Dear readers,
How’s your attention span these days? Mine seems to have surrendered almost completely to fidgety unrest, an anti-flow state you might call gerbil-esque (fuzzy, skittering, frequently stuck on a wheel).
Nobody wants to go full hamster. So it helps to have a day job that relies at least in part on getting lost in literature; the reliable lure of other voices, other rooms. But often lately I find myself reaching for great minds in small doses, concentrated pellets of wisdom and perspective that I can hold in one hand. And I have found myself especially soothed by the pithier works of two famously sharp women not known for suffering fools.
Which is not to say that the books in this week’s newsletter are devoid of whimsy or delight. Intermittently, there are dips into the strange and fantastical; sometimes even a recipe (for poison, but still). Both bring a welcome bite and astringency to their tone, a sort of bracing witch hazel for the soul.
—Leah
“Loot and Other Stories,” by Nadine Gordimer
Fiction, 2003
The South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer’s back catalog is not what any sane reader would call comfort food; her words tend to come with sticks and stones. And there isn’t much mercy in “Loot and Other Stories.” But the specter of mortality — the book was published the year Gordimer turned 80, not long after her husband of five decades died — also seemed to soften her corners, at least a little bit.
Each piece here deals, in its way, with death and the primordial urge to push back at it. In “The Generation Gap,” a man leaves his lovely wife of 42 years for a much younger and plainer violinist, to his adult children’s confusion and outrage. In “L.U.C.I.E.,” a jaded lawyer, accompanying her recently widowed father on a trip to Italy, reflects on the namesake ancestor she never met.
“The Diamond Mine” offers a brief, dreamy chronicle of a teenage girl’s sexual awakening with an Afrikaans soldier about to be sent off to war, and “Homage” follows the inner monologue of a nameless, stateless assassin as he stands unnoticed at the gravesite of the beloved political figurehead he was conscripted to kill.
Two excellent mini-novellas come later on: “Mission Statement,” an elegant account of midlife romance between a British aid worker and a local Black bureaucrat, and the more convoluted, fanciful “Karma,” which follows a disembodied narrator through various far-flung incarnations (a bourgeois insurance executive, a Russian chambermaid’s aborted fetus).
Gordimer is a tricky writer. Some of her sentences land like clean, perfect arrows and some are so mazelike and strangely syntaxed they seem designed to confound a composition student: Diagram this.
But when she hits the spot, watch out. Take the opener, “Loot,” a deceptive wisp of allegory about an earthquake that begets a tidal wave, with a knockout coda. You can read the story as it was first published 26 years ago in The New Yorker; just know that their version (how? why?) omits the last line. This Swiss website has the story in italics — can’t win them all! — but in full.
Read if you like: Sun damage, doomed love affairs, dropping the word “veld” into casual conversations.
Available from: Amazon, and various international departure lounges.
“Murder in the Dark,” by Margaret Atwood
Fiction, 1983
Is there a literary unit of measurement smaller than a vignette? The jacket copy of “Murder in the Dark” describes its contents as “short fictions and prose poems,” which seems fair enough, though it doesn’t encompass how much beguiling weirdness Atwood manages to cram into this bantamweight collection.
It takes her a minute to ramp up; the first handful of sketches — mostly scanty, fleeting recollections of lake houses or comic books — pass like dandelion puffs, pleasant but insubstantial. By the sixth piece, a backward glance at paramours long past called “Boyfriends,” she’s starting to cook. (The boys themselves are interchangeable, as is their smell: “leather and banana peels or the vestibules of old movie houses; a whiff of the future.”)
“Raw Materials” offers up a Mexican travelogue no leisure magazine would touch, a tale of mezcal and death temples and first-world-tourist ennui that veers by the end into existential dread. “Simmering” spins the speculative gender dystopia of “The Handmaid’s Tale” into the kitchen, imagining a world in which there is nothing more manly than whipping up a soufflé or pears flambé while the womenfolk head off to work with their briefcases and pinstriped suits.
As twinned thought exercises on the act of writing popular fiction, “Women’s Novels” and “Happy Endings” are both perfectly droll and, 40-plus years on, still depressingly on point.
“Murder in the Dark” exits as it entered, retreating from the book’s more substantial center into a series of flotsam and fragments. The title story, by the way, is not about actual killing but a parlor game that involves subterfuge, misdirection and straight-faced lying when the lights come on. Or as Atwood would have it, not a bad metaphor for novelists.
Read if you like: Canada, second-wave feminism, very small memory palaces.
Available from: A Virago Press paperback, and the bedside tables of approximately no bachelors you know.
Why don’t you …
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Treat yourself to another neat, ruthless little story by Atwood, “Stone Mattress”? And maybe cancel your plans for that Arctic cruise.
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Pick up Bernardine Evaristo’s polyphonic 2019 novel “Girl, Woman, Other”? It’s appropriately vignette-ish for this week’s theme (there are a dozen main characters in rotation, more or less), but also big and rich.
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Spend a few hours with the monumental songstress Marianne Faithfull, who died last week at 78 after living just about the most a lady can? Her “Faithfull: An Autobiography” is one of the all-time great rock memoirs, full of sex, stardust and terrible decisions.
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