First Love and Other Sorrows/Harold Brodkey/223 pp.

A MULSA book sale remainder!

Originally published in 1958, this collection of short stories was reissued in 1988, and that's the edition I read and am reviewing. A St. Louis native who attended Harvard, Brodkey writes stories that seem almost autobiographical. His description of St. Louis locations, and of growing up poor (but formerly well-off), remind me of another St. Louis resident, Tennessee Williams.
I especially enjoyed the first story, "State of Grace", and all the stories that dealt with the narrator's sister/Laurie/Laura and her attempts to find a "good man" to "settle down with". Although the people have different names in each story, you can't help feeling that these are all the same people, and that they are somehow personally known by Brodkey himself.

1985/Gyorgy Dalos/120 pp.

1985: What Happens after Big Brother Dies is meant as a sort-of follow-up to George Orwell's classic 1949 novel 1984. While the original was a warning about the dangers of unchecked government control and historic revisionism, and a prescient look at the Soviet Union of the mid- to late-20th century, the sequel by Dalos, written in Hungary in 1983, is a look at what might happen when such a totalitarian regime begins to crumble. A good knowledge of Orwell's book is absolutely necessary, as Dalos makes reference to "past events" and characters from the book constantly. There is also a series of rather unfortunate footnotes that start out adding information useful to the reader, but end up becoming rants by the narrator against his superiors.

amazon.com listing
deviantART review of the book

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich/Danilo Kis/135 pp.

A collection of seven loosely-connected short stories, each of which is a brief "biography" of a fictional figure in the creation of the Soviet Union and the Comintern. The stories, all set outside Yugoslavia (most in the Soviet Union, but one in Ireland and Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and one in Inquisition-era France), on the surface appear to be a statement on the violent excesses of the Soviet leadership in the Stalinist (and pre-Stalin) era; however, the book was published in 1976, and it is easy to understand that Kis was using the historic example of the Soviets to call attention to the activities of the secret police and government in Yugoslavia in the second half of the 20th century.
As mentioned above, one (seemingly) incongruous story takes place during the Inquisition in France in 1330. In the city of Toulouse (and all across France). Jews are being killed or forcibly converted to Christianity. Kis uses the story of Baruch David Neumann to show the ways in which those in power ignored (and often conspired with) the rabble's violent attacks on Jews.

Homely Girl, A Life and Other Stories/Arthur Miller/115 pp.

This short compilation of Miller short works includes just three stories: "Homely Girl, A Life", "Fame", and Fitter's Night". The shortest of the three, "Fame", is a possibly autobiographical look at how a popular playwright deals with his new-found celebrity. Random strangers approach him on the street, offering their unsolicited opinions of his work or gushing as if they were old friends. Rich people in restaurants think nothing of interrupting his meal to make him meet their friends. The key point of the story is when an old schoolmate recognizes him in a bar. The schoolmate, unaware of the playwright's celebrity, brags about his own success in life, but when the playwright is approached by a stranger asking for his autograph, the schoolmate completely changes his behavior, becoming shy and taking back an invitation for the playwright to join him for dinner. Success changes not only the celebrity, but also his relationships with those around him.

Oddly, the story I enjoyed least was the title story. A woman, treated badly in life because of her lack of physical good looks, comes to the realization that she doesn't need affirmation from others to feel good about herself.

The third story in the volume, "Fitter's Night", was the one I found most enjoyable. A pipefitter, working in the New York shipyards during World War II, spends most of his time (at work and at home) trying to land the easy jobs and find a way to avoid responsibility. But when he's forced into a repair job on a ship heading out to war, he realizes how important it is for him (and all his coworkers) to do the best job they can, because all these sailors' lives depend on the quality of his work.

Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories/various authors/576 pp.

Wow, I can't believe there have been no posts since my last one. As long as it took for me to finish this book, I thought for sure some other reviews would have been posted before I could review this one.
As the title implies, this is a collection of short stories, organized by their different points of view. As any English major worth his salt will tell you, point of view (POV) has to do with what relationship the story's narrator has to the events being related. Is the narrator recounting events that happened to him personally? Then he tells the story in first-person POV. Is the narrator recounting events that happened to the reader? Second-person POV is the route he takes. And so on. The anthology's editors go into much deeper division of the various points of view, including interior monologue, diary narration, and anonymous narration, but it all basically has to do with whether the narrator was directly involved in the events. The editors provide several examples of each type, and that's where my interest returns. (This was something that always got me in trouble in high school/college literature courses - I didn't care about things like POV and theme and so on; I just wanted to read the damn stories!)
The nice thing about this anthology is that it collects stories from a wide variety of time periods and cultures. While it leans pretty heavily on pre- and post-WWII America, we also have Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil", as well as stories by Poe, Chekhov, Maupassant, James Joyce and Joseph Conrad (including some lesser-known stories by these masters). One of my favorite pieces was Dorothy Parker's "But the One on the Right", which is a dinner party guest's inner monologue about her fellow guests. The collection even includes a story by long-time MU faculty member Tom McAfee, "This Is My Living Room".

