mrsmig, I’m glad you finished The Lottery and enjoyed it. Thanks for summarizing the stories here; it was fun to be reminded of all of them. I feel like “Elizabeth” was an interesting one to read from a writers’ perspective, as Elizabeth’s work is not entirely on the up-and-up when it comes to the writers she represents, and one has a sense of her disappointment with herself for being more of a light scammer than the literary mover-and-shaker she had hoped to be. Also, “The Tooth” is one of my favorites in the collection. There is a moment in it that encapsulates everything I wish I could do in my writing, the moment when the woman looks in the mirror at the faces lined up against the sinks in the ladies’ room, and tries to figure out which face belongs to herself. It’s such a simple statement of an incredibly insightful and chilling idea, with layers upon layers of meaning. I just love it.
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As for me: For the last few weeks I fell down a rabbit hole of one particular podcast, and my obsessive listening to it cut into my reading time. I went from being right on or slightly ahead of the pace for my book and story reading goals to ... well, I have to make a conscious push in the last 6 weeks of the year.
So here we go. I’m back in the
Story Prize anthology which ChrisP and mrsmig read earlier in the year.
84. "The Zero Meter Diving Team,” Jim Shepard, 2007
Rather an odd story, with so many facts in it that it almost reads more like a long-form article than a story. The facts are about the Chernobyl disaster, how it happened, how it was covered up, and what the aftermath looked like. The story is about a man’s relationship with his brothers and his father. And the combination of the two works very well. One has the sense of the narrator as a competent engineer and a compassionate person, frustrated by the governments’ corner-cutting and propaganda-spinning, trying to do the right thing for people affected by the disaster. And yet that competency and compassion doesn’t quite bridge the gap between himself and the other men in his family; they all seem to remain alien to one another.
85. "Saleema,” Daniyal Mueenuddin, 2009
Oh, ouch. What a sad story with a sucker-punch ending. It’s just a terrible and tragic picture of how goddamned hard life is for the poor, even in a society where there is excess and plenty, accessible only to a select stratum. The story is plainly written and plainly plotted; a young woman is a servant in a rich household in Lahore, where she funds her husband’s drug addiction and sleeps with various men for protection and a sense of connection to
something. She then falls in love with an older, higher-status servant in the house, and the two have a very touching and tender relationship which lulls you into making the mistake of imagining there might be happiness to be found even in the squalid servant quarters of this household. Yeah, no.
If you notice I skipped a year in there, it’s Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet on the Brain,” which I did actually read again but decided not to count. I already counted it earlier in the year, and had also counted it last year! It looks like it’s going to be one of those stories that I just come across a couple of times a year... very much a writers’s story, I think.
I’m halfway through the next story in the collection, a rather long Anthony Doerr story, and it’s pretty intense. More later, of course.
85/100 read, 38/50 from the last five years.