Both my reading groups chose short story collections this month. I thought they would be easy reading. Sit down, relax, read a story. Not so. Each was dense, often with an unexpected ending that required rereading to see what I missed.
The first collection was Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. True to its title it explored women’s relationships, often with men but female friends and relatives also. Close childhood friends, stepsisters, cousins drift apart and find it difficult to reconnect. Life has moved on for one if not the other.
The women rarely do well in their relationships with men. Some stories appear to be set in the 50s and talk about subjugation. Others are more timeless. A man dealing with his wife’s fatal diagnosis flirts with a young girl hired to help while the sick wife waits in the overheated car. A man infuriated by his work situation dies still ranting, oblivious to his wife’s feelings of loss. A woman meets a man she had a crush on when they were children and hopes for a reconnection. But a child of his has died and the walls around his current life are insurmountable.
Each of Munro’s short stories creates a scene with detailed descriptions of character and place. Events from the past weigh heavily on the situation and help set the mood. When the climax comes, it is a jolt: maybe it is an unexpected surprise; it might be the upwelling of a deep complex emotion; or rarely, the revelation is just plain satisfying.
Munro’s stories are angry about the mistreatment of women. This is not a sentiment to be found in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. Written from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, these stories depict the subservient lot of women in Japan as part of the background, hardly worth a comment.
The commodification and objectification of women in the stories is appalling to a twenty first century reader. Without a bit of shame, men of a certain class abandon their wives and go out nightly to get drunk and evaluate the available prostitutes. No Christian moralizing here. This behavior is expected.
Another theme is the devastation of war. A woman muses on how her town has changed and realizes there are no dogs. The author leaves it to the reader to think about why not. In a different story, an eccentric old woman, unkempt and muttering, lives in a crumbling building (symbolizing traditional Japanese culture?) and remembers her prewar life when she was a published writer.
These stories were written as Japan was being changed by Western influence and the conflict between the two cultures was strongly felt. The first tale could not be more explicit. A young man, travelling in Paris, is forced home to take on his family responsibilities and marry. When he can endure the traditional life no longer, he leaves his wife for the debaucheries of the city. After six months, he becomes ill and longs for the comfort his wife could provide. (He forgot she was pregnant when he left!) He returns home to the peacefulness of the country which he enjoys for about six months…
Written by many different authors over a period of one hundred years or so, this collection brings a perceptive slice of Japanese life.
Very different from the short stories is a memoir by Sasha taqwsablu LaPointe, a Salish author from the Pacific Northwest who writes about her troubled heritage in Red Paint. She was assaulted when a young teenager, ran away from home, lived on the streets. Mixed with her personal troubles was her intense anger at her ancestors’ treatment by whites.
The story is a litany of the troubles of a dysfunctional life – alcohol, sex, homelessness, PTSD. I felt she used writing this memoir as therapy and I found it tiresome to read. Interspersed with her story were histories of some individual ancestors. They could have been used to spark the book but were trite not perceptive. (They ate salmon and berries.)
Does she feel that her ancestors’ mistreatment was the root cause of her problems? Her rage, now, still, at how Native Americans were treated was unexpected, but maybe this feeling is widespread. I thought about the problems on reservations with depression and alcohol and how psychologists are learning that trauma and injustice can be passed through generations.
LaPointe is a talented woman, a punk musician as well as writer who lives according to her native heritage and has learned to combine these apparently disparate interests. She talks about the meaning of red paint in her native culture and uses it in her performances.
We don’t hear many Native American voices from the Pacific Northwest and I was looking forward to reading this one. She raises provocative questions about inherited trauma and identity, but there was so much anger. Mixed reviews!
An English professor wrote this sentence and asked the class to punctuate it properly: A woman without her man is nothing. The men in the class punctuated it as: A woman, without her man, is nothing. The women in the class punctuated it as: A woman: without her, man is nothing.
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bravo, great reviews
Your last anecdote above made me laugh – especially after reading about the three difficult stories about women’s status and personal experiences. Hope you are mixing up your reading material with more hopeful stories. Our book club book for January might make you smile.