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner/Alan Sillitoe/144 pp.

This is one of the best collections of short stories, by an artist I'd never heard of, that I have ever read. Sillitoe was born and raised in Nottingham, England, in a working-class family. At the age of 14 he left school and went to work with his father in a local bicycle factory. The stories in this collection mostly deal with families like Sillitoe's - poor factory workers living in cramped, dirty houses where the noise, soot and grime of the nearby factory is a constant part of their lives.
The title story is about a young man (Colin) who robs a bakery and is sent to a borstal, a sort of part youth prison, part reform school. The governor (warden) of the borstal gives him the opportunity to run cross-country meets for the prison track team; Colin is a good runner, and the governor thinks he will help him to win against a posh private school and get the borstal some good publicity. Throughout the race against the private school, Colin is way in the lead, but he stops running shortly before the finish line, intentionally losing the race to show the governor he is in charge of his own life.
"Uncle Ernest" is about a veteran of World War I who has suffered a mental breakdown due to his experiences in the war. There is an almost childlike innocence to him; when he meets two young girls at a diner, obviously poor and hungry, he offers to buy them something to eat. He continues to meet the girls at the diner, and the older of the two begins taking advantage of his innocence, getting him to buy them other things. Unfortunately, Ernest's motives are misunderstood by other patrons of the diner; they (and the police) assume he is a pervert, and warn him away from the girls.
I enjoyed all the stories in this volume, but I think my favorite was "The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller". Frankie is a young man of about twenty, who has the mental capacity of a younger boy; he acts as general (though he prefers to be called sergeant-major) in the neighborhood boys' skirmishes with other groups of boys. World War II is approaching, and Frankie assumes that when the war starts, he'll go to join his father's regiment; obviously, when the war does begin, he is rejected for service and ends up assisting the local civil defense patrols. This story is obviously at least partially autobiographical; Frankie addresses the narrator as "Alan", and Alan is a writer of stories about his old neighborhood. Sillitoe uses the story to reminisce about his own childhood and to express regret over having "moved on" to be a well-known writer who seems to have lost touch with his roots.
Reviewers have compared this book to The Catcher in the Rye, calling Colin a "British Holden Caulfield". It's easily one of the best collections of short stories I've ever read. Unfortunately, this copy of the book will not be going back into the MULSA book sale - it was missing a front cover when I got it, and has lost several pages since then. However, I note from MERLIN that there are several copies in the Libraries' collection: MERLIN

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof/Tennessee Williams/158 pp.

The second of a pair of Williams plays I read recently. "Cat" takes place in the bed/sitting room of Brick and Maggie Pollitt in the plantation home of "Big Daddy" Pollitt, Brick's father. Big Daddy is a rich man, owner of a huge plantation; the occasion that takes place in the play is the celebration of Big Daddy's birthday and his (supposed) clean bill of health from recent medical tests. All the family members (except Big Daddy and his wife, Big Mama) know that the medical tests actually came back positive for cancer, and they plan to gently break this news to Big Daddy.
The play chiefly deals with Brick's relationships with Maggy, Big Daddy, and Brick's brother, "Gooper" (Cooper). Brick and Maggie haven't slept in the same bed for quite some time, partly because of Brick's worsening alcoholism. Big Daddy wants Brick to overcome his alcoholism and general indifference to the world so that he can take over the running of the plantation, while Gooper and his wife try to get the plantation for themselves by making Brick look bad in front of Big Daddy and Big Mama. A subplot of the play is Maggie's questioning of Brick's relationship with his best friend, Skipper, who recently committed suicide; Maggie wondered if Brick and Skipper were homosexual lovers, and slept with Skipper to challenge their relationship. Her confrontation with Skipper is what resulted in his suicide, and the suicide is what has caused Brick's heavy drinking and general apathy.
Williams' handling of the interactions of this "Old South" family, his willingness to deal with topics like alcoholism, cancer and sexuality at such an early date, and the sometimes autobiographical nature of the story make this an interesting and entertaining read.

A Streetcar Named Desire/Tennessee Williams/142 pp.

