Short stories by two very different authors this week, with very different storylines, settings and characters, provoke the same sort of reaction -- a sense of remorse that the past is gone, that one has not remained anchored and the notion that there was a time when time passed much more slowly.
Scheherazade by Haruki Murakami, published in the October 13 of The New Yorker, is pure Murakami in that it could be all there is or one episode in a forthcoming novel. For now it is a short story, but Murakami said in an interview thattwo of his most acclaimed novels, Norwegian Wood and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, also started life that way. The story was published in Japan as part of the collection Men Without Women, with a title that came from Hemingway.
Although Murakami's stories in the latest collection, according to the interview, are centered on men without women (and shades of Richard Ford as well), Murakami does not come to mind when it comes to Hemingway's advice to "write hard and clear about what hurts". Murakami is more vague and indefinite than clear and hard, but he does write about what hurts as far as feelings are concerned.
In this story, there is a nurse who visits a man, Habara, confined to his living quarters. She brings him food, reading material, DVDs and sex. Why the man is confined is not part of the story, but there is an air of regret, of sadness, that he may end up being even more cut off before his journey is over. We don't know the real name of the nurse, but Habara calls her Scheherazade because she tells him part of a story every time she visits.
The stories may or may not be autobiographical. For example, she says she remembers being in the womb. She remembers a past life as a lamprey eel, waving in the current while attached to a rock on the bottom of the water, thinking lamprey eel thoughts and enjoying life for what it is. There is a feeling of peace.
That feeling of thoughtless peace is something she tries to recreate as a teenager with a crush on a boy. She breaks into his house and lays on his bed, taking a pencil and leaving a very personal item hidden in his room. Over time, both she and the reader realize the boy is the catalyst but not the object of her affection. It's that quiet time holding onto something, whether it's one of the boy's shirts or the rock on the bottom of the water, that she seeks.
I couldn't help but wonder whether seeking that peace is why she spends time with Habara after sex and whether she is trying to, and succeeds, in giving that as a gift to him.
Using a different style of storytelling, Elizabeth McCracken also chronicles loss in Something Amazing, the first story in her collection, Thunderstruck. She moves back and forth in time and among characters more abruptly, writing about the family of a girl who died, a five-year-old boy tormented by his nine-year-old brother and that older brother who makes a crucial error that harms him after doing a thoughtless, potentially harmful thing to that younger boy.
Just west of Boston, just north of the turnpike, the ghost of Missy Goodby sleeps curled up against the cyclone fence at the dead end of Winter Terrace, dressed in a pair of ectoplasmic dungarees. That thumping noise is a plastic Halloween pumpkin on one knee; that flash of light in the corner of a dark porch is the moon off the glasses she wore to correct her lazy eye. Late at night when you walk your dog and feel suddenly cold, and then unsure of yourself, and then loathed by the world, that's Missy Goodby ...
The story then relates the differences between what we remember of people who are gone and what they are really like, and of what people did and what we say they did. The unreliability of memory and of people is noted but is not made much of. That's just the way things are. That unreliability is something the reader can count on as the catalyst behind the actions characters take in the story.
Without revealing more of the story itself, there is something in the storytelling and the things that may or may not happen that remind me of two very different works, To Kill a Mockingbird and a short story by horror writer Peter Straub about a boy who can't stop when he finds himself in a position of power for a change.
These stories may seem complete downers to some. But to me they are fantastical attempts to honestly portray the reactions we have to experiences that change our lives, that wound us, that leave us wondering how else we are supposed to react. They are snippets in time that capture the moment in between the time that something major in our lives happens and the time when the consequences of that major event begin to unfold. Because they capture a moment in time, they also showcase how fast real life actually moves (even if that last meeting at work or forced family gathering you attended seemed to last forever).
They take me back to childhood when the sunlight was at its most intense just before dusk began. It's the gloaming. And seeing that sunlight through the huge spruce in my grandparents' front yard is an eternal moment that has never gone away, with the feeling that here is where I belong. There is always remorse now that so many years have passed and that is not where I am an anchored any longer. It's the same for the characters in these stories, especially Scheherazde and the transference of that feeling to Habara, anchored yet waving with the current.
Or, as is noted in McCracken's story:
Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.
Sometimes a character will try to recapture that which was lost or try to hold on to it in memory. The recapturing is what they seek and there is remorse both in that what they lost is gone and whatever they can recapture is done so fleetingly.
These authors, like the original Scheherazade, bring gifts. They can tell us about ourselves if we want to listen. Or, as Murakami writes:
Whatever the case, Scheherazade had a gift for telling stories that touched the heart. No matter what sort of story it was, she made it special. Her voice, her timing, her pacing were all flawless. She captured her listener's attention, tantalized him, drove him to ponder and speculate, and then, in the end, gave him precisely what he'd been seeking.
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