Stories Galore!

       

We celebrated short story as a literary form of art in our last exchange and the impetus it has acquired in the digital age as the more favored form of narrative literature.  Today I will be enumerating and expounding on the ones that have lingered with me over the years, culminating in a couple from contemporary writers. We read short stories to occupy ourselves for a brief period of time, given the length of a short story. It intrigues me when they stay with me for longer durations and some have been in my mind space for years together. A short story is technically written to invoke a single effect or mood and all parameters of the story are etched towards that effect, climaxing to the most apt denouement.

 In my school text, I read  Tagore’s ’Homecoming’ which left such a deep impression on my mind that I would often dream of Phatik, his homesickness and ardour to be back home with his mother. Over the years, I have mulled over the poignancy of the story and how Tagore inimitably creates an aura of loneliness, alienation and neglect that shrouds Phatik who accompanies his Uncle to the city with a willing heart, but finds himself unwanted, ignored and a burden. The liberties that he took with his mother and younger brother are suddenly and strictly curtailed and the love that he took for granted becomes paramount and an obsession, by its complete absence. His loneliness crushes him into a shadow of his former boisterous self. He falls ill and in delirium the refrain continues – ‘Have the holidays come – can I go home?’

Equally unequivocal are the writings from the 2R’s – Roald Dahl and Ruskin Bond, read and followed by children and adults throughout the literary circles. ‘The Man from the South’ written by Roald Dahl is an intriguing piece of literature. The story portrays the compulsive and so, a strange urge of a man to trick other people into getting their fingers chopped in lieu of extravagant material possessions. It is a study of the psychological depths of the human mind. The expertise of the writer skillfully laces the intricate workings of the mind, of the desire for wealth, the bait of gambling, and compulsive behavioral patterns with humor and a lightness of being.

‘The Eyes Have It’ by Ruskin Bond is a sweet story of a blind traveler rendered in first person, who meets a girl on a train to Dehra. The brief, but beautiful exchange between the two acquires a deep poignancy with the revelation in the end. The sweetness of attraction, the little pretences to keep up the lovely fantasy, and the so very tender interlude leaves the reader with a savory chocolaty feel of the whole episode.

 ‘The Gift of Magi’ by O’ Henry is an insurmountable feat in literature by itself. ‘The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men-who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here, the author  lamely relates the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.’

Now I shall take the reader into the unpalatable realms of story writing by Franz Kafka and DH Lawrence. I term it unpalatable because ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka, is a story that strips humans of every vestige of camouflage and shows us our barren naked souls. That every relationship in this world of desires and maya is based on give and take and what happens when it becomes just one sided. Of how we as human beings detest and are afraid of anything which is unlike or unfamiliar or grotesque to our senses. Kafkaesque, a repertoire of the absurd touched its zenith with the story ‘The Metamorphosis’. An extraordinary transformation of the protagonist Gregor Samsa into a giant insect is relayed in a mundane banal tone highlighting the absurd and chaotic in an everyday home with the kitsch of huge debts and themes of alienation and isolation. The evolving feelings of love and care juxtaposed with animal yearnings of food and shelter in Gregor, the insect (whose very sight and habits disconnect him from the family he so much cared for) deliver him in the end. Horrified by his appearance and transition from a bread winner to a grotesque burden and a liability, his family distances itself from him and his death releases the family to better days. In a way the story questions the consciousness of humans versus the animal world which is devoid of it.  Milan Kundera is another such writer whose writings are a journey into the cold, insensitive, basic and raw desires of the so-called highly evolved race of human beings. We shudder at their writings ’cause they are the hard, unpalatable (I use the word again) truth of our existence as a species. 

DH Lawrence wrote the ‘Rocking Horse Winner’ to mirror the ungainly image of mothers who in contrast to their nourishing avatars, drive their families to destruction with their incontrollable desires.  He brings out the irrevocable imprints that women as mothers leave on their children’s minds. The effect of a mother on her child can drive him to the realms of clouds and also to the dungeons of despair, depending on which way the energy of the bond is used by her. The story with its morbidity leaves an indelible mark on the reader’s mind.

