‘Last Evenings on Earth’ by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews

It is entirely possible that I could make another list featuring my comfort-reading and that list would include every story in Bolaño’s much-revered collection Last Evenings on Earth. 

The titular story, on the other hand, made me want to give it up a number of times when I first read it. There was this narrative voice, monotonously broadcasting B and his father’s lives in the hotel, day in, day out, like an old radio. Is this story ever going to end? I asked myself while trying not to skip to the last page. 

Yet this is proven to be one of the stories whose landscape is totally transformed by its ground-shifting ending. Imperceptibly, we are led to a place where the stake suddenly multiplies and skyrockets. Petrified with disbelief, we watch, via the slightly removed narrative voice, B and his father walking into a calamity that cannot be averted and then we realise that all the previous banality and tedium were so invaluable, their meanings etched in our memories like the names on the gravestones.   

For a long while, whenever I think of this story, tears well up in my eyes. “And then the fight begins.”

First published in Spanish as ‘Últimos atardeceres en la tierra’ in Putas asesinas, Anagrama, 2001. First published in English in ‘Last Evenings on Earth, New Directions, 2006

‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’ by Wells Tower

I didn’t know how I felt about the story, even long after reading it. I did know that I think about it a lot. The central piece of this literary display often comes to my mind, sometimes when I’m least expecting it, and it startles me: the blood angel. Djarf, one of the Vikings, slices open the skin on the priest’s back, along both side of his spine, then he reaches his hands into the cuts and pulls out the priest’s lungs, watching them flapping and quivering in the wind like a pair of wings.
 
I love extreme scenes, they are difficult to write and when we read them, we are forced to look deeply into ourselves and ask: is this what it is like to be human? 
 
No one knows if the depictions of Vikings in the story are authentic or not because their world is so far away from ours. On the other hand, their world resembles closely this one we are living in. Everything is ravaged and burned, filled with chaos, savagery, and despair. Admittedly we don’t kill out of superstition now; we don’t yank other people’s lungs out anymore. But have we become better humans? 

First published in Fence, 2002 and collected in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Granta, 2009, and available to read online here

‘Words for Things’ by Lucy Caldwell

There are some writers who are just excruciatingly brilliant. And Lucy Caldwell is one of them. I first came across this story at an event, in which I was reading after Caldwell. Suffice to say that after hearing the first few pages of this story, I was mortified for whatever I was about to read. Later, having got hold of the full story in print-out (courtesy of my co-reader), I read ‘Words for Things’ on the train back to Norwich. Two mum friends, right after coming out of their babies’ swimming class, begin talking about Monica Lewinsky in a hotel lobby. It was the first time I felt a story being both deeply feminine and incredibly powerful. 

After I finished the story, I gripped the printout and looked outside the window, and I realised that my outlook as a writer had been somehow shifted. I had always only wanted to write like a writer, but at that moment I knew that I actually wanted to write like a woman writer. 

First published in The Stinging Fly, February 2021, and available to read here. Collected in Intimacies, Faber, 2021

‘The Dead’ by James Joyce

I feel a bit embarrassed that I have included this story in my list, kind of like cheating an exam. All you need to know is that I read this story many times throughout the years, in Chinese, in English, in Chengdu, in Dublin. 
 
And it was in Dublin where I began to hear all the voices in the story and it was in Dublin, shortly after my son was born, I was pinned on the bed by the sleeping baby on my chest and ended up rereading the whole story. I cried when I read out, in a muted voice, the ending of the story again and again. That day, through the repetition, I saw something profound – too profound that I knew right away that I would never be able to express it with words. 

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914. Published in the Melville House Press Art of the Novella series. Available online including here

‘October’ by Ho Sok Fong, translated by Natascha Bruce

I first heard Ho Sok Fong’s name from her translator Natascha Bruce. Bruce told me a story of Ho’s she was translating at the time: In the days leading up to the 1911 Revolution, in Malaysia, a Japanese prostitute is involved with a pirate, who’s endeavouring to build a hot air balloon.
 
