"Eight Pieces for the Left Hand" by J. Robert Lennon

Picking up a volume of "The Best American Short Stories - 2015" edited by Michael Chabon, I came across this gem by J. Robert Lennon.  "Eight Pieces for the Left Hand" is written in the form of brief episodes that illustrate amazing twists of fate, random switch of circumstances and an insight into real human fragility.  The one piece that impressed me the most was one relating the story of a poet of "considerable national fame" who had just finished a collection of poems.  The collection was delayed during the revision process and awaited by the publisher and fans with some anticipation.  The poet is arrested for drunk driving and his car is impounded.  With the only manuscript of the work inside the car at the time, and the car and all of its content now owned by the police department (the legality of such matters escapes me at the present time, so I will just suspend my disbelief/skepticism), a long legal battle ensues to recover the manuscript from the car.  In the meanwhile, the poet dies.  After some more years, the publisher comes to an agreement with the police department to have the poems read to an editor over the phone with the idea of having the editor write them down by hand.  The phone call takes place, the poems are set in book form and published to vast critical acclaim, ensuring the poet's place in the cannon of contemporary literature.

Some years pass and eventually the poet's family wins the protracted legal battle against the police department rescuing the original manuscript.  After careful examination, everyone comes to realize that the poems published in book form bare little resemblance to the ones in the original manuscript.  The story conclude this way: "It was not long before a city policeman confessed to having improvised much of the manuscript during its telephone transcription.  His only explanation was that he saw room for improvement and could not resist making a few changes here and there.  Almost immediately, the policeman was asked to leave the force, and the acclaimed book was completely discredited.  The true manuscript was published in its entirety, to tepid reviews."  

And that is how you write an amazing story of real human depth.  I read through the rest of the pieces and they were just as brilliant, but for some reason this one stayed with me.  It would be an understatement to describe it as "clever," for it is far beyond more than that.

Jean Paul Sartre's "The Wall" and Pre-World War II Existentialism

Jean Paul Sartre's "The Wall" is full of those tiny stylistic nuances, so much so that if the reader "blinks" too fast, he might miss them. On the other hand, "The Wall" manifests characters that are alive to more than just emerging literary traits of the "not quite" mid-20th Century. Published in 1939 just about the same time Europe was about to explode to the fury of a new war, "The Wall" pre-dates much of the experiences that later led to Sartre's all-encompassing philosophy. The existentialism is certainly there, but in a "younger" form distinct from his post-World War II literary endeavors.

The title story builds upon the painful experience of prisoners during the Spanish Civil War. While a lot has been made of the allegorical "wall," the absurdity of these prisoners' condition and their suffering certainly points to the existential question, but it is the outcome of the story that reveals the truly over-the-top ridiculousness of "being." The protagonist seems to have sworn allegiance to the cause or to one of its leaders or to God knows what, and to that allegiance he is determined to be truthful to the very end. As he is interrogated, he is asked about the whereabouts of the leader and he responds with an absurd suggestion he anticipates the interrogators would never take serious. Nevertheless, when the suggestion is followed through and investigated, it turns out satisfactory to the powers in charge. This is not revealed to the protagonist after his companions have been executed, including among them a very young man who is emblematic of the existential idea of waste.

 The story "The Room" explores the capacity of loyalty but in much different fashion. A woman is married to a man who has become "questionably" insane. Her parents are caught in the whirlwind of decisions and options, as they do not want to see her "waste" her life away. In its own way, the story explores questions of self-sacrifice, loyalty and discipline to one's beliefs. This is a brief story (compared with the others) and, on the surface, seems to reveal less about the characters than the other stories in the collection. The question of insanity transfers from one character to the other, primarily displaying how each is committed to their own ideals of truth. The father, for example, is quite disgusted when he learns from the mother that their daughter is still being intimate with her husband. The premise reminded me of a quote from a novel by Ernest Hebert which I read in 1993 or thereabouts and made a great impact on me: "Men are loyal to their own ideas as dogs are loyal to undeserving owners," or something to that effect. In the end, the young woman is unable to leave her husband illustrating the despair of choices and the absurdity of attachments.

"Erostratus" follows a character in a desperate path to commit an act of violence for which he has no reason or explanation. By killing six people he hopes to "write" some history for himself, an existential mold that draws quite a bit from Kirilov, the nihilist in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Demons." "If I am to prove powerful to some extent," observed Kirilov, "then I must kill myself." He intends to leave a mark on history, however insignificant by simply exercising the power of the act in itself. The judgment of how useless and wasteful those deaths happen to be is beyond his act; a judgment to be formulated by others, as if to say, by second hand. The failure of his act paints a portrait of existential ready-made art--that is to say, Sartre does not judge right or wrong despite the psychological and philosophical tendencies of the story. Sartre simply states the events as they happen and the reader is left to judge. This echoes the stream of consciousness of the protagonist and the close reader is rewarded with this epiphany at the end. We are led to judge, again, in second hand.

Lulu has a friend named Rirette and a lover named Pierre. She also has a husband who exemplifies the archetypal domineering male who emotionally abuses his wife. But the seemingly clearly cut characters of "Intimacy" reveal more than stereotypical traits. Lulu is a complex female character not just struggling with issues of repression, guilt and loyalty, but also with existential conundrums revealing society's pressures of role and decorum. She intends to leave her husband, and goes as far as to plan her eloping with Pierre but fails in dramatic fashion leaving Rirette to piece together the irrational behavior of her dear friend.