Amongst contemporary writers, I devoured the story collection of Anjum Hasan – ‘Difficult Pleasures’ delightfully. The stories have urban settings with themes of displacement, longing and alienation imbued with a melancholic search for meaning, deeper connections, flair for creativity and sometimes an escape from a claustrophobic relationship or a flight from paranoia.

The reader is easily led into the interiority of the characters and more often than not the protagonists are solitary reapers exclusively binding and unwinding their lives, singing melancholic strains………... Characters are animated in deft strokes and their muddles, paradoxes archived using the stream of consciousness which builds crests and troughs diffusing situations and moments with a fluidity of a competent writer who has complete control on the design and structure of the narrative.

‘Revolutions’ is about a precocious child turned photographer who sees pictures in everyday things and freezes them into his frames. His endeavors are a face in a coconut husk, plastic that could be water and water that could be shadow. His quest for recognition makes him cling to a mentor and he himself becomes frozen in time. ‘Good Housekeeping’ unravels the deep emotional bond in a mother - daughter relationship. Ayana views the world through her mother’s eyes. Her mother’s mood -swings, tears, likes and dislikes are hers too. The last part of the story when she comes into her own is rendered with great mastery and subtlety. ‘The Big Picture’ walks away with all the laurels. It is a sweet story about an older woman who has cocooned herself in her house with her art works, and then suddenly she is let out in the wide world with an opportunity to travel to Europe with her selected paintings for an exhibition and the attraction of seeing master works and meeting world renowned artists. A menopausal woman stranded and lost at airports and art galleries , talking and mumbling to herself, fidgeting with tampons, with her menopausal timing gone awry.

And so the stories go on. Godspeed and stories galore to my readers too!

The Short Story’s Novel Life

Short story, a condensed literary genre, has got a lease of new life with the proliferation of the digital media, beginning with e-book revolution which hit us in 2007. There is an ongoing debate of reading having taken a backseat in today’s world of never-ending deadlines and smart phones. But the fact of the matter is that people are reading on the screen rather than on paper. With short attention spans and a fast life, the short story which as Edgar Allan Poe defined it, ‘that which can be read in one sitting’ has gained momentum.  The length of an average short story takes just a couple of screens and  suits the rampant users of the internet and latest smart handheld gadgetry. ‘Amazon, for instance, created its Kindle Singles program in 2011 for publishing short fiction and nonfiction, brief-enough to be read in less than two hours. Although the list price is usually modest, a dollar or two, authors keep up to 70 percent of the royalties: a welcome revenue for fledgling authors and a potentially big payoff for well-known writers.’ Within the space of a few pages, a great author weaves a compelling story which, with a rich narrative and vibrant characters and a dramatic denouement, acquires the depth of a Dickensian and the pace of a thriller, creating memorable literature that impacts the reader long after they have finished reading.  Virginia Wolfe, talking of photography and the art of short story writing, said, “Isn’t it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life? This gives us, I think, a clue to the enduring power and appeal of the short story—they are snapshots of the human condition and of human nature, and when they work well, and work on us, we are given the rare chance to see in them more than in real life.”

The genesis of the short story began with the caveman recounting the tale of his hunting encounter for the day. Improvising, deleting, dramatizing, rephrasing, repeating, exposing and yet withholding details to carve out the frame of a great story, the narrative traversed the ages in the form of anecdotes, parables and fabricated lies( an art ) to the Canterbury tales, fairy tales, legends relayed through poetry. Short story appeared in the printed format just two centuries ago with the industrial revolution and the surging middle class which demanded literary fodder through magazines and periodicals. A plethora of writers experimented and achieved success through their writings of intense stories, which were visited and reread time and again by generations down the line.  There were no evolutionary planes, a slow build-up to a crescendo.  In 1837, a printed short story collection was born when Nathaniel Hawthorne published his short stories titled Twice Told Tales..  The fact that in the early to mid-19th century, Hawthorne and Poe and Turgenev wrote timeless short stories virtually without any falterings, is indicative that the short story is hardwired in the human imagination, and was just waiting for an outlet stream which built into an ocean through the works of Melville, Nabokov, Calvino, Rudyard Kipling, Dickens, Dylan Thomas, DH Lawrence and the like. A long story of short stories that began with Hawthorne reached its zenith with the publications of Anton Chekov.