This is the first in a pair of Williams' plays that I read. Blanche DuBois comes to stay with her sister, Stella, and Stella's husband, Stanley, in a run-down neighborhood in New Orleans. Written in 1947, the play documents the changing relationships among Blanche, Stella and Stanley, while showing the clash between Blanche, a member of the "genteel" Old South, and Stanley, a member of the new industrial working class. Stanley resents Blanche, who represents (to him) Stella's past and the "finer things" that Stella left to marry him. The action culminates in a surprising confrontation between Blanche and Stanley, ending with Stella siding with Stanley and having Blanche committed to a nursing home.

The Confessions of a Trivialist/Samuel Rosenberg/219 pp.

Rosenberg is, according to the book's Foreword by Buckminster Fuller, a processor of trivia. When faced with a mystery, he "process[es] whole acres of trivia - significant details overlooked by others." In this way, he has been able to get at the (possible) reasons behind the actions of various historical figures, and uses that information to (re)create what Fuller calls "highly plausible but sometimes directly undocumented intimate episodes" in the lives of these people. By using these methods, Rosenberg gives us, in this volume, his hypotheses of events in the lives of Mary Shelley (creator of Frankenstein's monster), Herman Melville, Albert Schweitzer, and Lot's wife, among others. He includes an interesting chapter on the possible origin of the Santa Claus figure, as well as information about child-prodigy William James Sidis, who went from entering Harvard at the age of 11, to working subsistence jobs and collecting streetcar transfers (and writing perhaps the most boring book in the world, Notes on the Collection of Transfers).
While the book contains some pieces of interesting information (including an account of the author's 1955 interview of Schweitzer), I was turned off by the very thing that is Rosenberg's stock-in-trade - his tendency to make an assumptive jump in logic from a collection of random facts to a full-blown (alleged) episode in a person's life. While it is entirely possible that the figure of Dr. Frankenstein was based on Mary Shelley's father and her husband, we have no actual physical proof of that fact, merely the author's assumption and supposition. The book was enjoyable, however, for the new information (trivia) it gave me on Sidis, Melville, and the strange triangle of Shelley, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poet Byron.

The Magic Barrel/Bernard Malamud/214 pp.

Another MULSA book sale remainder! This collection of short stories, published in 1958, won the National Book Award the following year. In 1956 Malamud spent a year in Rome working on the manuscript for this collection, and three of the stories are set in Italy as a result - "The Last Mohican", "Behold the Key", and "The Lady of the Lake". In fact, "Behold the Key" seems almost autobiographical in its description of a struggling writer's attempts to find cheap lodging for himself and his family in Rome. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Malamud incorporates his Jewish heritage into much of his work; of the thirteen stories in the compilation, ten deal with the life of New York Jews. Malamud's characters, mostly poor Jewish immigrants, speak in a beautiful mish-mash of fractured English and Yiddish. The subject of the Holocaust comes up often in these stories - the loss of loved ones, and in some cases, guilt at having survived unscathed while others did not. The main character in "The Last Mohican", Fidelman, is accosted by a Jewish refugee who almost demands assistance based solely on the fact that both are Jewish. Even after very poor treatment by the refugee, Fidelman continues to feel an obligation to this survivor of horrors that Fidelman himself avoided through the lucky coincidence of growing up in America.
I enjoyed most of the stories in the collection; if I had one complaint, it was the fact that many of the stories ended without a resolution of the central problem. (Strangely, the story I enjoyed the most, "Behold the Key", is one of these stories that ends too soon.)

Frog Gig and Other Stories/Speer Morgan/109 pp.

Another MULSA book sale remainder!
The author, Speer Morgan, is an MU English professor and editor of The Missouri Review. This volume is a collection of some of his early short fiction. Morgan attended school at the University of the South, and received his BA from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and the stories in this collection are set in the small towns of the American South. In the title story, a college student visits a childhood friend, and the two go on a late-night frog hunt. The narrator of "The Oklahoma and Western" is a country/folk singer who has hit the big time in Los Angeles. "The Bad Cat", set in Columbia, MO, relates the problems a retired professor of agriculture is having with a stray cat, and with the coming of old age. In "Momma and the Moonman", Momma causes problems with NASA's moon launch when she "magics" an astronaut off of her television and into her living room. Morgan grew up in Ft. Smith Arkansas, across the river from Oklahoma and the old Indian Territory. The story "Jack Woman Killer" deals with a young Native American man's difficulty in balancing the customs of his ancestors with the White Man's world of the 20th century. Finally, "The Bullet" appears to be a semi-autobiographical piece about Morgan's life growing up in Ft. Smith, where his family owned a hardware store.

The Perfect Solution to Absolutely Everything/Arthur Hoppe/303 pp.

