‘The Happy Prince’ by Oscar Wilde

I always worry, when I re-read this story every few years, that I will have outgrown it, but so far its effect on me has only become more textured and stronger overall. It is – unambiguously, I suppose – a children’s story; Wilde wrote it for his son Cyril, and these days I really hear and am moved by the fatherly tones and concerns in it. Wilde was probably my first proper literary love, and at some point the story also became more poignant and fascinating for me because of a growing awareness I had of how deeply and kind of presciently it relates to developments in his own life. He memorably refers back to it in De Profundis, just after this award-winning motion picture of a paragraph:

“I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen’s narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree, that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall:—all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothing of them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all.”

But my love of this story predates my love of Wilde, and goes back to the very beginnings of my love of reading. I don’t remember the details of how the story first struck me, only that it struck me with great force, great emotional force. A scene from a bit later in the timeline of my relationship with the story comes to mind. Towards the end of secondary school, I read it out to my Philosophy class. We were considering the question ‘What is art?’ and the teacher had invited any of us who wanted to to present an exhibit to the class. I didn’t read it very well – I stumbled on a few words, and even made, so as to pre-empt sniggers, an awkward spur-of-the-moment substitution of a perhaps unfortunately dated expression. I didn’t bring out the different voices especially either. But when I looked up at the end, there were tears running down the teacher’s face.

First collected in The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888. Available on Wikisource

‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ by Raymond Carver

What Carver does here puts me in mind of one of those popularly imagined martial artists who, through the subtlest positioning and alteration of balance, dispatches his charging opponent. By that I suppose I mean I’m very struck by the minimalism here, the mastery of craft, the role given to the reader – also the sheer impact. It really, really gets me, this one.

First published, in an earlier form, in Quarterly West in 1978, and then, in the form I’m familiar with, in The Paris Reviewin 1981. First collected the same year in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and then in Where I’m Calling From, Atlanticm 1988/Harvill, 1993. The story’s available to Paris Review subscribers on their website

‘Thank You’ by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell 

I find I don’t want to tell you anything at all about this one – just encourage you to go on the journey. 

I can tell you that, on the strength of this story, I went and read the whole of My Documents – the collection it comes from – and, although no other story in the collection affected me quite like this one, I thought the whole thing was great, and two other stories from it I particularly like are ‘Camilo’ and ‘Family Life’.

First published in Spanish in Mis documentos in 2013. Also in 2013, Megan McDowell’s English translation of the story was first published on vice.com. Her translation of the whole collection – My Documents, in English – then came out in 2015. The story was available on vice.com until recently, and seems like it’s meant to be still, only there’s a problem with the webpage. Happily, it’s also available on The Short Story Project website

‘On the Darkness of the Evil One and “the Other Life We Can Build Out of This One”’ by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich

This one would not typically be referred to as ‘a short story’ – though it is a story, an incredible one at that, and it is short, at least in this telling.

Attributing it simply to Alexievich is also questionable. The most important co-authors are Irina Vasilyeva, Yelena Razduyeva, and two men identified simply as Yuri and Volodya/Vladimir. These people are also the story’s main characters.

It’s a story that appears, self-contained, towards the end of one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read, Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Alexievich, for those who don’t know, is an oral historian or literary documentarian, who, in each of her books, collects and curates a large number of testimonies from diverse people involved in a particular historical episode or phenomenon, enabling her to represent it with unusual depth, nuance and humanity. In this book, her theme is nothing less than the disintegration of Soviet civilisation and the emergence of its replacement, whatever that is.

The particular story I’m highlighting is about a woman, Lena, who leaves her beloved husband and three children to dedicate herself to a convicted murderer, serving a life sentence in a remote prison, who she, on the basis of only a photograph and the handwriting of a short, fairly nondescript letter, believes featured in a dream she had many, many years ago, telling her she would be his bride before God. We get Lena’s perspective, her abandoned husband’s perspective, the perspective of the convicted murderer, the perspective of a woman who previously made a documentary about these people and their situation and somehow cannot let them go now, and the perspectives of many fellow villagers and prison inmates who’ve known the main characters for years. It’s incredible! And of course made more so by the parallel – or even the deep connection – between Lena’s commitment to her vision, and that which the Soviet people, or many of them at least, had to theirs.

It’s hard to imagine a short story, in the usual sense of that term, achieving anything close to what this one does. I need to soon try and discover other great literary documentarians, other approaches to and innovations in that form.

I have myself heard spontaneously told, never-written-down stories that, to my mind, stand with the best literary ones I’ve encountered. I would think and hope we all have, even if we don’t normally think like that. I know I don’t. We’re perhaps a little too in awe of the institutional frame. I’m a huge fan of Living Libraries / Human Libraries, and of, you know, getting to know people.  

First published in Russian as part of the book Время секонд хэнд in 2013. Bela Shayecivh’s English translation of that book, with the title Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, then appeared in 2016

‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #20’ by David Foster Wallace

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is probably my favourite short story collection, and this is my favourite story in it.