Chekov is heralded as the greatest short story writer of all times, and rightly so because he transformed the narrative from a beginning - middling- end plot to a formless structure. He recognized the meaninglessness of life, its random dictates and answered questions that people lived and died for. He ploughed into the story format creating fluid characters, resisting judgments, and neat endings. His stories are lifelike i.e. unpredictable, arbitrary, thought provoking and disillusioned. The advent of the 20^th century in the world of short story writing thereafter is all Chekovian. The short story entered its golden age. Short story writers earned particularly good sums especially in America. ‘Magazines proliferated, readers were eager, circulations rose, fees went up and up. In the 1920s, Scott Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 by the Saturday Evening Post for a single short story.’ The Chekovian legacy lasted a long time without any new style bisecting it concretely, till the advent of the modern story.
We have spoken of the event-plot story and Chekovian story. Most short stories, even today, fall into one of these two categories. From them, other types emerged over the coming decades. The cryptic tale baffles many an untrained reader with a depth of meaning hidden under the apparent text, and the poetic story is for the connoisseurs. The biographical story is the latest modern form of short story writing blurring the line between fiction and fact to render sensational stories, maybe a take from the media which sensationalizes hard reality to appeal to the viewers’ appetite for drama in life.
‘The Gorkha’s Daughter’ is a short story collection by Prajwal Parajuly, a student of the Oxford Creative Writing MSt course. He was born in Sikkim to an Indian father and Napalese mother. He signed a record-breaking two-book deal with UK publisher Quercus. The five-figure deal makes Prajwal Parajuly, 27, Quercus’ youngest author and the youngest Indian ever to sign an international book contract. The book is out in the market and was discussed critically at the Jaipur Lit Fest, a sure shot indication of the popularity and resurgence of the short fiction genre in the contemporary world. The fever has caught on and novel writers are now switching over to the new demand of the digital era and new formats of writing. Story collections which had been put on a backburner by acclaimed writers like Tom Perrotaa ( books ‘Election’ and ‘Little Children’ have been adapted into Oscar winning films)  are seeing the light of day.

I recently read a short story collection ‘Difficult Pleasures’ by Anjum Hasan . She revels in the luxury of variety, of trying out so many different garbs or voices; but the perfection lies in its brevity and pointedness and really in the feeling of expansion into life that penetrates our consciousness by means of a style that produces a sense of truth and richness. She views each story as a specific invention, a liberating experience to move out of her own skin and slip into a character’s head and find the language and psychology to tell their story – that’s where all the difficult pleasure is!

My last article was about book apps, the latest format of books on the smart phone, and now the above topic of the new life of the short story has been an endeavor to explore the latest genres of books and reading in the contemporary world. This talk about short stories has surfaced many an unforgettable story from the recesses of my consciousness – which I shall continue in my next article. In the meantime readers can too go explore and recollect their favorite short stories and if you mail them to me I shall expound on them in my next interaction with you.

Happy short story readings on the KINDLE!

Difficult Pleasures Book column

                                                     Literary Conversations!

The other day, chin in hand, I sat listening to Anjum Hasan at the International Centre. I was all ears to her narrative of imagination which, she emphasized, was the core of fictional writing. Hearing her did not really grab me so much as the act of reading her collection of short stories ’Difficult Pleasures’. A summer release, the collage is like a deluge of a heavy downpour which you may set out to read in a light vein, but with the very first story you are left wondering deep in thought. To quote John Cournos, a literary critic, ‘A short story is not a ‘slice of life. Call it a ‘roll’ if you must – but, at any rate a whole roll.’ The stories do not follow the beaten track of a beginning, middle and an end. An anticlimax in the artistic sense, at times an understatement, or a whimper instead of the bang that the reader was expecting.

