Short Story Podcast Review: The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain by Yoko Ogawa, read by Madelaine Thien

The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain by Yōko Ogawa 

Text at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Audio at New Yorker Fiction podcast Oct 1st 2022
I just listened to Yōko Ogawa's story The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast Oct 1st 2022 . The podcast audio is read by Madelaine Thien. For me here voice took a little getting used to, I found it too soft, airy, and had to grind my teeth a bit, but I persevered and acclimatized enough to enjoy the story. What was excellent was the discussion Thien and the podcast host Deborah Treisman had about the story afterwards. One to recommend I think.

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Short Story Review: A Slow Boat to China by Haruki Murakami

A Slow Boat to China by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Murakami's first short story can be found in the collection The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami and if you have access to Jstor at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4384180

The introspective narrator tells the reader the stories of his first encounters with Chinese - the teacher in the Chinese elementary school at the edge of the world", mistakes made on a first date with a Chinese co-worker, an encounter with a encyclopedia salesman.

Written with some beautiful phrasing eg "The years '59 and '60 stand there like gawky twins in matching nerd suits." and "...the new me - five chickens and a smoke away from what I was...."

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Short Story Review: Half Light by Tayari Jones

Half Light by Tayari Jones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Short story about twins Amelia and Camelia Hall who have identical faces but look nothing like each other in all other respects. They are on a mission to retrieve a portrait of their mother painted by Jacques Toussaint. While still in ‘till death do us part’ mode dermatologist Amelia had given the portrait, originally given to her by her mother, to her musician husband in return for one of his songs written on paper. He ended up with it after their divorce where Camelia had acted as Amelia’s attorney. This retrieval is of course illegal and we all know that the best plans go wrong in this case when they meet the much younger, cake baker, Melanie in the ex’s kitchen
This is the second short story I have read by Tayari Jones, the trouble is I’m just not normally interested in the domesticity of family lives that she writes about but I have to say this one held me so much more that my previous read, Dispossession. Once again this was a free Audible Original and I’m glad I listened to this one.

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Short Story Review: Dispossession by Tayari Jones

Dispossession by Tayari Jones

My Rating 2*

Mothers and sons, the American dream soured, families split, daily life struggles, low paid work, evictions. All mirroring the narrator’s own past. Not really my sort of
but if you like Tayari Jones then this free Audible Original production of her short story may be for you.

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Short Story Review: The Didomenico Fragment by Amor Towles

The Didomenico Fragment by Amor Towles
My rating: 4 *

Percival Skinner has financial troubles as regards his retirement planning. He is an art assessor and is approached by dealer, Sarkis, looking for a certain painting by the Renaissance master Giuseppe Didomenico. It happens to have been owned by his ancestor who divided up the painting giving a piece to each of his children. Over the generations these children carried on the tradition until the inheritance was reduced to a fragment. Most had been sold, except the one owned by his young nephew Peter, his wife Sharon and their son 10 year old Lucas. Skinner is offered a 10% finders fee if he could arrange for its sale which could secure his future retirement. And so he hatches a plan to get his hands on the fragment, but of course things do not go actually as he planned.
It is classic Towles - great characters, well constructed story which he packs so much.
The Audible recording of this short story is narrated by actor John Lithgow. He does it marvellously. If you want a way to pass a very entertaining hour I can highly recommend this one.


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Short Story Review: Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell

 

Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell

Audio online at LeVar Burton Reads Podcast
Text available at Diabolical Plots 

Read more about the author on his site  

This is a warm hearted short story about an empty house "just a family short of a home" and a young father and daughter in need of "somewhere to start fresh"

A couple of good lines struck me in the writing -
"He looks at the couple of ripples in the green floral wallpaper, with the expression of someone looking at his own armpit" and "The house cannot cry. There is just a little air in its pipes"

Short Story Review: The Walker by Izumi Suzuki, transl. by Daniel Joseph

The Walker by Izumi Suzuki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Test available online at https://granta.com/the-walker/

Izumi Suzuki was Japanese writer living between 1949 and 1986. The most informative account of her I found is from 2021 posting on Literary Hub (https://lithub.com/a-writer-from-the-...) from around the time her story collection Terminal Boredom: Stories appeared in English with stories translated by Polly Barton ( whose name I recognised from several other translation of modern Japanese writers), Sam Bett, David Boyd (who has written about translating her work https://hopscotchtranslation.com/2021... ), Aiko Masubuchi, Helen O’Horan and Daniel Joseph who is the translator of this story. That collection is all the has been translated thus far.

