Elliot's Reading Week of 6-13-21: Two long stories an a Yehoshua novel

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 6/13/21

Stephen Crane’s long short story (oxymoron?) The Blue Hotel can’t quite stand up to his nail-biting, mysterious Open Boat but it’s a fine, engaging narrative that would do any writer proud; Crane is rarely taught or read these days, but he seems today to me at least a writer worth taking another look at. Blue Hotel is a Western (his writing shows the range of his journalistic experience), set (mostly) in the eponymous hotel on the Nebraska frontier in the early 20th century - a small town at a railroad junction. The story takes place on the night of a blizzard and focuses on three new overnight travelers checked into the hotel. It quickly becomes apparent that one of the men, the Swede as he’s known, suffers from paranoid delusions; he suspects that someone’s going to kill him - and he’s a scary presence to say the least in this tiny, out-of-the-way setting. The story culminates in a series of fights - no spoilers here - and though it wraps in the style of its era, with a neat conclusion and a twist of fate (unlike, say, the more fashionable and advanced open endings of Joyce and Hemingway that have come to dominate English-language short stories over the past 100 years) that not all will find satisfactory - too many loose ends and red herrings for my taste - the story evokes well its time and place and the interactions of a a group of men whose equilibrium has toppled and whose lives are in danger. 

Isak Dinesen’s famously weird story Sorrow-Acre (ca. 1940?), set sometime in the 19th century (I think…?) in ID’s native Denmark, is a story that shows the horrors of the false ideology of the class relationships in what amounts to a medieval, feudal, agrarian society. In essence a young man, Adam (a little heavy-handed there) return home to his family estate in Denmark (he’d been in England as part of the Danish delegation), in part to  maintain a relationship w/ his uncle whose son and projected heir has died after a lifelong health struggle. The uncle had arranged a marriage for the son - and now, surprise! - he takes the son’s place and marries the 20-year-old in hopes that she will provide the son and heir he requires. We certainly suspect, following the pattern of many such romances, that Adam will break up this loveless marriage and carry off the bride and the estate - but no, that’s not what happens. The uncle is about to punish a young man from among his many peasant tenants whom he suspects of arson; the man’s mother pleads for mercy, and the uncle sets up a condition: If she can harvest an entire acre of his corn in one day, before sundown, he will pardon the son - a task that all believe be impossible. She embarks, never the less, in what amounts to public torture; Adam intervenes, pleading w/ his uncle to go easy, but to no avail. So now we expect another ending - that Adam will take over by force, or that the peasants will do so, or someone at least will step forward and end this woman’s public torture. But - no - the uncle remains rigid, the peasants remain passive, and Adam is frozen; at the end, he declares that he’s going to America. Well, thanks for this vote of confidence in the U.S., and, yes, this story is powerful and sad - sorrowful, I almost wrote - but I think it’s terrible that the peasant farmers are so submissive and that Adam just turns his back on the suffering as if nothing can change, as if he can do nothing to stop this travesty, as if the horrible uncle has the right to determine the life and death of those who work his land. ID’s sympathies are in the right place, but her working of this material will, or should, make you angry. 

A.B. Yehoshua is one of several excellent writers living and working Israel today; he’s had some success in the U.S., but he deserves more - and sad to say despite his sympathetic portrayal of all cultures living today in Israel he will never win a Nobel Prize or any significant international literary award because of current attitudes toward the State of Israel. I should and will read more of his work, but will note that I was really impressed by 2 of his novels, Mr. Mani and Open Heart, and now have read a 3rd, A Woman in Jerusalem (2004) and will add it to the list. This novel, like his Open Heart in particular, involves a man on a quest or a mission, which ABY follows closely as the tales widens and then snaps shut. In this novel, we follow closely the efforts of an H.R. director in a commercial bakery (note that none of the characters in this novel is named; all are identified by their role in the story or their profession, e.g., the owner, the secretary, the woman … ) who is informed that a woman killed in a recent suicide bombing and who’d gone for some time as unidentified was in fact an employee of the bakery; a tabloid paper is planning to publish an “expose” showing that the bakery has been indifferent to the fate of one of its low-stature employees. The owner - a wealthy and seemingly generous man - assigned the hr manager to learn about the woman and ensure that she receives proper burial, which leads to an odyssey of a journey with the woman’s body toward burial in her native land (a former Soviet state, unnamed). This novel unwinds in the tradition of “burial” novels - obviously As I Lay Dying comes to mind; there also was a more recent novel about a family in Syria transporting the patriarch’s body across the war-torn land - looking it up right now: Death Is Hard Work, by Khaled Khalifa (2016). ABY’s take on this mini-genre is beautifully written, mysterious at times (various dream sequences and “voices” of a witnessing chorus) and surprising in its good will and generosity of spirit - about which whether that’s realistic at all others will have to decide; I have no idea. As a final note: It’s fun in reading this novel, set in the present in its day and now 17 years old, to note how much our technology has evolved: Among other innovations now passee note in particular the miracle of satellite phones that allow you to talk - with a crystal-clear signal! - with anyone on Earth, or at least in your area code. How far we’ve come.