Another MULSA book sale remainder!
This volume consists of essays by Hoppe, previously published in the San Francisco Chronicle, on a variety of topics, including politics, the Vietnam War, birth control, Mother's Day, the arms race, and rutabagas. (Yes, rutabagas.) All of the essays were written in the mid-1960s, so a large portion of them deal with Vietnam and the Johnson administration.
Hoppe starts off, tongue firmly in cheek, by stating that the solution to overpopulation is... total birth control. As in absolutely no babies being born, period. He goes on to say that Mother's Day should be a national day of mourning, since mothers are to blame for every single bad thing that has ever happened. ("...extensive historical research shows that every evildoer, from Atilla the Hun to Adolf Hitler, had, somewhere in his background, a mother... If we wipe out Motherhood, we will unquestionably wipe out not only overpopulation, but war, soil erosion, dental caries, air pollution and people who cough on buses.") He warns against trusting anyone over thirty, as well as anyone under thirty, and advocates drinking courses for teenagers, as well as the legalization of bananas and other psychotropic drugs.
This book is a hilarious demonstration of how ridiculous so many things are, from politics to bigotry to xenophobia, and how we, as a people, take ourselves waaaay to seriously. If you're not familiar with the 1960s, some of the topics may be a bit confusing, but otherwise the book is very enjoyable.

The Charioteer/Mary Renault/380 pp.

A lot of the books I read and review (including this one) are what I've referred to as MULSA book sale rejects. This simply means that the book has gone through the book sale shelves (Ellis copy service area, by the way) and, for whatever reason, have not been purchased. I grab some of them, read them, review them, and return them to be run through the sale again.
Most of Mary Renault's novels have been on classical history themes - Alexander the Great, Greek mythology, etc. In contrast, this story takes place in World War II-era Britain. Laurie Odell is a British soldier, injured at Dunkirk and recovering in a military hospital. He becomes friends with Andrew, a young conscientious objector who is working at the hospital; as their friendship progresses, Laurie begins to find himself attracted to Andrew, but is afraid to act on his feelings; in 1940s Britain, being a homosexual is still against the law, and he would face court-martial if his sexuality were discovered. Laurie is sent to a hospital in a neighboring town to undergo medical treatment; while there he becomes reacquainted with Ralph, a classmate from his public-school days. Ralph had been kicked out of school under a cloud of suspicion, and Laurie discovers that the reason for his expulsion was that he had been in a relationship with another male student. Laurie is torn between his feelings for Ralph and his affections for Andrew. The novel also deals with feelings toward homosexuals in the mid-20th century, and shows the fine line that gays (in and out of uniform) had to walk during this time.
While I enjoyed reading this book, there are parts that were confusing to me. Some of the slang that was used by various groups in the book (public-school students, soldiers, gays) and even, to some extent, everyday British speech were difficult to understand, and made for slow going at the beginning of the book. The very British habit of not speaking of "difficult" subjects leads to a lot of vague and confusing conversations; I tried to work some of these things out through the surrounding context, but in some instances I was left wondering what was being discussed. One of Laurie's fellow patients attempts to let Laurie know that he's aware of Laurie's sexuality and his relationship with Andrew, and that he's OK with it, but I only figured this out a couple chapters later, by other conversations they have. In fact, the reasons for Laurie's final decision between his two suitors is still a bit cloudy for me due to the vagueness of dialogue.
Overall, though, I did enjoy this book, for the way it tackled such difficult subjects as homosexuality and conscientious objection.

No Exit and Three Other Plays/Jean-Paul Sartre/281 pp.

A friend saw that I was reading this book and asked, "Why are you reading Sartre? Life too pleasant for you right now?" I responded that I'd heard a lot about Sartre, but had never read any of his work and wanted to try him out. This volume left me with mixed feelings toward the author.
This collection consists of four plays written by Sartre: The first, No Exit is a conversation among three people who have recently died and found themselves in hell. However, instead of the whips and torture they expected, their punishment is to sit in a locked drawing room and talk with each other for eternity. The second play, The Flies, takes us to the ancient Greek city of Argos, where Orestes has returned to take his vengeance on his stepfather and mother for killing his father, Agamemnon. He meets his sister, Electra, the Furies, and even Zeus himself. The third play, Dirty Hands, takes place in a small Eastern European country during World War II; a member of the local Communist group is given the mission of assassinating a fellow party member. Finally, in the fourth piece, The Respectful Prostitute, a young woman in the 1940s American South is asked to testify that a black man tried to rape her. If she doesn't, she will be exposed as a prostitute and run out of town.
Of the four works, I enjoyed No Exit the most. All the action takes place in one room, as the three characters reveal the causes of their deaths, and the actions that have led them to their punishment in hell. The play that I least liked was The Flies; the concept that the residents of Argos are ritually punishing themselves for the murder of their king, and that Zeus and the Furies are feeding off of their self-loathing and depression, was disturbing to me. Also, the play assumes a familiarity with the Orestes/Electra story that I didn't already have.
Two of the works (The Flies and The Respectful Prostitute) mention specifically that they were translated by others; if Sartre himself translated the other two plays, or if he wrote them in English, both he and the other translators did a good job of putting them into language that fits well with the locale and personalities of the characters.