According to Granta, Daniel Joseph holds a Master's from Harvard in medieval Japanese Literature and who according to his Amazon's page he specializes in both modern and classical literature, science fiction, pop culture, music, and the avant-garde, and if this story is anything to go by that list may qualify for the addition of the term 'weird' ,

The Walker is a short 4 page story, set in some unknown time and place where a narrator seems to have been walking for ages and seems icompelled to continue to walk, except that she encounters a woman with food cart. ******SPOILER ALERT*** hungry and with no money she exchanges an item of jewellery for food. This seems a fantasy encounter, told quite realistically, but the final twist left so gobsmacked, my only though was 'How strangely weird!'

I've put Terminal Boredom: Stories on my To Be Read List 

 

Postscript: Daniel Joseph has also written about her on Art Review  in 2021 (https://artreview.com/how-izumi-suzuki-broke-science-fiction-boys-club )

Short Story Review: To Jump Is to Fall by Stephen Graham Jones, read by LeVar Burton

 

To Jump Is to Fall by Stephen Graham Jones

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another story from the marvellous LeVar Burton Reads Podcast. The story text is available online at https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...

For me this one had a slow start and took a bit of time to engage me. I was aware early on of the precarious position of the sky diving telepath upon his survival with the plan eing to get him to a hospital staffed by his employers people but the reason for the twist at the end I did not see coming as he considers his one jump for a golden payoff v his moral compass!

Short Story Review: What the forest remembers by Jennifer Egan

What the forest remembers by Jennifer Egan

This story can be found in the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

It starts as a fairy tale would "Once upon a time , in a faraway land, there was a forest" but these forest memories are not the memories of trees, but the memories of four young men in the mid 1960's going there to experience their first 'grass' . Yet it is none of these men who are recalling their memories telling others the story or stories of that night. Instead, it is the daughter of one who is the narrator of this story years later, after her father has died. Her own memory of it is a six year olds, and that amounts to him going away and returning from this "Short trip north, some fishing, a little duck hunting, maybe"

So how does she 'tell' the story of that night? ****SPOILER ALERT ****Why via one-foot-square yellow Mandala Consciousness Cube of course! It seems her father took part in a consciousness storage project and his consciousness stored for that academic experiment was later transferred to a Cube where she could view them, and later she had them transferred into the Collective Consciousness, where lucky for her as the narrator of this story she found all four men’s memories.

From these she has constructed the story, or at least a fuller version of the story of that night. Her authorial problem is in many ways the same as any researcher for a historical biography would have " ... my problem is the same one that everyone who gathers information has: What to do with it? How to sort and shape and use it? How to keep from drowning in it? Not every story needs to be told."

I wish more had been made of this authorial dilemma. On one reading this I am left with thinking - Consciousness Storage is an interesting concept but not totally novel so why use it as a device in this story? Well the answer comes not in the story but in the linked New Yorker interview Egan does entitled "The Dangers of Knowing" https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-... .

So if you intend to read her forthcoming book The Candy House this is for you as that is where this is explored further through a common character, one of the men Lou Kline, the father of our story's narrator.

