Vheissu

Here's a list of the One Story pieces I’ve discussed on this blog. I’ve starred those stories I liked best. C. N. Adichie, “Transition to Glory” ( One Story 27) Andrew Porter, “Azul” ( One Story 72) * Lydia Peelle, “Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing” ( One Story 87) * Nam Le, “Meeting Elise” ( One Story 93) Joe Meno, “Children are the Only Ones who Blush” ( One Story 122) Jennifer Haigh, “Desiderata” ( One Story 125) Robert McCarthy, “Stag” ( One Story 126) Sheila Schwartz, “Finding Peace” ( One Story 127) Tamas Dobozy, “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once Lived” ( One Story 128) Anne Corbitt, “The Tornado Bandit” ( One Story 129) Terese Svoboda, “Bomb Jockey” ( One Story 130) Naomi J. Williams, “Snow Men” ( One Story 131) Molly Antopol, “The Quietest Man” ( One Story 132) * Cheston Knapp, “A Minor Momentousness in the History of Love” ( One Story 133) Susanna Daniel, “Stiltsville” ( One Story 134) Grant Munroe, “Corporate Park...

A drunk driver runs over and kills a girl, and, although no one finds out he did it, he is tormented by guilt. That’s the gist of Smith Henderson’s “Number Stations” ( One Story 136, May 30, 2010). But it’s a gist you have to shake free from an avalanche of minor and major characters, subplots, near-miss affairs, ostriches, and cryptic radio transmissions. Here’s a sampler.  The drunk driver’s name is Goldsmith. His mother takes pictures of Goldsmith’s daughter (Charity) perched on an ostrich led by a parolee (Bill) whom Goldsmith hired to work at his restaurant. The ostrich escapes, and makes it to the house of a young waitress (Emily), who also works at Goldsmith’s restaurant and whose virtuous and athletic boyfriend (Van) helps look for the runaway ostrich. It so happens that Emily is recovering from a party thrown by Goldsmith, and despite her blatant attempts at having sex with him, they end up talking until Goldsmith confesses that he killed the girl years before. While Gol...

Grant Munroe’s “Corporate Park” ( One Story 135, May 10, 2010) is built on a clever premise: a cougar has walked into an office building, and it’s mauling the employees. As the grumpy and anal corporate lawyer who narrates the story tells us, the mountain lion produces a “massive reduction in personnel” (12). Blood is spattered everywhere, limbs and moustaches are strewn across the office. This doesn’t spark a frenzy, in part because of the bureaucratic narrator, in part because the company’s executives implement gag policies, boost employee morale, focus on the numbers. The threat of death thus gets its fangs severed and turns into the unfeline threat of downsizing. The plot has a twist: apparently, many employees use the opportunity to fake their own deaths and thus get a handsome life insurance with which to retire. Halloway, the narrator, a crusader for the corporation’s interests, is unaware of this scheme, and is shocked when he discovers it. Former employees are remaking their...

It’s good when stories make you question, wonder, and prod. But the main question I was left with after reading Susanna Daniel’s “Stiltsville” ( One Story 134, April 10, 2010) was why .  And, even though the story has merits, I mean a bad kind of why . I didn’t expect to end with such an impression when I started reading. The first few pages were strong. The descriptions of the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Andrew in Miami are powerful. We find a “deck sagged with split planks,” “a swimming pool churned with foliage,” “the canal at the back of the house teemed with window shutters” (1). When “a marine cruiser made its way through the canal,” it sent “the floating rubble into fits” (3). These descriptions remained unmatched throughout the story. The way characters interact is interesting. The story is narrated by Frances, who’s married to the sprightly but increasingly ill Dennis. They have a daughter, Margo, who got married to Stuart right before the action of the story start...

Cheston Knapp’s “A Minor Momentousness in the History of Love” ( One Story 133, March 30, 2010) and I never bonded. It’s strange. The right sorts of elements were there. Characterization done by accretion and by showing, not by full disclosure and by telling (good example: how the narrator’s anger management issues creep up on us). There are scenes in which the narrator’s inner world vined around the events in the outside world (take the description of Charlotte on pages 2-3). We find inventive uses of metaphors (note the metaphors-turned-real of windows on page 7 and walls on page 9). Whiffs of poetry (notice the alliteration in a sentence like “Be hol d the whole body of my mental torture” [3; my italics]). But despite all those valid and varied techniques, the story never interested me. My main problem was the narrator, who was drearily uptight to the point of producing stilted language and boring descriptions. You get stuff like a towel that “is heavy with the saltwater weight ...