I love how it reaches out across the chasm, of course grown yet wider since its publication, between political left and right (is it just my ignorance, or is it hard to find stories that do that?), I love how it clocks a typical contemptuous, shallow perception of a person and then blasts through that perception to something beautiful, I love how it finds profound truth in even a thoroughly bogus ideological package, I love its tussle between real monstrosity and real redemption and its consideration of everyday forms that both can take. I also find it funny, moving, shocking. A proper epic of the short story form, I’d say.

I should add that, as I express my love of Wallace, I’m mindful of two kinds of claim being made about him by others. One is that he was, in many ways and many situations, a cruel and misogynistic person. The other is that that cruelty and misogyny pervade his writing too. Having read most of Wallace’s work, I find that second claim particularly hard to buy. If it’s true, I have a lot to learn on this. But then, yeah, maybe I do have a lot to learn on this. For now, I’ve read and heard a few cases against Wallace – none have persuaded me of the second claim, but I continue to be up for the discussion. The first claim, on the other hand… That one I find a lot more persuasive. According to one of Wallace’s editors, many of the Brief Interviews were even based on discussions Wallace had himself had, with him in the Hideous Man role. Of course self-awareness never absolved anyone of anything, as Bo Burnham precisely put it. Then again, we might consider the possibility of there being, in these stories, not just passive self-awareness but determined acts of self-scrutiny, self-castigation, moral striving, warning to others, attempted atonement even.

I’ve come across some clearly intelligent people saying David Foster Wallace’s books should simply not be read or taught. It’s difficult for me to describe how that makes me feel. There are elements in there of panic, of sadness, of confusion, of weariness, of fatalism… The fact is that this writing does a spectacularly good job of making me more critically alert to my demons and possible demons, and more eager to be kind and caring, and it gives me great joy in the process, and makes me feel more at home in this world. You want to take that away? I don’t feel the desire to exonerate Wallace. Far less to canonise him, as biographer DT Max puts it. I don’t want to cut the art work away from the artist either – I don’t think that would be wise. I do want to recognise his humanity. And encourage us all to fully recognise our own. I mean, acknowledge that we’re all capable of being both wonderful and terrible, and there might even sometimes be causative links between these two extremes in us, and we don’t just wilfully generate our evils out of nowhere, these things have histories, pathologies, roots stretching way beyond the scope of what we choose, and all of us are, to some considerable extent, tossed around on the seas of fate, there but for the grace of God, so to speak, and goodbut for the grace of God too, because not yet in the situation that would bring our demons mercilessly to the fore or show up the full extent of our moral vulnerabilities (and so perhaps for now blissfully unaware of these). Can we consider the possibility that people who do terrible things, and then live with the knowledge and consequences of what they’ve done, sometimes have important things to tell us, or even a related moral strength of feeling that most of us cannot so easily muster? I want to appreciate the wonderful things Wallace created (and feel gratitude and admiration towards him for them, yes), and look right into the darkness of what wrong he did too and be appalled and learn the lessons, and see and consider the probable vital links between this wonder and this darkness, and hold this all together, and breathe. And if that indeed sounds like a hell of a challenge, well, a) I think it’s a challenge we stand to realise we face with many great artists, or even, in a sense, with all people, including ourselves, and b) I think it’s a challenge Wallace’s stories, and maybe especially this one, can help with.

First published, under the slightly different title ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6’, in The Paris Review in 1997. Then collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in 1999. Available to Paris Review subscribers on their website. There’s also, on YouTube, a great recording of Wallace reading the story, and it’s been there long enough for me to hope that it’s there legally

‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: A Fantastic Story’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Almost a bit of proto-sci-fi from Dostoevsky, as well as the morality tale to end all morality tales. I’m not sure I’ve ever liked the basic idea of a story more than this one – which probably says a lot about me. 

As I believe short film to be an outrageously neglected art form, I’ll also flag up Aleksandr Petrov’s adaptation, which is visually stunning, as well as interesting in how it renders visual certain non-physical elements of the plot – though, all told, I miss too much of Dostoevsky’s intense, intricate thinking.

First published in Russian in Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary journal in 1877. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s English translation first appeared in their Dostoevsky collection The Eternal Husband and Other Stories in 1997. An older, probably serviceable but, by all accounts, less good translation, by Constance Garnett, is in the public domain and available at online-literature.com

Introduction

Libellus, libelli, m. noun. (Latin) a little book; a small work written for publication; a pamphlet; a notebook.

When thinking about short fiction my mind immediately gravitates to the ancient, specifically to the first century Latin poet Catullus. As part of the novi poetae of his generation, he rebelled against the long, drawn-out epic and strove to write smaller, succinct, personal pieces. In the first poem of his collection, he calls his masterpiece a libellus: his “little book” which, he tells us, is highly polished, new, and charming. In the Tradition of Catullus I present my list of libelli – “short books” – with nods to Latin, Ancient Greek and the survival of myths through the 21st Century. It is my hope that anyone who wants an introduction to classics, without committing to reading an epic, will use this list as a touching off point. (All translations from Latin and Ancient Greek are my own, by the way.)