Short Story Review: The Uncurling of Samsara by Koji A. Dae

This short story is available to read and to listen to in the January 2022 Issue of Clarkesworld Magaine, https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dae_01_22 

The author, new to me as so many of these CLarkesworld stories are,  has a website where many of her other short stories are listed there https://kojiadae.ink/published-elsewhere 

It is a story about grieving set on an generational ship making its way from to some brave new world.  The ship is called the Samsara,  the  Sanskrit word that means "world^", the concept of rebirth and "cyclicality of all life, matter, existence", a fundamental belief of most Indian religions, the cycle of death and rebirth  and rebirth, regeneration and recovery are themes in this story. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra )

Ever thought how food might be produced on such ships? One possibility lingers through this story. Gram and our narrator had been 'printing' food, trying to perfect recipes with the flavours, textures and tastes of old. But Gram has died and the narrator still in training for this role is left bereft and cannot bring herself to eat. We follow the  narrator through the month following Gram's funeral as she struggles to come to terms with her loss. On Day 10 facing the prospect of Potato stew in the canteen she considers that no one on the ship has ever eaten Earth potatoes so why do they have to copy them, to copy all their shortcomings - a bit like what I think about Vegan meat! 

Gram had been working on trying to perfect Cherry Pie, her famously good flaky pastry works but cherries are an altogether different problem, one she had yet to conquor. SPOILER ALERT  Our narrator's inability to eat eventually leads to her collapse and recovery and with it her novel solution to the cherry problem. Thus life goes on and it is all cherry pie! 

At the Creative Writing Group I attend we are always saying "forget the last line" as folk often overwrite it, but here the best  line of the story is undoubtedly its final one "Real cherries may not have had fat, but we're drifting curled un space, playing fugues on memories of Earth" Lovely.

Shoart Story Review: Different People by Timothy Mudie

Different People by Timothy Mudie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I listened to this on the LeVar Burton Reads Podcast https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Cl7..., and the originalstory is available online on LightSpeed Magazine https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...

 
This was the first piece I'd read by Timothy Mudie and was pleasantly surpised. It is a well constructed, well written storyline which flows along well. It is about the issues surrounding a relationship between a man and a woman who was his wife in another universe, becomes his wife in this one, and the person who is this wife in his universe. Actually it is a deft way of showing the questions never asked in relationships which might have made the difference to us understanding each other better, of considering how one's life could have been different and what it might be like to meet one's doppelgänger. 

Good story, worth a read/listen.

Short Story Review: Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian

Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this and listened to the author's own narration in The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20... . 

First, I'm cautious of an author reading their own works as when they are bad they are awful. Not so here, Roupenian 's voice has clarity of articulation and she reads at what for me is a good speed. 

Second, I came across this after seeing an article somewhere about how this story caused such a rumpus and went 'viral' on the internet. "Roupenian’s portrayal of an encounter between a young woman called Margot and an older man called Robert rode the wave of the #MeToo movement, and as a result readers often seem to use the work as a vessel for their own projections. The story provoked widespread anger among some men for its negative depiction of Robert, the man who shows his true colours at the end of the story, and whose wounded reaction to Margot’s rejection resonated with many women" ( The Cat Person debate shows how fiction writers use real life does matter by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, The Guardian 9 Jul 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...) 

 
I think we can all relate to the everydayness of the girl meets boy storyline, the stumbling and fumbling of first dates. But SPOILER ALERT as anyone who has read the interent discussion about this story or the story itself will know the innocence of the first part of the story slowly becomes diffused with seeds of revulsion, a meancing undercurrent which then wells up into Margot thinking "This is the worse decision I have ever made". Then Margot has to go through the whole 'breakup text' thing. Her friends do rally round her when he appears in the bar and usher her away. But then his texts take on a new, cruder, abusive, direction. 

This is where Roupenian chooses to end her short story. For me the ending worked, because to continue on would have necessitated the story becoming a different story, one where the abusive had to have a result, an ending, perhaps even the murder joked at in the story. Instead this reader at least is optimistic that Margot can 'escape' Robert by blocking him, having good friends, and by doing what the author did at the end of her story by not continuing the text exchange.