"The Childhood of Leader" is the story of the making of a fascist. The main character Lucien Fleurier is depicted from early childhood into young adulthood in a series of psychologically linked scenes. From simple angst about not belonging to being sexually abused by a child predator, Lucien (who is the son of an industrialist) gravitates from ideas about self to growing connections about the world around him. The fascist element is connected by Sartre to the impending explosion of violence that is both relevant to the story and relevant to the historic events taking place at the time. Lucien is aimless in the sense that he looks into the future with a clear idea of what he does not want, yet he is powerful to transform his life away in a way that would direct him away from what he sees as doom. Therefore, he falls easy prey of those around him. Here Sartre uses a different technique--he does not so much inject existentialism into the story as he allows it to grow with the character, often simply displayed as anger, frustration and angst. The revelatory factor of the story is Lucien's acknowledgment of the absurd, with the disturbing vagueness of his acceptance as an added bonus to the reader.

I am surprised at how much I enjoyed deciphering these short stories and connecting the dots about Sartre's intentional use or outright avoidance) of existentialism. I have to look to more of Sartre's pre-war works.

All that Encompasses Fiction...

Murakami's ability to make us believe in the dream-like stories he weaves is by far the most obvious example of his genius. The 24 stories in "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" are addictive to read. Murakami's work is the reason we return to fiction as an escape (or as a learning tool). Again, his ability to make us believe is uncanny and unparalleled. The last story I reported on was "A Folklore for My Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism." That story was a microscopic venture into the heart of a generation that was too big for its own good; a generation whose promise not only was fulfilled, but generated more greed than any before then. And along those lines, the protagonist finds himself fulfilled but unhappy.l In "Hunting Knife," the narrator and his wife are on vacation at a small resort. Being it out of season there's hardly any other guests. The narrator describes the exception as a mother and a young man in a wheelchair. To make a short story even shorter, the narrator's emptiness is so thinly and vaguely described that one finds it hard to see what--if anything--is the matter with the narrator. At the end of the story, the narrator and the young man in the wheelchair have a conversation about a hunting knife, and just like magic the reader is left to theorize about why the narrator seems to keen on waving the hunting knife cutting through the air (hoping to cut those attachments that make him so weighed down?). "A Poor Aunt Story" begins by a narrator questioning why to every family there seems to be a 'poor aunt,' you know the type... you only see her on birthdays or weddings, she keeps to herself, never married, etc. Well, the narrator wakes up one day (after complaining of not having such an aunt) with his own poor aunt attached to his back. She looks over his shoulder. This is why Murakami is so incredible. He makes this leap of faith into the fantastical in an otherwise realistic story and without the reader realizing it, she/he suspends his/her disbelief without reserve. This story is a reminder to all of us as to what the purposes of fiction are. We can theorize them, analyze them, restrict entrance into the canon... but there's no way to absolve us to whom fiction of this type is simply and escape. Murakami is one of today's finest writers and a humankind genius.
4.0/18.2 total miles.

Imagine a Dream Denied...

Murakami's story "A Folklore for My Generation: A Pre-History of Late-Stage Capitalism" deals with a dream denied. The narrator relates the story of "two of those people," there's always some of them in schools: successful, good-looking, smart, good at sports, popular. The narrator calls them Mr. and Mrs. Clean. The narrator's school has two of these people and they are dating each other as if they were in an exclusive club. Whether the narrator is resentful or not is not very clear, but years after graduating from high school, the narrator encounters (as he calls him) Mr. Clean. It turns out that those two perfect people didn't end up together. The story shifts point of view, as now the successful "Mr. Clean" tells the story of love unfulfilled, years of depressive abandon, etc. It is really a sad story. It struck me that we all have had a friend like this, or perhaps we were in this position ourselves. Mrs. Clean gets married to someone else. She disappears from Mr. Clean's life. Mr. Clean offers the narrator a clean and simple story without any hints along the way to ruin the end. It is, like I said, a very hard story to swallow, but it is also one that is so perfectly written that it is easy to get lost in it. Here's a nice detail. While having dinner together at a fancy Italian restaurant, the narrator and Mr. Clean are so involved in the story that the reader might actually lose perspective as to where they are. Murakami interjects: "By this time the restaurant was completely full, loud with the sound of people's voices, laughter, plates clinking. Almost all the guest were locals, it seemed, and they called out the waiters by their first name: 'Giuseppe, Paolo!'" This is a very simple touch to the story but one that stuck out to me as the writer's techniques to keep the story moving forward without losing track of the setting.

I am only on page 81 of the collection. I plan to make up for lost time, time in which it was difficult for me to concentrate. Hopefully this weekend I will read voraciously.

5.0/14.2 Total.

Diving into Murakami's World....

I started Haruki Murakami's "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" after a delightful read of Naipaul. The short stories collected here are not inter-connected like in previous volumes. The title story is supposed to be fragments of what at one point could have been part of "Norwegian Wood," Murakami's best novel. There's always this mysterious pitched to the stories. The ability to turn into the surreal is all Murakami's. This is something that could be a turn off for some people. A character might be lost in an abandoned building and all of a sudden be having a conversation with a talking sheep. But not all of Murakami's work is like that. I highly recommend "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," "Kafka on the Shore," and most definitely "Norwegian Wood."

I had an opportunity to meet Haruki Murakami and exchange some words with him in 1998. It was an unforgettable evening, really. He finally spoke about the elements of biography on "Norwegian Wood," something he had avoided for a long time.