Should you require an antidote to all hearts, flowers, champagne and chocolates doing the rounds right now, you may wish to pick up the literary equivalent of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”.
But where to start? I’m not a seasoned short-story reader. It’s something I am working on. However, I am not yet able to read short story anthologies from cover to cover. Like a box of chocolates, I prefer to dip in and out but it’s always good to start with my favourite coffee cream.
Coincidentally that would be story 1. Here We Are by Dorothy Parker, sharp-eyed female wit and infamous ascerbic tongue. A newly-married couple are travelling to their honeymoon destination. The bridegroom hasn’t had time to learn the tact and diplomacy necessary to a smooth relationship and the bride is obviously on edge at the thought of well, you know what. When asked by his wife if he likes her hat he replies:
“I know this is the new style and everything like that, and it’s probably great. I don’t know anything about things like that. Only I like the kind of hat like that blue hat you had. Gee, I liked that hat.”
“Oh really?” she said. “Well, that’s nice. That’s lovely. … The first thing you say to your wife is you think she has terrible taste in hats.”
Nerves, or a harbinger of the unhappiness to come?
Discovering a difference in taste lies at the centre of the second story, Jumphra Lahiri’s This Blessed House in which a Hindu couple discover a treasure trove of Christian kitsch in their new home. Unaccountably the wife develops a fondness for it and displays it prominently. The husband with a penchant for understated minimalism is naturally irritated. Married only for two months, it is the initial step in his realisation that their shared “adolescent but still persistent fondness for Wodehouse novels and their dislike for the sitar” may not be enough.
At this point I decided to sample a story from each of the three other sections – randomly selecting an author whose work I had never yet read. Joyce Carol Oates’s The Quarrel shows how unexpected disputes can spring up between long established couples – in this case the trigger is the difference in the two descriptions of a would-be mugger. Fortunately this quarrel is not terminal but the scars take quite some time to heal.
In Virginia Woolf’s Lapin and Lapinova finding a pet-name for her husband is the key to a bride’s coming to terms with life married to a man whom she does not find entirely sympathetic. Woolf’s writing surprisingly accessible, finely nuanced as is to be expected from the pen of such a literary giant. Pitch perfect but for a completely unnecessary final sentence, which is at odds with the tone and the subtlety of the rest. Puzzling. This story is available on online and your thoughts would be welcome.
The final story in this collection from Grace Paley, a writer lavishly praised by the likes of Dovegreyreader and Kirsty of Other Stories. And I can see why on the strength of the two-page story Wants in which a woman meets her ex-husband, who is consumed by bitterness at the wasted years of his marriage to a woman who, in his eyes, wanted nothing. Her response to this accusation:
He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.
How’s that for original and intriguing …. and book-buying-embargo-busting. It took only 5 minutes to boot up and perform the necessary buy-The-Collected-Stories-of-Grace-Paley with 1-click action.
At which point, the bell rings on round one. Round two, in which I take on the combined mightiness of the translated authors, Chekhov, Ginzburg, Jansson, Platonov and Colette, to follow.
Lizzy's Literary Life (Volume One) 
Love that cover!
*grin*
My TSS post is up!
I heard of this and loved the premise for the collection–though I thought it might not be the best thing to get my boyfriend for Valentine’s Day, even as a joke. You just never know. I’m especially interested now that I hear there’s a Natalia Ginzburg story in there. I haven’t read this one, but I love her, and she’s perfect for an anthology like this.
Your description of “the Quarrel” reminds me of a couple that I heard of that got divorced over a Monopoly game. Yikes!
This looks like a good collection and a good place to start reading short stories. I love Dorothy Parker. She should be much more widely read today than she is. I just bought a collection of Grace Paley stories. I’ve never read her before but only hear good things.
Thanks for stopping by Short Story Sunday.
Who would have ever dreamed of those contents behind that regrettable cover? They look like children (which perhaps is the point)! Thanks to your review though, I will definitely check this out.
The final Woolf line you mention has always struck me as very funny because it is so unexpected, appearing to have been written by someone else entirely but reflecting the fragile state of the institution.
Great post!
The last line from “Lapin and Lapinova” is probably the most important of them all. Rosalinda is not only trying to come to terms with her marriage, in fact, she is trying to escape from all sense of reality. The woman suffers from extreme anxiety and uses the fantasy world that she created with her husband to help her escape. In the end she begins to go crazy because she has lost the ability to cope with herself and she becomes engulfed in her own terrifying thoughts. She tells Ernest that she has lost Lapinova (meaning she has lost her escape tactic). She hopes that he will twitch his nose and snap her out of it. Instead, he disappoints her by saying “‘Poor Lapinova . . .’ ‘Caught in a trap’ . . . ‘killed'”.
“So that was the end of that marriage” –> meaning her fairytale is over. She can no longer escape from reality. The couple was no longer “in league together against the rest of the world”.