Molly Antopol’s “The Quietest Man” ( One Story 132, March 10, 2010) is a good story, with piquant insights and interesting situations. It’s a story about Tomás Novak, a man from the Czech Republic who came to the States as a political émigré. He was offered a teaching job in a small college in a small town as a way to escape persecution in Prague. By persecution, I mean that he and his wife (Katka) wrote articles for an underground newspaper. When Tomás was discovered, he kept quiet during interrogation, earning him the nickname “The Quietest Man.” Despite Tomás’s apparent poise, Katka was a far fiercer and more engaged intellectual than he was. When they were shunted to the States, they had a two-year-old daughter (Daniela), and Katka was forced to work as a janitor cleaning up the very rooms Tomás lectured in. (This contrast was over the top: too literalized a metaphorical way to illustrate the different paths immigrant lives follow.) Katka’s discontent puts incredibly pressure on...

Naomi J. Williams’s “Snow Men” ( One Story 131, January 30, 2010) is a good character sketch and an interesting immersion in a different time and a different culture. That doesn’t mean it’s a great story, though. Narrated by a young Native American woman in 1786, “Snow Men” describes how a group of Native Americans encountered European explorers. I can’t complain about the language. Unlike other stories narrated by a person from a different time ( e.g. ), anachronistic word choice is not an issue here because the story is translated into contemporary English. The metaphors are neither dry nor dazzling. The curiosity of the villagers about the natural world and about the European travelers is depicted convincingly. The story takes no noteworthy risks with the concatenation of events or the arrangement of ideas on paper. It starts, it finishes. No elations or gnashing of teeth along the way. The real problem is that the story reveled in the historical background so much that almost no...

Terese Svoboda’s “Bomb Jockey” ( One Story 130, Dec. 31, 2009) was off to a sensational start, even more appealing than “ The Tornado Bandit ,” which I singled out for its great opening. During World War II, in what seems to be the Dakotas (14), two people meet. One, an irreverent young woman entering college age. She is smart and beautiful, the daughter of a wealthy politician. Her name appears to be Margaret (22), but it’s only mentioned once in the story. The second person is Hump, a young man in possession of athletic and attractive looks and the sole support of a crippled mother. Trait number one makes people wonder why he wasn’t drafted; trait number two explains why. His work is to dispose of faulty bombs, called turkeys. Hump is, classwise, no suitable match for Margaret, but a fling keeps adding up until it’s an affair on the verge of marriage. Margaret’s father is by no means happy with this. At the end, Hump has proposed, and Margaret has to decide if she says yes. There i...

Some of the stories I’ve discussed recently sin at the beginning: they start slowly and pick up the pace, so that compressing or curtailing the opening pages would make the story stronger. The opposite happens with Anne Corbitt’s “The Tornado Bandit” ( One Story 129, Dec. 10, 2009). It starts out forcefully, only to turn its march into a meander that circles around for a nap at the end. It’s a story about a family, the elderly Mitty and Carl Milton, who return home from a trip to find their house trashed and a beaten, grizzled corpse lying in the bathroom. We find out three homes were affected by the killer the newspapers call the Tornado Bandit. The lives of these families are shaken. Leah Finkelstein starts watching violent movies, zoning out, arguing fiercely with butchers, and carrying around a bat. Mitty and Carl take risks: they speed around in fancy cars taken from the lot where Carl works as a salesman, they gamble, they have sex outside in the yard. Carl, uxorious for forty ...

Tamas Dobozy’s  “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kálmán Once Lived” ( One Story 128, November 30, 2009) seemed like the kind of a tale someone will write after, say, reading a gripping history book on how WWII was fought in Budapest (reading the author’s One Story interview , this was in fact the case). It was lifeless. There is a captivating array of details, yes, but the main character, László, just plods along seeking forgiveness (and making things worse and worse for a big number of people he rats out to the Soviet authorities). The previous sentence makes the story sound more interesting than it was. László escapes from Nazi hands and falls into Soviet medals. He lives a tortured, sell-out life in the villa of the one man whom he never met but whom he escaped from the army to meet. I could provide a few more details. There are a couple of interesting phrases: “betrayal had become László’s vocation” (5); “the woman [had] the tired look of someone who has outlasted he...

Sheila Schwartz’s “Finding Peace” ( One Story 127, October 10, 2009) worked after page 21 (of 29). Before that, it ran into all sorts of trouble. Details were clumsily slipped in (something I’ve already mentioned with two previous stories in this One Story streak). It was obvious that we were being served the backstory in conspicuously planted morsels. Also, the opening was awful: “ Why I am doing this? Sally asks herself.” Note the trite question, the italics, the useless attribution. There were dozens of ways to start the story; the one Schwartz chose is among the worst. The story plays with capital letters and punctuation (e.g., “As if Mr. Peanut is climbing with them. M-R. P-E-A-N-U-T: A tall, monocled representative for Planter’s Peanuts …a much kinder leader than Ellikka” (12). Sometimes it works: there’s a funny bit on page 13, for instance. Often it just makes the page look weird, especially with the capital-letter-cum-dash device. And there are moments that are punctuat...

