Random reviews and rambling

Mentioned herein:
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
The End, Salvatore Scibona
The Fake Nazi, Aimee Bender

Ploughshares Magazine

It's no secret I've been reading a lot of short stories lately. Partly, my attention span has been stunted by work, and soon, school. More on that later. It also seems like every novel I've picked up lately has been awful. I tried Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but the prose was horrid, and the pacing terrible, and the political posturing shallow. I'd heard you have to get through the first 50 pages for it to pick up, so I remained patient. After 75 pages people kept telling me you had to get through the first 100. I read to page 110, and when someone told me it didn't really pick up till page 150, I gave up. I didn't want to get to the end before deciding I was enjoying the book.

I've since picked up Salvatore Scibona's The End, based on the promise of his short story in a recent New Yorker. And it's okay, but it's a very fractured thing. It follows the lives of Italian immigrants in Ohio in the first half of the 20th century. The first section was about a baker who one day oversleeps, then drives out to New York to bring back his estranged family. He gets sidetracked to Niagra Falls, where he has an ice cream, then the narrative leaves him there while it switches to a different woman in the same neighborhood with no immediately obvious connection to the baker. The book flap copy indicates they're all linked by some terrible secret, but 100 pages in, I still have no idea what it is. I like the book and hope to finish it, but like Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I'm not sure I'm invested in the story, or even why I should be. There's no urgency for me to discover what happens next.

So I've turned back to the short story, where the investment is smaller and the pay-offs just as satisfying. I picked up the recent issue of Ploughshares, the literary journal of Emerson University. For those of you who don't know, much of American short fiction is published by University sponsored small journals. It's a measure of American literature's health, really, that artsitic fiction has become subsided by the education industry, in effect they're publishing the art and writers they'll be writing critical essays on in the future. Sounds like narcissistic inbreeding, but there you have it.

In this issue of Ploughshares is Aimee Bender's new story, The Fake Nazi. I cringed at the title, but dove in, and was pleasantly surprised. It's about a man in Germany who walks into the police station and confesses to holocaust atrocities. But he's wrong - he's too young, for one thing. They find his apartment filled with Nazi movies and novels and newspaper articles - he's apparently been living with guilt for crimes he never committed. Eventually, his life and death haunt a secretary in the legal system where he had periodically tried to surrender himself. She investigates his life, and discovers a past lover, then his brother, and all the secrets to who he was, and how he fit in society.

Here's the kicker: She does all in 13 pages. It's a testament to the power of the short story, and of Aimee Bender's skill, that she can do this, while Stieg Larson had to fumble through 100 pages before I gave up on him, and Salvatore Scibona hid all the meat of his book in dark, intellectual wrappings and Faulknerian posturing. I think it's sad that writers these days are ashamed of just telling stories. You know, something happened, so I did this, and then this happened. It's hard, Lord don't I know it. It's easier to be a stylist than a storyteller, maybe, or it's too hard to resist the urge to be clever and intellectual.

So anyway. I'm not sure where I'm going with this blog, or my reading, and may take a break. Then again I may not. Other things are coming at me, or rather, I'm going towards other things. So, keep checking in and stay in touch.