REFUSING TO CANNIBALIZE MY LIFE
story: “Man-eating Cats”
author: Haruki Murakami
year: 2006
where: in palestra
note: a reread, a favorite, a fantasy!
a line: “The wind was the wind at the edge of the world. An inescapable retro color filled the place. It made me feel as if I were being quietly swallowed up by an alien reality, something foreign and just out of reach, vague yet strangely gentle. And the shadow of that substance colored the faces, the eyes, the skin of the people gathered in the harbor.”
story: “Commerce and Residue”
author: Tim Fitts
year: 2017 (in Go Home and Cry for Yourselves)
where: mio ufficio
note: a great story for our age of cultural appropriation politics
a line: “Marcus slightly envied the fact that Pham had an automatic angle borne into her. She was part of the diaspora. Her father had spent time in re-education camps.”
story: “Saint Andrew’s Hotel”
author: Sara Majka
year: 2016
where: Greece
note: from Cities I’ve Never Lived In
a line: “Peter stayed in the hospital until he was twenty-one; nobody could find his parents, and the hospital had put him to use in the kitchen.”
story: “The Adventure of a Soldier”
author: Italo Calvino
year: 1984 (English translation)
where: Philadelphia train
note: Such great description of how time stretches in the moments of nearness to someone we desire.
a line: “This meeting of calves was precious, but it came at a price, a loss: in fact, the body’s weight was shifted and the reciprocal support of the hips no longer occurred with the same docile abandon.”
story: “The Lost Order”
author: Rivka Galchen
year: 2014
where: casa dolce casa
note: I can’t recall the stimulus for purchasing Galchen’s book, American Innovations, and this makes me sad. I hate forgetting. This story has a ring like Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing”…a ringing call. The main character also feels like a more morose and confused Lorrie Moore character.
a line: “I have not always–had not even long–been a daylight ghost, a layabout, a mal pensant, a vacancy, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed and someone who considered eating less a valid primary goal.”
