Emperor became so enamored with these paintings that when he eventually left seclusion everything in the actual world proved to be a disappointment. Now he hates Wang-Fo. So when Wang-Fo shows up in the city the Emperor promptly has him and Ling arrested.
The Emperor’s arranged a whole sort of punishment for Wang Fo that involves blinding the old man once he finishes an uncompleted painting from his youth. Ling protests and gets killed for his troubles.
Without any other choice, Wang Fo starts on his work, but here a strange thing happens. He paints an ocean and a boat appears on that ocean. In fact the room is now full of water. Inside the boat is Ling and he has come to rescue Wang Fo and take him away into his painting, which he proceeds to do. The End. It’s not a bad story, but Orientalist af.
Next week… more unless there’s less.
February/March Books 2020
A strange thing has occurred: I am having a hard time reading. I keep starting books then setting them aside, and I’m not sure what the cause of the trouble is. Here’s two months worth of what I’ve finished.
Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham: I’m a big fan of boring and absurd spy novels and this book delivers both. Ashenden’s a thinly veiled Maugham stand-in and these stories all take place between the start of World War I and the Russian Revolution except the war’s far away and it’s more about intriguing in Swiss hotels than carrying out missions behind enemy lines. Maugham has a great skill in using prose to paint a portrait. One sour note is that these stories take place very deep in the Colonial project and so you get the bigotry that goes along with it.
Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary by Terry Jones: I am not up on my Chaucer scholarship, but Terry Jones is. Here he takes to task scholars who see Chaucer’s knight as an exemplar of chivalry, instead of the cut throat mercenary he is. Using The Canterbury Tales, Jones goes into the details of each and every reference, trying to get at how Chaucer’s contemporaries would have reacted to them. Instead of an exemplar of chivalry, Chaucer’s knight is revealed to be a blood-thirsty mercenary typical of the era. Part of what I loved about this book was how bite-sized it was. I could read a few pages one day then put it down for a few days while I read something else.
Foundation by Isaac Asimov: A seminal text, in fact dare I say… foundational? Eh? Eh? So I’d never read this before and was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. Granted, I was amused by how the Foundation’s great project revolves mostly around setting up bogus religions and pyramid schemes. Every chapter is sort of the same too: two characters in a room first they react to plot event, then they plot more events. You simply keep cycling from character and events. And the tech is pure fantasy. Still… this was a big greasy meal and I regret nothing.
The Sign of the Labyrs by Margaret St. Clair: This is going to sound like a back-handed compliment, but I don’t mean it that way: the faster I read this book, the better it was. The story takes place in the future after some unspecified apocalyptic event in an underground maze-like mega-structure. There’s a plague and traps and monsters, and a whole lot of Wiccan style paganism on display. This reminded me of Fritz Leiber’s Gather Darkness, another post-apocalyptic SF novel that embraces the whole witchcraft versus church idea. This one is a heady ride.
How are you all holding up? What have you enjoyed reading lately?
Yesterweird 