Naturally, I needed to read this story and Bruce kindly shared it with me later. ‘October’, it’s called. Before I finished the first page, tears rushed to my eyes. I had never read anything like this before. Ho’s prose is so unique, vivid and eccentrically captivating. The literary world in ‘October’ is also brand new to me, multi-coloured and untamed like a painting of Pollock.
 
I often think back to the scene where Kikuko stretches out across the tatami in the newly built chapel, feeling an incredible serenity. A breeze comes in, “climbs over her ankles and skates up her calves”, eventually it reaches her thighs, and arouses the prostitute.

First published in English in Lake Like a Mirror, Granta Books, London, 2019

‘The King is Always Above the People’ by Daniel Alarcón

If my memories haven’t deceived me, this was the first story I read after arriving in America. In the university where I was studying, there was a Japanese garden and I’d go there and read by the pond.
 
‘The King is Always Above the People’ – a pompous statement that was reinterpreted in the story with a fatalistic twist. The dictator was hanged in the square and all the passers-by looked up at his dead body.
 
The protagonist was a young man who escaped from the small town he grew up in and arrived in the capital on his own. And he told, in a constrained and poised voice, about the frustration and the bewilderment brought about by his immigration. There was no surprise that I found solace in the story and began to narrate my early days in America in a voice similar to the young man’s – my real life synchronised with the fictional narrative.

Later, our lives departed from one another, the initial disorientation faded, taken over by something more arbitrary, brutal and enigmatic.

The young man went back to his hometown, working in a bank, with a wife and a child while I continued to drift, from one continent to another. Only occasionally, I think about him and his eventual departure at the end of the story, when, after attending an acquaintance’s funeral, he “escaped through a back door, into the warm evening.”
 
We were told that he never made it back home and his wife never looked for him.

First published in Granta, April 2007, and available to read here. Collected in The King is Always Above the People, Riverhead Books, 2018

‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner

Another favourite story from my previous life where one cannot get out of a literary conversation without bringing up Faulkner at least three times . In the 90s, William Faulkner was so prevalent in China that about half of a whole generation of writers was coded with his literary genes – the other half, the literary descendants of Borges. Before going to college, I purchased the complete works of Faulkner to prove that I was serious about literature. And the one story that stayed with me until today was ‘A Rose for Emily’. 
 
It was the first time I encountered First Person Plural and it was also the first time I saw a circular temporal structure. The storyline twisted like a moebius strip and ended where it began, a time-honoured trick that completely dazzled the eighteen-year-old me. 

First published in The Forum, April 1930. Collected in the Collected Stories, Vintage, 2009

‘The House of the Sleeping Beauties’ by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Edward Seidensticker

I was shocked, when I first came to this part of the world, that not every literary person had read Kawabata. Desperately I tried to persuade everyone I know to read Kawabata so we could talk about how great he was, as soon as possible. 

The story I’d use to make my pitch is ‘The House of the Sleeping Beauties’. It probes the themes of the obsession towards youthful female bodies and the dread about one’s pending mortality and renders them into a quiet and stifling entity. 

At the end of the story, Eguchi – the old man who visited the House to admire the fresh-faced beauty – didn’t die, it was someone else who passed away. Although the death was denied by the woman of the house, Eguchi felt certain that the sleeping girl had turned into a corpse in the middle of the night. He would not be persuaded otherwise, because the truth was, this was exactly what he’d hoped to find in the House of Sleeping Beauties – the eventuality of mortality.

First published in Japanese in 1961. First published in English in The House of the Sleeping Beauties Kodansha, 2004

Introduction

I have always been an avid fan of the short story, both as a reader and as a writer. Thank you, Jonathan for letting me choose my favourites!
 
A short story contains multitudes of possibilities, of lives lived and worlds imagined- a veritable smorgasbord of ideas and form to savour and reflect upon. I always begin reading them with a sense of anticipation.
 
