Abdullah, Hage, Friedman, Ha, Orner and Atwood

Short Stories in October, November, and December

Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, these stories capture a variety of reading moods.

This quarter, I returned to three favourite writers and also explored three new-to-me story writers.

Silmy Abdullah’s Home of the Floating Lily (2021), was also part of my Here and Elsewhere reading for its collection of interior stories, primarily about women’s lives, that cast a light on lives in Bangladesh and in Little Bangladesh in north Toronto. I was swiftly engaged in the characters’ lives and read on because I wanted to know how things turned out for them.

“For the first time in years, there is a softness in [Munir’s] voice. He would often comfort [Shahnaz] like this, when they were newcomers in Toronto, when she would stand on the balcony of their apartment and weep for her home in Dhaka, staring at the neighbourhood across the street, at the rows of bungalows she found ugly.”
(Title story)

“Aunty looks at me, a sharp piercing glance. ‘One year in Canada and you have become all humanitarian, have you?’ she says. ‘Don’t forget who sent you there.’”
(“Across the Ocean”)

There were other Toronto stories in Margaret Atwood’s Dancing Girls, which I discussed through November for this year’s Margaret Atwood Reading Month.

Peter Orner’s polyphonic collection Maggie Brown & Others (2019), including the novella “Walt Kaplan Is Broke” would serve as an excellent introduction to Orner’s storytelling. Like Joan Silber and Alice Munro, Orner focuses on small details that comprise everyday lives: tender and relentlessly reverberating with tension between love and loss. (“Allston”)

“Some books sit on the shelf for so long they become part of the landscape. One day, a spine catches your eye, and you slide a book from between two others, open it, read a little.”
(“Allston”)

“You give me a quiet house, a sleeping daughter, a sleeping wife, and I’ll show you what it is to be alive.”
(novella)

Kathy Friedman’s All the Shining People (2022) landed on my stack thanks to her appearance at the Wordstock Festival (which I attended virtually). One of the things I really enjoyed about this collection is her use of dialogue, the way that she captures perspectives, whether inward musings or outward expressions, in a believable tone that reflects her characters’ view of the world. Sometimes this is appropriately wordy, other times sleek.

“He still came over to play computer games, and we hated the same people, and I guess he was nice to me or whatever, so when Jordan’s mom called my mom, and she told me what had happened and told me I should go by the hospital after school, and I didn’t want to, and she said I had to, I said okay.”
(Title story)

“Martin’s earliest recollections of his father weren’t proper memories; they were the spaces where memories should have been, like empty picture frames.”
(“Seeing Clearly”)

A collection with exactly the kind of endings that I prefer with short stories is Khanh Ha’s All the Rivers (2022). The winner of the Eastover Prize for Fiction in 2021, this collection is slim but memorable. As I reread the quotations I flagged in various stories, the characters and their situations come back in a rush (many months later, as I’ve taken my time with this collection, to enjoy it to the fullest).

These stories are effective because of the attention paid to balance throughout: the author takes considerable care with both absence and presence, with the universal and the specific, with perspectives rooted in innocence and experience, and a sensibility that shifts seemingly naturally between precise and lyrical prose, as required.

When necessary, there is enough sensory detail to engage readers’ senses, as in “The Devil’s Mask”: “The patina-green Lambretta was weighed down with piles of household goods and an array of trappings.” In contrast, the prose can be stark and clear, as in “All the Pretty Little Horses”: “I wish I could see a town the way you do. With memories, with little stories. Do you have a sense of belonging?”

The motions of a fox move lightly across the narrative, mirroring the author’s intuition for either heavily weighting certain events or allowing them to barely ruffle the surface of the story: “He ruled the dunes at night. In the early morning, you could see his tracks in the sand, and, if you followed them, you could tell his habitual itinerary.” (“The Woman Child”)

He writes with the awareness that not all readers will be familiar with Vietnamese history and organically embeds the necessary information so that all readers can appreciate the characters’ different understandings: “At Mў Lai the American soldiers murdered the Vietnamese civilians, but during Tet in Hue, the VC massacred the Vietnamese—their own people. Here you heard only of Mў Lai. The American public was more interested in a war crime committed by one American infantry platoon than in the Hue massacre.”
(“The Dream Catcher”)

I enjoy the endings of these stories most of all: there’s only a glance in the direction of resolution, just enough to satisfy not so much as to quench. There is always a space afforded to readers’ minds and hearts an implicit invitation to carry on with it yourself, the characters deftly developed to allow for them to continue to exist beyond the resolution on the page.

“He gazed at her long enough that she glanced away.
I guess you’re right, she said.”
(“Night, This River”)

I’ve discussed Khanh Ha’s novels here too: Flesh (2012), The Demon Who Peddled Longing (2014), Mrs. Rossi’s Dream (2019), along with another short story collection, A Mother’s Tale (2021).

Contents: The Woman Child; All the Pretty Little Horses; The Dream Catcher; The Devil’s Mask; The Girl on the Bridge; Night, This River; The Yin-Yang Market; A Mute Girl’s Yarn; A Scent of Long-Ago Love; The Children of Icarus; All the Rivers Flow into the Sea

Another longtime favourite, whose novels I have discussed in detail, is Rawi Hage: De Niro’s Game (2006), Cockroach (2008), Carnival (2012), and most recently Beirut Hellfire Society (2018).

In Stray Dogs, short-listed for this year’s Giller Prize, Hage takes readers on a Pictures-at-an-Exhibition-styled journey. And, indeed, almost all of the stories contain images, specifically photographs or their photographers—all spiralling around questions about how we assemble meaning from our perspective on the world, how we preserve it, and how easily it can be shattered.

A single reading does not suffice for these stories. In almost every case, I found myself needing to reread immediately after finishing. Even in a character-driven story like “Mother, Mother, Mother” there is a sense of a deeper meaning beneath the surface, a sense that we are not only being acquainted with the events that comprised the woman’s life, but that the way these events are being recounted says more about the teller’s view of her life than about the woman who lived it.

“My mother was a beauty was loved the company of the mirrors that were forbidden to me. She was a master of disguise. She was able to live at various altitudes, in different terrains and cities; she presented her flamboyant self to everyone and everything, even the birds, the goats and the villagers. She was also good at managing maids and the nobility, the clergy and doctors. All this she learned form examining herself in the mirrors.”

In the first story, a character muses “that photography functions as a prophecy of death—overtly linking these observations to the title of Joyce’s story, ‘The Dead’” and, in the last, another notes that these “cameras of yours, these manifestations of our fraught relation to technology and the mechanization of the world, these deadly little devices, should be abandoned.” In between, there’s much to consider and reconsider.

Contents: The Iconoclast; Bird Nation; Stray Dogs; Mother, Mother, Mother; The Whistle; The Fate of the Son of the Man on the Horse; Instructions for the Dance; The Veil; The Duplicates; The Wave; The Colour of Trees

And you? Any short stories lately?