Hibakusha

Hibakusha are the surviving victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (including those not yet born but carried by pregnant women who survived the bombings). Hiroko Tanaka, the main character in Kamila Shamsie's novel Burnt Shadows is one such survivor. She lost her father and her German fiance in Nagasaki. When she has recovered from her own injuries and the war has ended, she sets out to find her fiance's half sister, Elizabeth, who is living in Delhi, married to James, an Englishman. Hiroko and Elizabeth become close friends. As the novel follows their relationship over the ensuing decades, we learn more about their spouses, children and even a grandchild. The two families become linked in evermore intricate and challenging ways. A pivotal part of the story involves the CIA. It is difficult for me to know how realistic and accurate that part of the story is.

The settings in the novel are many. In addition to Japan and India, the events take the reader to Istanbul, the newly established Pakistan, New York in the aftermath of 9/11 and Afghanistan. The author herself was born in Pakistan.

Shamsia has managed to link the bombing at Nagasaki with the aftermath of 9/11 in a very powerful way. In addition to being a good story, this novel raises some fundamental questions that we need to answer as we continue to face war and the nuclear threat. I think it is telling that I am still asking myself if the events of the last few chapters could have been otherwise. What would I have done in those same circumstances?

Watch a brief interview with Kamila Shamsie here.

Classics on TV

It's called Masterpiece Classic for a good reason. In the next few weeks my local public television station KQED will be broadcasting a series of productions of several of our Jane Austen favorites: Emma starting Jan 24; Northanger Abbey on Feb 14; and Persuasion on Feb 21. If you go to the website you can enter your email address to receive a reminder the day before each show. That's probably old news to many but it was new to me. The less I have to remember, the better. Public television stations in other areas may have similar schedules.

Try not to watch the show until you have read the book!

The Ships of Life

I have only recently become a fan of short stories because they satisfy a need when I am too distracted by life to concentrate on, or finish, a full length novel. And, I have noticed that collections of short stories are appearing more and more on lists of best books and favorite books for the year. One of the best and most prolific contemporary short story writers is the Canadian writer, Alice Munroe. I have just finished a selection of short stories that she published in 2001, “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories”. These are nine stories about people who are connected to each other but not always because they choose to be. The stories are mainly about women in small provincial towns in Canada in the 1960’s. Women who found life fleeing around them without the predictability they had counted on.

In the title story the author tells us about two petty teenage girls who attempt to play a cruel joke on a housekeeper approaching spinsterhood. But the joke is on the teenagers and they can’t understand how it happened. In “Family Furnishings" a young girl escapes her family to attend college in a city. There she encounters a family relative who reveals a secret that shocks the young woman and changes her history. The last story of the collection,“The Bear Came Over The Mountain”, is about a philandering husband who, in the end, selflessly pays his wife back for all his indiscretions. This story has become a popular novella and a motion picture entitled, “Away From Her”.

Alice Munroe has that rare ability to depict characters with many flaws who in a few pages become real and sympathetic. She tells stories that move in time and place and give the reader a true sense of what a character is thinking and why.

Reading a short story by Alice Monroe is as intriguing and satisfying as reading a novel. Her character portrayals and writing never falters. It is amazing to think that someone can consistently produce such great stories. Her latest collection entitled, “Too Much Happiness”, was published in 2009.

Short and Bittersweet

What do I want from a short story? I like to discover a character who, even the brief space of the story, captures and holds my attention. Most of the eleven stories in Maile Meloy's Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It more than satisfy that requirement.

Her characters are flawed, conflicted, not always likable but utterly believable. Echoing the title, a character in “The Children”, trying to decide whether to leave his wife, says bluntly “What kind of fool wanted it only one way?”. And in “Travis, B.”, when a young ranch hand realizes he is out of his depth in pursuing a romance with a young lawyer, he muses that he “had wanted practice, with girls, and now he had gotten it, but he wished it had felt more like practice”.

Several stories have twists at the end, but they never feel gimmicky or manipulative. In nearly all of them a character is pulled in opposing directions, and each is resolved (or not resolved) in a fresh way. Meloy's style is crisp and understated, and in several stories she uses the stark and powerful landscape of Montana as a backdrop.

Sometimes I'm not ready to start reading a new novel, or maybe I want a quick break from the one I'm reading, and I'm looking for a satisfying short story that I can gulp down whole. For me, Meloy's stories rank near Alice Munro's for satisfying that thirst.