I realize I’ve been quite the slacker here. Between proofreading and reading short stories for class, I haven’t been reading much for pleasure. That said, all the stories I’ve read for class have been an incredible pleasure. I’d only read one of them before – “The Fall of the House of Usher” – so I have been thrilled with the exposure to so many other brilliant short story writers. Below are the fourteen stories I’ve had the pleasure of reading over the past month.
1. The Marquise of O by Heinrich von Kleist
2. The Foundling by Heinrich von Kleist
3. The Sandman by ETA Hoffman
4. The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne
5. Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
6. Bartleby by the Scrivener by Herman Melville
7. A Passion in the Desert by Honoré de Balzac
8. A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert
9. Mother Savage by Guy de Maupassant
10. Madame Tellier’s Establishment by Guy de Maupassant
11. The Meek One by Fyodor Dostoevsky
12. Yermolay and the Miller’s Wife by Ivan Turgenev
13. The Nose by Nikolai Gogol
14. The Undertaker by Alexander Pushkin
Edgar Allan Poe defined a short story as that which can be read in one sitting. It has always been my experience that I am always so anxious to finish a novel that I end up reading for ten hours straight, to the detriment of my eyes and anything else I was supposed to have been doing. Short stories, on the other hand, give a complete story in an hour or so. Of course, some of these are a little longer, like “The Meek One,” which took me two hours to read. But that’s still better than, say, Anna Karenina. A beautiful book, but it takes a true commitment to read it if you have anything else in your life at all.
I often feel weighted under all the amazing short stories I haven’t read. I’ve been reading novels since junior high, but I only became serious about reading and writing short stories about two years ago. I’ve tried to school myself the best I can on those twentieth-century masters: Flannery O’Connor to Raymond Carver and back. But I’ve missed so much, especially those writers who pioneered the style, which was why I was so excited, on my first day of class this semester, when we received the syllabus describing how we would read in chronological order from the genesis of the short story in Germany through contemporary writers.
I highly recommend the Germans, and I plan to read more of Heinrich von Kleist and ETA Hoffman just as soon as I can. Most are probably familiar with the first Americans writing short stories, though Hawthorne and Melville are perhaps better known for their novels. Read their stories; they’re fantastic.
The French take a bit of a departure from the gothic under which these first five writers would generally fall. I found Balzac and Flaubert intriguing, but it was Maupassant I fell in love with. “Mother Savage” is such a succinct, intense story that I feel like I need to rush out and buy more of his Franco-Prussian War stories. And “Madame Tellier’s Establishment,” one of Ernest Hemingway’s favorite stories, is a deftly told meditation on class hierarchy and struggle. The division of the sacred and the profane, the intrusion of religion, the different definitions of love all reminded me of that twentieth-century master. It is so amazing to see literary history at work, to see how one writer can affect another even centuries apart.
Russian writers have always been difficult for me. The first piece of Russian literature I ever read was Crime and Punishment when I was in high school, and I’m not too proud to say I didn’t understand one bit of it. Being older and wiser, I did understand “The Meek One” – as much as anyone can understand Dostoevsky – but I can’t say I’ve been entirely converted. The story is called one of the first stream of consciousness writings in the Western canon, and the narrator is a true confessioner a la Thomas de Quincey, but I think the two techniques combined were a bit overwhelming for me, along with the length, which approaches 50 pages.
But I very much enjoyed Turgenev and Gogol, Turgenev who dealt with society and class struggle as subtly as Maupassant, and Gogol who managed to make a completely ridiculous story actually seem realistic. “The Nose” reminded me so much of “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez, a story I read for the first time a year ago and truly love, though I don’t write magical realism. I think all writers can benefit from reading this genre, though, because it gives us a lens through which to see how writers make events real to the reader. You will write all the time about events to which a reader cannot directly relate. It might not be as outrageous as a nose walking off or a man growing wings; it could be the death of child or an experience of war. But Gogol, and García Márquez, can teach us all how to make even seemingly universal events relatable, believable, felt in our readers.
My favorite Russian, though, was Pushkin and his story “The Undertaker.” At the beginning of class our professor told us it was written as a parody of a gothic tale, which Pushkin was tired to reading. It’s not just a parody, though; it’s a story that suspends disbelief. At the end we find out that the most outrageous scene is a dream (which reminded me a bit of M. Night Shamalan’s The Sixth Sense – oh the perils of being a modern reader!) but I think that’s the beauty of the story, that there are two ways to read the scene, each valid. It’s a difficult feat to accomplish, one Pushkin does so well and in such a short space.
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