Category: Story Club

Story club seems to be jinxed! First I wanted it (rather ambitiously I admit) to be a weekly affair, then a fortnightly before settling for a monthly event. And then I went and missed last month’s book club. And I was all set to miss this month’s as well.

But then I didn’t want the ‘jinx’ have the last laugh. So here I am with this month’s short story – Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer.

Nadine Gordimer, a South African writer and political activist, started writing at the age of nine, and her stories began appearing in magazines when she was 15. She was shocked by the condition of the black community and spoke out strongly against the apartheid system existing in her country. Apparently, after being released from prison in 1990, she was one the first persons that Nelson Mandela met. Many of her books were banned in her home country and she spent many years outside her country in self-imposed exile. In 1991, at 67 years of age, she became South Africa’s first Nobel Prize winner for Literature.

I had a brief encounter with the writings of Nadine Gordimer around this time, or perhaps a bit earlier. Seeing my interest in books, someone had gifted me Nadine Gordimer’s Six Feet of the Country. Being a compulsive reader, I had read the book of course (at least I think so) but somehow I didn’t quite take to it. Perhaps I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate it or I tried to give it the usual casual reading that I was used to giving the crime thrillers and suspense novels I was more into those days. But what is truly ironic is that today’s story – Country Lovers – is one of the 7 stories of that very book.

I feel like kicking myself. To have a priceless gem somewhere around the house and to have no clue – how callous (and ignoramus) can one be? How many more such priceless gems have I missed? And here I always thought I was bright, perhaps even clever – just like Rabbit.

“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Oh well…I think I prefer this one 😉

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents –Ezra Pound

Moving on to the story – and if you haven’t read the story yet, perhaps you should do so now (link is given above) before scrolling down for there are spoilers ahead.

Country Lovers is an interracial (hence forbidden) love story of childhood friends turned sweethearts – Thebedi, the black girl and Paulus the white farmer’s son. There is almost a bland detached matter-of-fact narration of the events as they unfold. The children play together and become close friends. Defying norms, he continues to visit her while home from his boarding school and one cannot help but feel the affection and connection they both share. He brings her gifts as does she:

They seek each other out.

One almost feels that things will be different for this couple, that they would have a future – together.

But then as is wont to be, one thing led to another and she becomes pregnant. For a modern day reader this is where the story diverges and takes off on a different path. Logically speaking she should have then informed Paulus. But she doesn’t. And neither does she tell him of her impending marriage to Njabulo. She even gets married and delivers a baby girl within two months of her marriage. Even that is acceptable as is the fact that the child is unmistakably white. Njabulo provides for Thebedi’s child as much as is possible with his income.

Things could have carried on so but for word reaching Paulus’ ears about Thebedi’s child. He lands up to investigate for himself. And there is no denying – she is his child.

Grimace of tears and anger – overwhelmed at seeing his daughter? Or perhaps cursing his fate that he is unable to publicly acknowledge his beloved and daughter? Hey wait a minute…and self-pity? Like really? The gentle, laid back placid pace of the story takes a sudden turn and one is quite unprepared for it. At least I was.

Instead of killing himself, he killed his baby…

No! That couldn’t be possible. And why take such a drastic step? Nobody had pointed fingers at him – not Thebedi, not her husband, not the community people. Yet he killed his baby. Why?Just to save his reputation? Unbelievable.

Yet all too true. In many places, even today.

In a show of justice, Paulus is arrested but let off for lack of evidence and unreliability of Thebedi as a witness. Njabulo is commended for his fortitude and forbearance.

Through her writing Gordimer has vividly recorded life in a controversial country. I did read some of the analysis of the story that are available on the net. Most, if not all, make a note of female exploitation highlighted in the story.

To be honest, I found Njabulo’s situation to be equally tragic and pathetic. As was that of the rest of the community. Their acceptance of the situation as if it was par for the course is almost eerie and unbelievable. It only indicates how common such events were, that it did not even deserve a protest.

Njabulo comes out as a strong principled character that is rare and difficult to find. Rather than make the child, who is not at fault or even Thebedi suffer, Njabulo goes about making his family as comfortable was possible for him. An uncommon man indeed.

I cannot help but be a bit cynical about Thebedi – she is the dark enigmatic one. Her actions are quite unfathomable. She is happy to follow Paulus’ lead but she is content to marry Njabulo. She accuses Paulus of killing her daughter but retracts it a year later (perhaps she was pressurized into doing so) all the while wearing the earrings that Paulus had gifted her.I did find this significant – did the author wish to make a point about Thebedi’s duality or stress that she was too poor to buy another pair of earrings? I wonder, if before marrying Njabulo, did she tell him about Paulus, or her pregnancy – if the baby was born 2 months after marriage, he could have hardly not known about it?

I wish I could have known more about Njabulo, his feelings, reactions and thoughts as the events unfolded and played out for him.

For me, Country Lovers is not about Paulus and Thebedi. It is about Njabulo and his unwavering and steadfast support for Thebedi. If that is not love what is?

Thanks for reading– don’t forget to leave your comments and suggestions.