Enough's Enough/Calvin Trillin/251 pp.

Syndicated columnist Calvin Trillin, a Kansas City native and sometime visitor to Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, offered this 1990 collection of some of his best columns from the late 1980s. While Trillin is not a political columnist per se, some of these columns do deal with the Reagan and Bush (Sr.) administrations and political campaigns, along with such 80s figures as Michael Milliken, Gary Hart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Imelda Marcos, and Manuel Noriega (not to mention Noriega's red underwear and his evil voodoo tamales). Trillin also covers more everyday topics, like family vacations (and Packing Greatness), empty-nest syndrome, and three a.m. car alarms. Since this was written over 20 years ago, some of it was a little out-of-date, but some topics were strangely similar to issues being dealt with today - the invasion of Grenada by the Reagan administration, and of Noriega's Panama by the Bush administration, bring to mind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in our recent history, for example.
I enjoyed Trillin's easy-going, dry sense of humor, and the shortness of the columns (average of 2-3 pp.) lends them to easy reading. Trillin is one of my favorite columnists, and I recommend the book. By the way, this was another MULSA book sale remainder!

The Warden/Anthony Trollope/214 pp.

Another MULSA book sale remainder...

In the grand Buddhist tradition, I needed to balance my previous read (Shakespeare Undead) with something a little more... upscale. Hence Trollope. Rev. Septimus Harding is a clergyman in mid-19th century England, precentor (choir director) at the local cathedral, and warden (director) of a small charity home for elderly working-class men. The residents of the home receive a small monthly stipend, but Warden Harding receives a salary of 800 pounds a year (at the time, a pretty hefty sum). A local progressive convinces the residents that they should be receiving the profits of the charity, and they hire a lawyer to sue the warden and the church. The meat of the story is how Warden Harding comes to realize that he doesn't deserve all the money he's been receiving; at issue is the difference between what is legally allowed and what is morally right.
Considering the novel was written in 1855, I found it to be a fairly easy read, especially as compared to someone like Charles Dickens. The author of the critical afterword in my edition says that, unlike many of Trollope's other novels, The Warden is "one of those small novels [...] in which every word has weight." Trollope uses a minimum of words to express his ideas, so we don't get a bunch of extraneous extra descriptions of blue skies and meaningful glances. Trollope definitely has a message he is trying to convey, but he doesn't take the usual "preachy" approach that so many of his contemporaries seemed to.

Thirteen Great Stories/various authors/256 pp.

I'll be the sacrificial lamb and write the first review...
I'm almost finished with this compilation of short stories "by 13 master storytellers"; I've started the last story in the book, "The Morning Watch" by James Agee. By the way, this book was "remaindered" from the MULSA book sale!

The anthology includes stories by Saul Bellow, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also includes work by lesser-known artists like Felipe Alfau of Spain, Luigi Pirandello of Italy, and Isaak Babel of Ukraine. Most of the stories were written in the 1930s-1950s, and the book was published in 1955. The stories are truly representative of their time; two stories written by American authors deal with changing racial relationships in the Deep South, and Babel's work details the life of the Soviet worker during the early days of the Soviet Union. (Interestingly, although Babel himself was an "enthusiastic Communist", according to Wikipedia, he was killed during Stalin's purges in the 1930s.)

Here's a full list of the stories (and authors) included in this collection: "The Beggar", by Felipe Alfau; "Looking for Mr. Green", by Saul Bellow; "The Jar", by Luigi Pirandello; "Hook", by Walter van Tilburg Clark; "The Downward Path to Wisdom", by Katherine Anne Porter"; "The World's Fair", by F. Scott Fitzgerald; "Two Gallants", by James Joyce; "The White Rooster", by William Goyen; "The Bath of Death", by Joaquin Arderius; "And I Am Black, But O! My Soul Is White", by Peggy Bennett, "Benya Krik, the Gangster", by Isaak Babel; "The Eye", by J.F. Powers; and "The Morning Watch", by James Agee.