The Week In Fiction
This should be my monthly reading curation, but this week, I focus on a select few short stories from the past week.
This week has been an absolute dream. Not that anything eventful and groundbreaking happened. After one long year, my masters basically ended — a dream I’ve been looking forward to since the beginning.
It’s been one grueling year, one in which I balanced work with school. The last time I was in any kind of purely academic setting, I told myself that was the end; I would never put myself through the torture of reading textbooks, forming notes, answering questions in class, etc. Law school does that to you. Yet, I dared to get a post-grad degree in a field completely unrelated to my undergrad.
It’s been a wild year, and to wrap it up, I had to write a dissertation that stressed and stretched me. I’ve experienced pressure, but this was a discovery. Maybe after I get graded, I’ll write about that process. But in this letter, I’m sharing the top four stories that kept me afloat this week.
An excerpt of Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom: I can’t get tired of African literature that explores mother-daughter relationships; the more you peel the onion skin, the more you discover complex layers. Or I’m just attempting to be fake deep. In the story, a young woman’s mother is suffering from depression. The daughter sends for her mother and is overwhelmed by the memory of the first time her mother was depressed. I haven’t read the book, but this excerpt is giving me ‘buy me’ vibes.
Mrs. Fox: This is such a beautiful story — my favorite in the set. It’s the story of a woman who becomes a fox. Before this, she has a pretty ordinary life with a husband who loves her. But then she starts to feel sick, and the worst happens. At first, her husband keeps her at home as he tries to wrap his head around what has happened. But then he has to make a choice. And it’s not an easy choice. It reminds me of a famous Maya Angelou quote: Love liberates. It doesn’t just hold.
The Year of Spaghetti: Routine is a constant feature of loneliness or isolation. Remember the lockdown, how you would wake up, go to your desk, work, eat, go to bed. This story by Murakami is pretty much a story like this, one in which nothing really happens except the fact that the protagonist cooks spaghetti all year. Like all Murakami’s stories, something haunting lurks under the story. What drives this character to make only spaghetti for one year? Murakami exercises great restraint that I have never been able to manage when writing: not giving it all away — the backstory and the extra stories that give us full context and answer all our questions. That doesn’t make for a memorable story. The most interesting people I’ve encountered are cloaked with mystery. How much more of an ordinary character in short fiction?
Licked Clean: I don’t want to make any assumptions about this one. I liked it, but I didn’t fully understand it. I was being steered in different directions to find the secret in the story. The story spans most of the life of a protagonist — from college to marriage, etc. Ultimately, this protagonist (who has this group of friends he constantly returns to) is unsatisfied with life and his decisions. I would add that I was intrigued by the story's lifecycle of the protagonist’s life, confined to possibly less than 5000 words.
I always go back to short stories when I’m stressed and can’t go on the long trip most novels are made of. I describe the beauty and joy I experience when reading short fiction in this interview with The Republic: In the short story form, writers compress worlds and narratives into a few words, and readers are allowed to take the rest of the story and do as they please, imagining what happens next and what happened before we entered the world of the story. The short story form allows readers to be writers and creators themselves (without the actual job of creating). Reading these stories allowed me to step away from my own and experience other words.
That’s all, folks. I’m going to try to rest a lot this weekend and catch on some reading. What about? Don’t forget to read, share, comment, etc.