I do not have an academic take on them; what I am looking for is not just technical brilliance but an ability to show vulnerability and attention to the minutia of life.
 
During the recent lockdown, I started going on long walks and would often listen to the New Yorker Fiction Podcast where a writer chooses a story by another writer and discusses it. It was a wonderful way of reacquainting myself with masters of the form such as V.S Pritchett, Franz Kafka or Katherine Mansfield. 
 
Looking back at my choices, I am struck by how heavily slanted they are towards American writers and the preoccupation with relationships, identity and loss. I suppose I explore similar themes in my own stories in Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness. Displacement whether emotional or geographical is a predicament of our times and it features heavily in my own stories. We are more interconnected yet lonelier than ever before.

‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov

I need to read this story at least once every few months and it never fails to move me each time. ‘Signs and Symbols’ is about an elderly Russian couple who have emigrated to America and live in straitened circumstances. They visit their mentally unstable son in a sanatorium and return without seeing him. They take him a modest birthday gift, a selection of jams. At first glance, the story seems a quiet meditation on old age, parental love and the sorrow of the exiled, but it has so many layers and depth to it. We learn that the son suffers from a rare mental illness that makes him hallucinate. He has attempted to take his life a few times. The elderly parents live a frugal life, Nabokov lingers over the details of their straitened circumstances, the mother looking through the photograph albums, longing for the home she’s left behind, and the father’s embittered gratitude towards his more successful brother who has brought them over. 

Hanging over their nightly rituals is a sense of impending foreboding and doom. Yet this is not a sentimental story. The ‘signs’ and ‘symbols’ of their predicament are presented in carefully crafted sentences, without a single superfluous image or sentence.

That Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong. The subway train lost its life current between two stations… During the long ride to the subway station, she and her husband did not exchange a word, and every time she glanced at his old hands, clasped and twitching upon the handle of his umbrella, and saw their swollen veins and brown-spotted skin, she felt the mounting pressure of tears.

The ending is deliberately ambiguous. The couple receive two misdialled phone calls from a girl who is looking for someone called Charlie and the story ends when the phone rings for a third time. The reader never knows whether it is another wrong call or whether it is the hospital, ringing to say their son had succeeded in committing suicide. 

First published – as ‘Symbols and Signs’ – in The New Yorker, May 15, 1948, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, Doubleday, 1958 and Collected Short Stories, Knopf, 1995. Also in the Penguin 70 Cloud Castle Lake, 2005

‘Mrs Sen’s’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

As someone who has led a peripatetic multicultural existence with an upbringing that spans India, Italy France and Britain, I am instinctively drawn to stories about displacement and belonging. I have a special affinity for this particular book and my PhD thesis was based on an exploration of nostalgia and belonging within Lahiri’s work. 

Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut collection of stories, published in 1999, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway/PEN Award in 2000, and several of the stories appeared in The New Yorker. The title is taken from one of the stories in the collection, which, like the other stories, examines the lives of diasporic Indians starting a new life in Seventies America when India was still very much an exotic entity and Asian groceries or communities a novelty. Lahiri writes powerfully about the immigrant experience and the difficulties of uprooting and assimilation. 

I could have happily chosen all the stories in this wonderful collection, but the one that highlights the tug of war between rooting and uprooting has to be ‘Mrs. Sen’s’. Mrs. Sen, the main protagonist in this story finds it impossible to integrate in America. Her almost petulant and childish refusal to learn to drive for instance is emblematic of her distress. A small American boy who she looks after, whilst his mother is at work witnesses her loneliness and pathetic attempts to recreate India in her new surroundings. Lahiri draws parallels between the boy’s own solitary childhood, devoid of family love with Mrs Sen’s predicament. Mrs. Sen’s home is a shrine to her Calcutta life and Lahiri skilfully expresses this through the objects in Mrs Sen’s home. Her kitchen knife, the tape of her family’s voice, the aerograms, and her saris exist in stark contrast to her American world.