The story is one of the most ancient forms of literature; but the short story as a well defined sub- genre is a modern literary form. Epics have stories in them- and tragedies, comedies and the novel may have many stories at the same time. A short story has its own distinct form, and in English literature this may be said to have happened in the nineteenth century, with the lack of time to read full – length novels as life became busier and busier. Anjum Hasan revels in the luxury of variety, of trying out so many different garbs or voices; but the perfection lies in its brevity and pointedness and really in the feeling of expansion into life that penetrates our consciousness by means of a style that produces a sense of truth and richness. She views each story as a specific invention, a liberating experience to move out of her own skin and slip into a character’s head and find the language and psychology to tell their story – that’s where all the difficult pleasure is!

The book cover is a picture postcard from Goa with coconut palms and a sandy beach with a simulation of the effect of waves on the contours of a sandy coastline which is irrevocably changed with every assault of the ocean wave in multiple ways, the pattern, the silhouette a paradigm shift in perspective; with each story. The stories have urban settings with themes of displacement, longing and alienation imbued with a melancholic search for meaning, deeper connections, flair for creativity and sometimes an escape from a claustrophobic relationship or a flight from paranoia.

The reader is easily led into the interiority of the characters and more often than not the protagonists are solitary reapers exclusively binding and unwinding their lives, singing melancholic strains………... Characters are animated in deft strokes and their muddles, paradoxes archived using the stream of consciousness which builds crests and troughs diffusing situations and moments with a fluidity of a competent writer who has complete control on the design and structure of the narrative.

‘Revolutions’ is about a precocious child turned photographer who sees pictures in everyday things and freezes them into his frames. His endeavors are a face in a coconut husk, plastic that could be water and water that could be shadow. His quest for recognition makes him cling to a mentor and he himself becomes frozen in time. ‘Good Housekeeping’ unravels the deep emotional bond in a mother - daughter relationship. Ayana views the world through her mothers eyes. Her mother’s mood swings, tears, likes and dislikes are hers too. The last part of the story when she comes into her own is rendered with great mastery and subtlety. ‘The Big Picture’ walks away with all the laurels. It is a sweet story about an older woman who has cocooned herself in her house with her art works and then suddenly she is let out in the wide world with an opportunity to travel to Europe with her selected paintings for an exhibition and the attraction of seeing master works and meeting world renowned artists. A menopausal woman stranded and lost at airports and art galleries , talking and mumbling to herself, fidgeting with tampons, with her menopausal timing gone drastically wrong……... ‘Immanuel Kant in Shillong’ and ‘Banerjee and Banerjee’ are meanderings into rich philosophy and literature wherein characters try to imbue relationships gone awry with meaning and inspiration from books. In ‘Saturday Night’  Hasan with great dexterity recounts two simultaneous stories which cross each other just before the end and become intertwined ironically. Inayat and Hina sum-up the collection in the last story with a deep philosophy. However much you may love and treasure souls related to you in your life ; your journey is lone and solitary and you have to let everything go one day………

Here I would like to enumerate a few lines from the collection which had me mulling and ruminating long after……..

Her reflection in the blank, curtain less windows follows her from room to room as she brings out her things and slowly lets them fill the empty spaces.

It is possible to feel completely at home in the world but this is only because we have laid claim to a small space- a few rooms, certain streets, a familiar town – over which our habitual wanderings create grooves that we can comfortably slip into. In truth, the world is a strange and horrifying place.

You know, like  Borges said, each of our unthinking footsteps makes its way over the Golgothas of others.

God, how well we know the rules. Words, words, words and all that. Do you know the feeling of losing it all.  One moment and everything gone. The edifice gone. The shimmer gone. Just pills and clock hands left.

When Samir is afraid , he smiles – but Samir is doubled over from terror, trying both to break free of his father and ensure his father doesn’t abandon him.

I remember expounding on Kant’s categorical imperative. Act only on that maxim through which you can; at the same time, will that it should be a universal law.

Literature imbued with seriousness and gravity, a delight to a seasoned literary enthusiast. Each story opens up new avenues of literary conversations.  A story does not end with the last page but repeats itself interminably in your mind long after. For oft upon my couch I lie in a vacant or a pensive mood they flash upon the inward eye and I begin again on the road to philosophical tunings, literary analogies; a world unto itself. KUDOS ANJUM HASAN!