That is me the optimist talking, because as we all know things do not always work out that way. Moreover what this story should be reminding us is that everyone has the right to change their mind, even when they had previous said 'yes' and both men and women, girls and boys need to learn how to handle that situation and how to conduct themselves in a respectful manner.

Short Story Review: Parsnips in Love by Porochista Khapour

Parsnips in Love by Porochista Khakpour
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A tender portrayal of love through the ages in all its forms. You'll never look at 'Wonky veg' without recally this short story in the fable style. How Art's expression of the beauty of form, of shape , of the work of the sculpturer Nature brings out the emotions, the love in all of us.

Short Story Review: 2043...A Merman I Should Turn to Be by Nisi Shawl

2043...A Merman I Should Turn to Be by Nisi Shawl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Book 3 of the Amazon Black Stars series of short speculative fiction stories. Not my favourite of the 4 that I have read so far. I liked the way it created an underwater city to which escaping landers were fleeing, paying for time limited, transit corridor opening licenses through hostile surrounding territory - a bit like a cross between the "40 acres and a mule"  reparations promise to freed slaves and the Underground Railroad. On the other hand I felt it rushed in some parts, the premis requiring a longer piece to do it justice.

Short Story Review: These Alien Skies by C.T. Rwizi

These Alien Skies by C.T. Rwizi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So many layers packed into a short story! These Alien Skies is Book 4 in the Amazon Series Black Stars.Msizi and Tariro are copiloting a starship through the first ever wormhole when it explodes leaving them with no way home. The injured Msizi is aided back to health by the inhabitants of an alien planet, migrants themselves and alien original residents. The story has themes of love and loss, survival, history, colonisation and diaspora, alien tech and communication issues. I liked the way the writer used the colonisation of Africa by Europeans in the protagonist and migrants own histories, his appropriate use of real African languages, Swahili and Dholuo in the story, although with today's onscreen translation it was a bit strange to have their words written in English. Neat ending bring all three groups together.

Short Story Review: Bullet in the Brain By Tobias Wolff

Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is the pivots in this short story which are superbly crafted to great effect, ratcheting the reader like a cooker dial.
(available for listening on Audible Plus and for reading in the collection The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction ed Larry Dark)

Short Story ChapBook Review: Friendship For Grown-Ups by Nao-Cola Yamazaki, translated by Polly Barton

Friendship For Grown-Ups by Nao-Cola Yamazaki
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my first read from this series of chapbooks beautifull produced by a collaboration between University of East Anglia (famous for its writing MA) , Writers' Centre Norwich, and Norwich University of the Arts - see https://www.strangers.press/keshiki

Nao-Cola Yamazaki was not a familiar writer to me, her 3 stories in this chapbook are all translated by Polly Barton, see https://www.pollybarton.net , who is the translator of a few Japanese women writers that are on my to be read list.

The 3 three linked stories total 45 pages and are bound in an 'arty' cover somewhat reminiscent of the 70s and are introduced with a Foreward written by surreal short story writer Aimee Bender.

The first story, entitled "A Genealogy", is a downright 'weird' meditation on evolution and the genealogical lineage to the character of Kandagawa.

In the second story, entitled "The Untouchable apartment" we again meet Kandagawa whose somewhat dream like state is interrupted by a phone call from her previous boyfriend, Mano. They end up going to see their old apartment which now no longer exists, just like their relationship. They spend the day together but Kandagawa realises she is no longer the girl she was when they were together four years ago - not quite Jesse and Celine or Before Sunrise / Before Midnight.

"Lose your Private Life" , the third story is about a young women Terumi Yano, writing under a pseudonym of Waterumi Yano, as she struggles to come with what this means for her identity as she becomes more well known as a writer, how new people she meets will only know Waterumi and never again know the Teruni that her university friends Mano and Kandagawa know.