Eliot’s mother nodded …looking around the room. “And that’s all…in India?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Sen replied. The mention of the word seemed to release something in her. She neatened the border of her sari where it rose diagonally across her chest. She, too, looked around the room, as if she noticed in the lampshades, in the teapot, in the shadows frozen on the carpet, something the rest of them could not. “Everything is there.”

First published in Salamander magazine. Collected in Interpreter of Maladies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999/Flamingo, 2000)

‘The Piano Player’ by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book is not strictly a short story collection, but rather a novel with carefully drawn vignettes of different lives lived in a small fictional community in Crosby on the coast of Maine, a quintessentially New England town. Uniting them all is the formidable figure of Olive Kitteridge, a school math teacher and the wife of a pharmacist. A larger-than-life character, she is at the centre of several stories and peripheral in others. 

In ‘The Piano Player,’ Olive and her husband are peripheral to the central story, which is about Angela O’Meara, a piano player in a local cocktail lounge. She has a faded beauty about her and a drink problem. Strout has a cinematic way of describing the setting and the characters. She paints a wonderful visual portrait that distils the spirit of the place and the person. The Bar with its “sprawl of couches, plump leather chairs, and low tables… where the piano was not so much ‘background’ music as it was a character in the room.” Angela’s “jawline is gone soft and uneven, and the wrinkles near her eyes were quite pronounced. But they were kind wrinkles; nothing harsh-it seemed had happened to this face.” And yet the reader knows that Angela has lost her way in life because of a doomed love affair. She is a nervous pianist, aware of her audience and uses vodka to calm her nerves. Angela plays without a break in order to avoid making small talk and arrives at work on a Friday night about a week before Christmas smelling of alcohol and mint. Angie recognizes a man sitting in the corner, and his presence opens up painful memories about her past.

As a writer, I am interested in the quiet dramas that can throw an ‘ordinary’ life off kilter, one wrong decision or choice that can alter the entire landscape of a life. In this story, Strout subtly reveals the loneliness, the heartbreak and the disappointments that lurks beneath Angela’s suburban gentility and bravado. One moment we are in the cocktail bar listening to Angela, playing a request from her former lover, the next moment we are inside her head, reliving her anguish at meeting him after a break of so many years. 

She knows that loneliness can kill people – in different ways can actually make you die.

First published in Olive Kitteridge, Random House, 2008. It is also an HBO TV Mini-series starring Francis McDormand in the title role

‘Last Night’ by James Salter

James Salter understands the human psyche, its needs and its frailties, and he describes them in clear, matter-of-fact prose that shows subtlety and allusion. This particular story tackles several difficult themes such as the ethics of assisted suicide, faith and the disintegration of a marriage under the pressures of an extramarital affair. The setting is suburban and the third person narrator describes the events leading up to the wife’s last night. The wife in question has persuaded her husband to help her die, but before this can happen, they go for a final meal at a fancy restaurant with a young woman who is helping them with the garden. Salter paints an exquisite picture of the restaurant scene where death hangs over the tinkle of glasses and murmur of polite conversation. He uses flashbacks to reveal the events that occurred before the beginning of the story or in the historical past of the story. 

They ate dinner in silence. Her husband did not look at her. her face annoyed him, he did not know why. She could be good-looking but there were times when she was not. Her face was like a series of photographs, some of which ought to have been thrown away. Tonight it was like that.

His characters may be haunted by death and disappointment, but Salter never judges them, never even pretends to round them. They remain elusive, shadowy figures, as mysterious to the readers as to themselves. The reader seldom has any extraneous details and sometimes I wasn’t sure where the story was taking place or even the decade. Endings were sometimes so subtle I had to reread to see if I’d missed some clue.

As one of the protagonists says in this story, “You think you know someone, you think because you have dinner with them or play cards, but you really don’t. It’s always a surprise. You know nothing.”

First published in The New Yorker, November 2002, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Last Night, Knopf, 2005 and The Collected Stories, Picador, 2013