Bucak, Irving, Lahiri, Ndiaye, and Towles

Appealing to a variety of reading tastes: Trendy Translations, Honed and Haunting

Trying something a little different with the Quarterly format. For most of the collections, I’ll summarise them in five sentences, followed by a quotation. Except for one, one that’s made me think while reading, frequently, of other readers who would enjoy these stories as much as I have. And I’m also including a single story that’s available to read online. (This month, one of the stories from the exceptional collection happens to be available online as well.)

So many people have mentioned Marie Ndiaye’s fiction, that I was pleased to find “The Good Denis” translated by Jordan Stump in The New Yorker. The narrator’s visiting her mother in a first-class nursing home when she learns that when her parents split, when the narrator was an infant, it was her mother who did the leaving: leaving for a good man who treated the narrator like his own child. As time passes, the narrator’s questions are multiplied and amplified. “But who was I that anyone should have to deign to accept me, and that raising me for two short years should seem the work of a saint?” And as the story unfolds, she both longs for and loathes this good man.

Dionne Irving’s The Islands (2022)

Irving’s islands are literal and metaphorical; she writes about how we are often adrift, from those who are supposed to be closest with us—parents, children, neighbours, lovers, relatives overseas. And about the distance between the lives we imagined living for ourselves and the lives actually lived (a gap widened by class and race). Many of the stories revolve around women’s relationships, but I was also deeply moved by the story she wrote from the perspective of a divorced father. The way she subtly references Jamaica’s past in some of these stories reminds me of Olive Senior’s ease moving between Jamaican and North American settings (bit of Europe here, too), but with a splash of Edwidge Danticat’s bold imagery and spare sentence structure. Both Senior and Danticat write stories but also novels; I would love to read a novel from Irving alongside more stories.

“She won’t be like the other girls and women she knows—hair tied up and life tied down with children and men. Girls and women with something missing in their eyes.”

Contents: Florida Lives, Shopgirl, Weaving, All-Inclusive, The Cape, Canal, An American Idea of Fun, Some People, The Gifts, Waking Life

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories (2023)

Lahiri’s one of the few who has had equal success with short and long fiction as well as non-fiction, and now she writes in Italian; she translates most of the stories in her new collection into English, but three are translated by Todd Portnowitz. Her sentences are impeccable, her clarity remarkable. Word choice and audience, scene structure and theme: you feel, while reading, that she’s thought of everything. My favourite in this new collection is the middle section, which operates like a collage of linked vignettes, circling around the idea of where and how we belong to places, familiar and fresh. But overall, there is a cost for her precision in that the emotional resonance is restrained, so while I was always happy to pick up this collection and read the next story, I praised and admired—from afar.

“The employees, all of them women, sit behind the windows and chat with one another like aunts at a wedding.
The rest of us sit silent, like members of a small audience watching a performance.”

Contents: I The Boundary, The Reentry, P’s Parties, Well-Lit House; II The Steps III The Delivery, The Procession, Notes, Dante Alighieri

Amor Towles’ Table for Two (2024)

Two friends had raved about Amor Towles’ fiction previously and I’d begun to read him on four different occasions, but every single time the novel was recalled to the library for somebody’s hold: how were these older novels so endlessly in demand? When the opportunity arose to review his latest collection, Table for Two (2024), I was eager to read it, knowing it would finally mean I’d read his backlist. And how lucky that was my plan because with Towles, his four books read like one massive volume; if I hadn’t read his other books in such close proximity, I would have missed the inconnections and links, the gentle nods to characters and themes that came before. The stories feel a little old-fashioned but their engaging tone balances that, and his appreciation of a satisfying (i.e. not necessarily happy) ending really works for me.

“What follows is a transcription of events based on the direct testimony of my husband and additional intelligence gathered over nine years of marriage.”

Contents: The Line, The Ballad of Timothy Touchett, Hasta Luego, I Will Survive, The Bootlegger, The Didomenico Fragment, Eve in Hollywood

The opening story in Ayşe Papatya Bucak’s The Trojan War Museum (2019) was such a tremendous reading experience that I left the collection for a couple of weeks (“The History of Girls”, online here). This idea—that “Girlhood…was something to be survived”—struck home. But I found myself needing space after each story in the same way, so fully realised was each work, that I did not want to continue with another until I had more fully inhabited what I’d just read. Sometimes because the energy in the story demanded space, as with the first story: so haunting. But sometimes because she tells stories told in such a way that the arc forced me to reroute. Not in a deliberately subversive or experimental way but, still, with elements of surprise.

Many of the stories are historical, some feature historical figures, and more are set in America than I expected (she teaches in Florida). She uses italics in a way—short scenes, even—that makes me want to read those sections with particular attention. Details (like names and dates of paintings or blog posts) disrupt the flow deliberately, so readers settle into perspective or character. Pacing is cultivated thoughtfully, so readers rush into the future, almost unwillingly. Like Nathan Englander, Steven Milhauser, Lauren Groff, and Louise Erdrich, Bucak’s stories are wide-ranging and sometimes deeply moving.

“Children do find us out. Sooner or later they realize we are so much weaker, more flawed, and more scared than they ever imagined, even when they were imagining the worst. And they find out because they, too, become weak and flawed and scared, at least the lucky ones do. I suppose it’s the best we can hope for. Even weak and flawed and scared, sometimes we do all right.”

Contents: The History of Girls, A Cautionary Tale, Iconography, Little Sister and Emineh, Mysteries of the Mountain South, The Trojan War Museum, Good Fortune, The Dead, An Ottoman’s Arabesque, The Gathering of Desire

This year I’ve also been rereading Carol Shields’ stories, and I’ve already written about Lisa Alward’s Cocktail and half the 2024 Best Canadian Short Stories published by Biblioasis (I’m still reading the other half).

You can see some of the collections I’m aiming for next in the photo above. Other recent arrivals in my stack? Jann Everard’s Blue Runaways, Danila Botha’s Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness, Mark Anthony Jarman’s Burn Man, and Carol Bruneau’s Threshold.

Who wrote the last short story you read? And if you had to choose from these, which appeals to you most in this moment?