If anyone is interested or motivated enough to join the Story Club – most welcome! Just create a pingback to this post so that we can hop over for a read.

Rules are simple:

1. Advance announcement of name of short story, one that is freely available on the net.

2. Story maybe a folktale or in the local language. But an English translation should be freely available on the net. Or participant could post the translated version along with his or her review.

3. Bloggers should post on their blog while non-bloggers may email me – mysilverstreaks@gmail.com

4. The basic idea is to gain from each others rich heritage of literature and be able to understand a little bit more than before.

5. And of course have fun!

You can find the previous Story Club posts here and here

A selection of Nadine Gordimer quotes

Truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country

Looking forward to a lively interaction, comments, critiques, suggestions, opinions…

Hello! How’s the week been? Looking forward to the weekend I guess. Some armchair time, traveling the world through blogs and stories, one hopes.

Well anyway, it’s time for the Story Club. If you remember, Story Club #1 began on the 15^th of June. I wanted it to be a weekly affair but a lukewarm response forced me to make it a monthly event – for now 😉

YP of In the zone has kindly offered to host this month’s Story Club. She has chosen Stephen Crane’s short story ‘The Open Boat’. I would advise you to read the story before rushing off to read YP’s review – she’s has a neat hand and a cool worldview. She is also participating in the summer A to Z challenge and it is interesting how she has woven the Story Club into it!

From my side, just a short background on the author and the story – as gleaned from the web. The story published in 1897, is based on Crane’s experience of surviving a shipwreck. Crane was stranded at sea for thirty hours. His account titled “Stephen Crane’s Own Story” was first published a few days after his rescue. But this focused primarily on the sinking of the Commodore, and the ensuing chaos. Crane subsequently adapted and rewrote his experience as a short story The Open Boat. This was later published as part of the book The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure in the US. The open boat is the most feted of all of Crane’s work. Indeed the stark reality and helplessness of the situation is vivid and hard hitting. Unfortunately, Crane contracted tuberculosis and died when he was just 28 years old. Tragically, his premature death brought him greater recognition, fame and acclaim.

Thanks for reading and now let’s move to the real review – don’t forget to leave your comments and suggestions.

If anyone is interested or motivated enough to join the Story Club – most welcome! Just create a pingback to this post so that we can hop over for a read.

Rules are simple:

• Advance announcement of name of short story, which is freely available on the net.
• Story maybe a folktale or in the local language. But an English translation should be freely available on the net. Or participant could post the translated version along with his or her review.

• Bloggers should post on their blog while non-bloggers can email me – mysilverstreaks@gmail.com
• The basic idea is to gain from each others rich heritage of literature and be able to understand a little bit more than before.
• And of course have fun!

   

  Suggestions are welcome.

Come on let’s go – Click here!

Hello everyone! How’s the week going so far? Hang in there, half done anyway 🙂 If you remember I threatened promised to begin the Story Club today. Until yesterday, the going was slow. But now Story Club is officially on with a slight change. Instead of a weekly event, it will be a fortnightly activity – 1^st and 15^th of every month. I shall take the first step today and Yvette will do The Open Boat by Stephen Crane on the 15^th of July. If anyone is interested in doing one on the 1^st of July please do let me know. Otherwise I will take Yvette’s advice and go for a monthly event.

All set? Great – let’s begin!

For today I have chosen a story by Lorrie Moore, a contemporary American award-winning writer known for her brilliant, funny and yet poignant short stories. I was spoiled for choice but I finally settled on How to become a writer, or Have you earned this cliché from the book “Self-help.” I do apologize for not announcing the name of the story earlier but to tell the truth I wasn’t quite sure if this was happening or not. Besides, this is not a story – story but more of an insight into the life of an aspiring writer.

 How to become a writer is a vastly entertaining read but more so if you are not a writer. Yet, it’s the writer who needs to read it the most. As the title suggests, this is a guide about how to become a writer or more like what you should be prepared to face in case you want to take up writing, particularly as a full time job.

I would go so far as to suggest any aspiring writer to read this piece and use it as a sort of an acid test. If you feel more of a sinking heart than a desire to burst out laughing – writing as a full time job is probably not for you.

Through Francie, our guide to the world of writing, Lorrie leaves the aspiring writer no scope for any sort of delusions or hallucinations regarding the ‘glamorous’ life of a writer – with dollops of cracking humor.

This is how she begins:

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/ missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age – say, 14. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at 15 you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She’ll look briefly at your writing then back up at you with a face blank as a doughnut. She’ll say: ”How about emptying the dishwasher?” Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Accidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters.

This kind of sets the tone for the piece – witty, funny and hard-hitting. The aspiring writer with the slightest bit of delusions about the grandeur of his or her work (and future) is in for a huge shock. She goes on to say:

Experiment with fiction. Here you don’t have to count syllables.

In creative writing seminars over the next two years, everyone continues to smoke cigarettes and ask the same things: ”But does it work?” ”Why should we care about this character?” ”Have you earned this cliche?” These seem like important questions.

On days when it is your turn, you look at the class hopefully as they scour your mimeographs for a plot. They look back up at you, drag deeply and then smile in a sweet sort of way.