Robert McCarthy’s “Stag” ( One Story 126, Sept. 10, 2009) has a brisk and vivid scene, but overall it wades through a thick brew of symbolism and description. It’s a story of a father, Sean, who leaves his alcoholic wife, Gina, when their daughter Sienna is born. He was a heavy drinker himself, but he becomes more responsible now that a child is involved. Gina feels no such need to change. Sean buys a rickety house near a river and a dump, and plans to raise Sienna there on his own. On their first night at the house, a stag breaks through a set of glass doors, and Sean has to pin it down and strangle it in order to protect Sienna. After that, he gets a call to go pick up Gina from a bar. The story plods through these events. McCarthy is passionate about lists, so that we get a list of things that may harm Sienna at the new house (1), of animals that could be seen through the glass doors (4), and so on. Furthermore, Sean’s friend Doug produces unnecessarily elaborate advice, portentou...

Jennifer Haigh’s “Desiderata” ( One Story 125, August 30, 2009) deserves a very brief note. The story is about Joyce, a widow who gets by in the absence of Ed, her husband. Albert Chura, who worked as a janitor in the school where Ed was a principal, helps Joyce with random chores around the house. Albert asks Joyce for Ed’s old bicycle, and she grudgingly gives it away. While unpacking Ed’s things, Joyce finds boxes full of pictures. They suggest Ed may have had an affair with a woman he urged the school to hire as a teacher. Some of the pictures involve a bicycle; Ed had always begged Joyce to learn how to ride, but she never did. Those images convince Joyce that she has wasted her life through her unwillingness to take risks. She asks Albert to give her back Ed’s bike. After some grumbling, he does. The story ends as Joyce is pained by regret. Haigh is fond of parentheses (you find asides in parenthesis often in the story). That doesn’t bother me. What does, though, is the double ...

Nam Le’s “Meeting Elise” ( One Story 93, June 30, 2007) is another oldie worth mentioning. I’ve discussed Nam Le’s fiction before , with a story I liked and a story I disliked. “Meeting Elise” stands in between. Henry Luff, the narrator, is a famous painter who fell for a nude model called Olivia. His wife ran away with their one-year-old daughter, Elise, to Russia. Luff lived with Olivia for years, until she became a heroine addict, left him, and died. Luff followed Elise’s progress from afar, while Elise became a famous musician. When she was eighteen, Elise invited Luff to a concert in New York. They scheduled a dinner in which Luff was going to meet Elise’s fiancé, her manager. They canceled at the last minute, while Luff was already sitting at the table. Still, Luff tried to approach Elise repeatedly, and failed to meet her every time. He walked in late to the concert, and waited outside at the end, where he saw Olivia in every woman that passed by. He was anxious, in part, beca...

Andrew Porter’s “Azul” ( One Story 72, March 30, 2006) is a very good story. It was later published in Porter’s acclaimed short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter , and it’s no surprise it was chosen as one of the 100 most distinguished stories of 2007 in the BASS 2007 volume. The story is narrated by Paul, a man who’s married to an English professor called Karen (she’s on her second marriage). They’re in their forties, and are childless because Paul is sterile. Paul’s condition put a strain on the marriage, but they chose to stay together. Years later, as a way of having an “adventure” or a “distraction,” they decide to host a foreign exchange student from Belize for a year. His name is Azul. Azul’s high school friends don’t know it, but Azul is gay, and Paul drives Azul regularly to meet his lover, Ramon Cruz. Paul is troubled by this, but Karen convinces him not to worry too much. These moral qualms are constantly set aside during the story. Paul pinches off some wee...

Let’s begin a trip through One Story stories with an oldie, published in 2003. I’ll leap up to the present shortly, after a couple other detours to the past. By the way, last year I published my first note on a One Story piece, here . Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Transition to Glory” ( One Story 27, September 30, 2003) is a story of an affair (“In her better moods, she liked that word, affair , liked the decadent affectation that clung to it, affair ” [7]). It takes place in Nigeria. One party is a radio talk show host called Ozioma; the other is a powerful and wealthy man called Agha. Her name means “Gospel”; his means “War” (11). Ozioma is much younger than Agha, almost as old as the oldest daughter Agha has with Didi, his wife. The story jumps back and forth from descriptions of the affair to scenes that are set after Agha’s death. Agha dies in a car crash not too long after the affair had begun. One of the most poignant moments in the story is when Ozioma puzzles at a crumpled ...

Is it just me? Why do I get the impression that almost every short story I read nowadays boils down to something like this? So I was walking around town the other day, doing what I generally do, when this quirky little thing happened. I know, I know, not a big deal, but it’s complex and symbolic deep down, when you come to think of it, especially when you come to think of something like that happening to someone like me , with that warped personal history of mine (let me hint at it now). But, hell, that’s life, it’s so confusing and it goes on, and everything else will just continue pretty much the same way it was. *** I’ve been reading a bunch of stories lately, but I haven’t brought myself to write about them because none has sparked enough interest to do so. I preferred not to write half-hearted comments, like I did a couple times earlier in the year (although last month I did share some discontent here and there ). The one story of the recent crop that probably intrigued me ...