Category Archives: A Month of Short Stories

A Month of Short Stories 2017, Day 3 – The Ambush, by Donna Tartt

Posted on by Bill Chance

M41 Walker Bulldog
Liberty Park
Plano, Texas

Over several years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month…. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year – In September this time… because it is September.

Today’s story, for day 3 – The Ambush, by Donna Tartt

Read it online here:

The Ambush, by Donna Tartt

“Oh my God!” he said. “Stay with me, Hank! You can’t die, you son of a bitch!”

I grimaced and tossed my head from side to side in agony as Tim – in a desperate effort to revive me – pounded on my chest. I was impressed by his profanity, but even more impressed that he had taken the Lord’s name in vain on my behalf.

Far away, from the back porch, Tim’s grandmother called out to us in a thin, irritating voice: “Do you all want lemonade?”

—-Donna Tartt, The Ambush

A while back I read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and liked it more than I anticipated. The Goldfinch is on my list of books to read – a long list that is, unfortunately, growing rather than shrinking.

Maybe before I die.

Today’s story, The Ambush, is a spectacularly well written tale of childhood and war. The descriptions are all too precise and knowing for a child of eight (the narrator) and you know it is being told from a point far in the future. That the memories are so strong and accurate shows how important the events are to the character, the author, and the reader.

It is a story of the time, a time gone, but of a time I remember. It’s a story of the death of a friend’s father and of the death of a certain kind of life we used to live.

This is something that the novel does better than any other art form: reproducing the inner life and the inner experience of another person, particularly extreme forms of consciousness like grief, dreams, drunkenness, spiritual revelations, even insanity. Unlike movies, where we’re always onlookers, in novels we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And I like dealing with particularly intense inner experiences because I think that in many ways, this is what the novel does best.
—-Donna Tartt

A Month of Short Stories 2017, Day 2 – The Itch, by Don DeLillo

Posted on by Bill Chance

Crow Collection of Asian Art
Sculpture Garden
Dallas, Texas

Over several years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month…. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year – In September this time… because it is September.

Today’s story, for day 2 – The Itch, by Don DeLillo.

Read it online here:
The Itch, by Don DeLillo

But nobody showed up, so he sat awhile looking at the wall. It was one of those Saturdays that feel like Sunday. He didn’t know how to explain this. It happened intermittently, more often in the warmer months, and it was probably normal, although he’d never discussed it with anyone.
—-Don DeLillo, The Itch, opening lines

I have read some of Don Dellilo’s work… not what I would say a lot of it… not by any means all of it. The most notable absence is the massive novel Underworld which I have been meaning to read for a couple decades. Tomes of that weight and size require a commitment that I have been unable to grant for some time. Maybe soon.

Maybe before I die.

At any rate, I loved his novel White Noise enough that the other things he has written pale in my mind. That novel rotates around a bucolic modern scene that is interrupted by an Airborne Toxic Event of some kind… something that I am sort of familiar with in real life. It is an entertaining and haunting work of fiction.

In modernist fiction, there is an interesting difference between novels and short stories. In a novel, the strange detachment of modern life has to be dealt with and resolved… at least partially. In a short story, the author is free to wallow in the surrealism of daily life in this best of all possible worlds.

In today’s story that surrealism takes the form of an itch. The protagonist bounces from doctor to doctor… getting no help, and towards a possible love interest. But always present, if sometimes latent, is the itch, possessing a strange and fearful symmetry, and a perverse unpredictability. It doesn’t make life unbearable, but it probably makes it less fun. Which seems pretty unbearable.

Interviews:

I’m thinking of two dimensions of a screen or a page on which people read. We hope, writers hope, that in fact their characters are living in a three-dimensional world, first in the writer’s mind, then in the minds of readers.

When I’m conceiving a scene, do I see it in three dimensions? It’s not so easy to answer what appears to be a simple question. I see it — I see characters, I see people, I see streets, cars — and they seem to exist in this special level of mental reality. I could not distinguish the features of a character’s face when I have an idea concerning this character, when I see him or her in a room, and in most cases the room itself is fairly generic — except when I’m actually describing a room — this does happen somewhere in “Zero K” — and then I see a room much more clearly.
—-from an LA Times Interview

INTERVIEWER
Do you have any idea what made you a writer?
DON DeLILLO
I have an idea but I’m not sure I believe it. Maybe I wanted to learn how to think. Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions. How much of this did I feel at the time? Maybe just an inkling, an instinct. Writing was mainly an unnameable urge, an urge partly propelled by the writers I was reading at the time.
—-From The Paris Review

Crow Collection of Asian Art
Sculpture Garden
Dallas, Texas

A Month of Short Stories 2017, Day 1 – Love (“Amor”) by Clarice Lispector

Posted on by Bill Chance

(click to enlarge)

Over several years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month…. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year – In September this time… because it is September.

Today’s story, for day 1 – Love (“Amor”), by Clarice Lispector.

Read it online here:

Love (“Amor”) From The Complete Stories; Translated by Katrina Dodson By CLARICE LISPECTOR

Ana’s children were good, something true and succulent. They were growing up, taking their baths, demanding for themselves, misbehaved, ever more complete moments. The kitchen was after all spacious, the faulty stove gave off small explosions.
—-from Love, by Clarice Lispector

I don’t know where I first heard of Clarice Lispector and her short stories… it was surprisingly recent. She is considered one of the masters of the form from Brazil. I checked out a book of her stories, translated into English, of course, from the library and am working through them.

Her work has that surreal quality that translated stories usually have – especially the ones from Latin America. The emotional knowledge is so subtle, acute, and accurate, it is almost painfully real and exciting fantasy at the same time. It makes me wish I could write like that.

Today’s story, Love, shows that there is nothing more delicate and unbalanced than an ordinary modern family life. Anything can tip the cart over – even something as simple as a blind man chewing gum.