The seminar doesn’t like this one either. You suspect they are beginning to feel sorry for you. They say: ”You have to think about what is happening. Where is the story here?”

There is simply no let up – she continues unrelenting:

Thank god you are taking other courses. You can find sanctuary in 19th-century ontological snags and invertebrate courting rituals [….]Be glad you know these things. Be glad you are not just a writer. Apply to law school.

Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin.

Lorrie goes deep into the life of a writer and catches it by the heart. She then proceeds to unveil the mystique behind the writer’s life, handing out punch after punch – her biting humor the only respite.  The entire subtext of the piece underlines the hard work, patience, grit, persistence and unflagging unwavering commitment that a writer must have. That rejection, discouragement and frustration are par for the course.  In the entire piece there is only one bit from where aspiring writers can draw some hope:

You spend too much time slouched and demoralized. Your boyfriend suggests bicycling. Your roommate suggests a new boyfriend. You are said to be self-mutilating and losing weight, but you continue writing. The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius. Understand what you must do. Switch majors. The kids in your nursery project will be disappointed, but you have a calling, an urge, a delusion, an unfortunate habit. You have, as your mother would say, fallen in with a bad crowd.

Lorrie Moore not only has a remarkable control over the language but a neat turn of phrase which I can only marvel at. Here are a few gems and my personal favorites from her other works:

Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.” ― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.” ― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

 Her voice was husky, vibrating, slightly flat, coming in just under each note like a saucer under a cup.” ― Lorrie Moore, Birds of America

Reading her work makes me wonder about mine. Perhaps I should get back to doing what I have been trained to do. But then I wasn’t doing particularly brilliantly there either. So it’s a toss up between doing something that I am supposed to know and well, like doing or, do something I don’t know the basics of but yet feel almost obsessively compulsively drawn towards. In fact, it’s almost like a disease. Interestingly, Francie described writing as ‘a lot like having polio.’

In that case, once infected with the writer virus, one is doomed for life – awesome isn’t it?

Coming back to Lorrie, in an interview she was asked, “What kind of eye do you cast on your earlier work?”

Her response is liberating to say the least.

“I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write. My first two books, I know, are full of energy, and there are sentences I still like here and there, but mostly they are chock-full of mistakes of judgment and taste and sensibility. I did not have the skill to take on some of the material I took on, even when the material was fairly stock or meager. But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.”

No doubt she is being modest and self-deprecating but it is heartening to know and hold on to the thought – it happens to all of us, no matter how good or bad one is. So without any further debate, I shall continue to write (hey! I saw those eyes roll) – for writing is something I not only want to do, but need to do, have to do, regardless. With the hope and prayer that I get better at this elusive craft.

Anyway got to rush, I have to, simply have, to read Self-help now!

Thank you for reading and don’t forget to leave me your notes, suggestions and thoughts. If anyone has another perspective to share on this story, please put up a post on your blog with a pingback here so that we can all hop over for a read.

Is anyone willing to host a Story Club on the 1^st of July (or any other date)? Do let me know.

Rules are simple – advance announcement of story name ((I already apologized!) and date. Bloggers should post on their blog while non-bloggers can email me – mysilverstreaks@gmail.com

Quote of the day: “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” ― Lorrie Moore

Readers of Moonshine, here’s Chapter 67 and Calvin :- Poor Susie :(  Click here for more Short Stories or here for more information About the Blog

 

Gotcha! You think I am thinking about Thinking…? But actually it’s about something completely different.

I have been thinking if anybody would be interested in a Story Club? Just think about it for a moment. I mean we all love stories right and there are probably a gazillion stories out there in the world, which we will never read or even get to know about. How sad is that? Suppose somebody brought a special story to your notice, explained its nuances, shades, metaphors, techniques wouldnt that be awesome?

So I wondered about floating a story club – a short story club if you like where each week one story could be read, discussed, analyzed – wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t you like to be part of such a club?

So, if there are any takers, this is how it would function (I told you I have been thinking).

Interested participants would:

1. Mention the name of the chosen story  and the date (any Wednesday) of posting (beginning 15^th June) in the reply box below.

2. On the designated date, put up a post (on his or her blog) highlighting the uniqueness, underlying theme, message or anything else that may be of interest.

3. Ping back the URL here so that we can all hop over to read, chat, interact and broaden our horizons.

4. The participant should announce at least a week in advance the name of the story and preferably one that is freely available online to enable maximum participation.

5. Others may also put up posts on their blogs pertaining to the same story (with a ping back here to let us join the party)

6. In case the story is not available online please provide a brief synopsis before writing about it.

7. Interested non-bloggers (ahaa I got my eye on you) can mention the name of story and date and mail me the post. Full credit is assured.

8. And finally, just in case there are no takers, I will start reading the short stories on my own.

So what do you think? Suggestions, questions and comments are welcome – in fact eagerly awaited. I hope you wont disappoint me (besides I am holding my breath)…

 

For the readers of Moonshine, here’s Chapter 63. Before you rush off, have a look at Calvin and don't forget to let me know what you think - "I am in" would also be great

Click here for more Short Stories or here for more information About the Blog