These weren't stories that 'blew me away' but at points did intrigue me. I thought about whether there was an autobiographical element to the final one or whether this was a clever slight of words illusion on the part of the author for example when she had Waterumi's book be entitled "Friendship for Grown-ups"

Short Story Review: The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen

The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Excellent. It seems so modern in its style even thought the setting is clearly just post war. I loved the build up, everything is very unlike a horror or a ghost story, then author drips in some odd aspects, the letter but no caretaker, no stamp, and then some more sinister apsects with the flashback to Mrs Drover as a young woman sayng goodbye to a soldier going off to war. He is most definitely cold and there is an abusive, controlling feel to his words, which makes the reader feel quite uneasy.

Then Bowen brings the reader back to the Drover house as Mrs Drover searches for the things she has come back to their London home for . The author drops in some well chosen words and phrases which set the tone for Mrs Drover's increasing panic - 'the letter writer sent her only a threat' and 'just at this crisis the letter writer had, knowingly, struck', a moment of respite comes when 'Six has struck', then more tension as Mrs Drover makes up the parcels in a 'fumbling-decisive way' - that contradicory juxtaposition of fumbling and decisive is so good - as she recalls 'He was never kind to me', 'I was not myself' and then the 'draft that travelled up to her face' reminiscent of the creepiness of cobwebs on your skin......'down there a door or window was being opened by someone who chose this moment to leave the house.'

Then it all comes together - 'the clock struck seven' ' the taxi had turned before she....recollected that she had not "said where"', the breaking to a stop, being flung against the glass and 'remained for an eternity eye to eye' with all the unsaid clarity that their goodbye under the tree had lacked - and then the scream.

Such powerful, well crafted writing. A masterclass in short story telling in my opinion. Very impressed. Great choice.

Review: On the Lonely Shore

  On the Lonely Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This short story is available at Uncanny Magazine, March 2019 and on audio at LeVar Burton Reads, September 2021

Delicately done fantasy tale of bitter sweet love.

Short Story Review: Anabasis by Amal El-Mohtar

Anabasis by Amal El-Mohtar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this as part of the collection Nevertheless, She Persisted: Flash Fiction Project .
This story can be found online. 

First, I thought I had better check what "anabasis" meant - "Anabasis (from Greek ana = "upward", bainein = "to step or march") is an expedition from a coastline up into the interior of a country" according to Wikipedia.

Upon starting to read this I was completely entranced by an early section which I found rivetingly poetic -

"My real mouth is full of sharp teeth and a sharper tongue, three languages coiled like snakes in my throat, scaly and silent. My real mouth is an armoury of words forged in the furnace of my chest, hot as a spitted sun. My real mouth is a storm, and my voice is thunder.
To pass among you I wear a different mouth: full lips unparted, always smiling. I paint it pretty colours. It speaks only when spoken to, softly. To pass among you, it tells you stories: I am sweetness. I am sunshine. I am here to hold your hand through the horror of my name. My mouth is a coin, and I spend it. "

According to the publishers , the story was inspired by a 2017 news story about the trecherous border crossing in the snow into Manitoba for refugees seeking Canada which reports that "A two-year-old member of a large group of refugees who walked into Manitoba from Minnesota ..told his mom he wanted to die instead of finish the walk". Heartbreaking.

El-Moktar's writing is stunning, she uses the Sumarian poem, Inanna's Descent into the Underworld to contrast with the mother's walk across the snow "Borders are shape-shifters,too: they change what goes through them. Time was, the only border worth crossing was into the underworld, to fetch back a lover's life" That writer is Canadian is extremely relevant to this piece - her passport, her struggle to remain Canadian in light of the border guard eyeing her as Arab, as Muslim. Her empathy with the predicament of those crossing

"If I could take each of my words and lay them in the snow at her feet. If I could.. eat this distance between us. If I could devour this border, if I could tell it to smile while I broke its teeth, if I could unsheathe the sword of my mouth and strike it down, if I could thread the needle of my mouth and stitch good shoes for her baby, if I could cut a path into this country with the sharpness of my tongue..." 

Unbelievably poignant.

I am very impressed by this piece, my mouth, my words fails to convey how much. 5 stars are not enough.



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