‘La Jeune Parque’ by Paul Valéry

In Roman myth the three Fates — Parcae in Latin, Moirai in Ancient Greek — are referred to as sisters: Clotho, the youngest, is the spinner of a person’s life thread, Lachesis measures the final thread of life, and the dreaded Atropos cuts the thread of life. Because of their absolute and unpredictable authority over all life—even Jupiter is subjected to their decisions—they are feared and rarely spoken about except in passing references. Valéry writes this 512-line poem about Clotho, the youngest of these fates. After a successful career as a poet he suddenly takes a break from publishing his works for more than 20 years.  La Jeune Parque, a poem as perplexing and enigmatic as the Fates themselves, is the first piece of writing that he publishes after this extended period of silence. 

First published in 1917 in French. Translated into English by Alistair Elliot, Bloodaxe Books, 1997

‘Neptune’ by Franz Kafka

In this story Kafka imagines the god Poseidon sitting at his desk under the waves and crunching numbers. Kafka presents us with a Poseidon whose job as god of the sea no one truly understands. Because he is so busy in his management position, he never gets to enjoy the sea over which he rules. Poseidon would love to find a new job, but what else is he really qualified to do? Kafka ironically and humorously concludes his story, “He liked to joke that he was waiting for the end of the world, then he’d find a free moment right before the end, after completing his final calculation, to take a quick spin in the sea.” I read this story in a new translation of Kafka’s prose done by Peter Wortsman and published by Archipelago Books. Wortsman has chosen a wonderful selection of shorter writings that showcase the range of the author’s brilliance.

Written in 1920 in German but never published during the author’s lifetime. Translated into English by Peter Wortsman, collected in Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, Archipelago Books, 2016; also by Michael Hofmann in Investigations of a Dog and Other Creatures, New Directions, 2017. Hofmann’s version is available to read online in the Paris Review, here

‘Trimalchio’s Dinner’ by Petronius

The Satyricon, written by the emperor Nero’s arbiter elegentiae (judge of style), Petronius, in the first century B.C.E., is one of the most interesting pieces of realistic fiction that has survived from antiquity. The work, estimated to be the size of a modest modern novel, is highly fragmentary so that the plot as a whole can only be loosely reconstructed. The narrator, an amoral yet educated man named Encolpius, has done something to offend the Roman god of sexuality and fertility, Priapus, and as a result has been stricken with a horrible case of impotence. He travels around Italy with his companion and young lover Giton looking for a cure, for the Roman equivalent of Viagra. The work has been described as a satire, as a mock epic, and a picaresque novel; it is lewd, it is bawdy and it is funny.

The Satyricon, however, also has an underlying moral message and a serious side for which William Arrowsmith argues in his seminal paper, entitled ‘Luxury and Death in the Satyricon.’ The central episode of the novel, which is also the most extant part of the work that has survived, is the Cena Trimalchionis—‘Trimalchio’s Dinner.’ Encolpius and Giton, along with a third friend they pick up somewhere along the way named Ascyltus, are invited to an elaborate dinner at the home of a ridiculously wealthy freedman named Trimalchio. The themes of luxury and death are meticulously and deftly blended together in the dinner party scene during which Trimalchio’s ostentatious wealth is fully on display alongside his obsession with his own mortality. He is rich enough, for instance, to hire a trumpeter that does nothing all day but sound his horn on the hour. He has a water clock in his dining room, a very expensive and rare item for a Roman, which also marks time for him. And the symbol, for me, that best displays the juxtaposition of the wealth and death is Trimalchio’s elaborate fresco that depicts the fates measuring and cutting the thread of his life—Trimalchio’s thread, of course, is painted in gold.

Written in Latin in 65 A.D. and widely translated into English since the 17th Century. Available to read online at Project Gutenberg here

‘A Terrace in Rome’ by Pascal Quignard

To read any work by Pascal Quignard, whether fiction or non-fiction, is to experience philosophical and literary reflections on sex, love, shadows, art and death. A Terrace in Rome, his novella which won the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française prize in 2000, explores all of his most favored themes and images via the fictional story of Geoffroy Meaume, a 17th Century engraving artist whose illicit love for a woman causes him horrible disfiguration, pain and suffering. The year is 1639 when twenty-one-year-old Meaume, serving an apprenticeship as an engraver, first lays his eyes on Nanni, the eighteen-year-old blond beauty who is betrothed by her father to another man. For a while Meaume is happily absorbed in this secret affair and playing in umbra voluptatis (in the shadow of desire.) Each of the forty-seven chapters in the book are succinct – most are only a page or two—as Quignard is a master at composing a tightly woven narrative which lends the feeling that every word, every character, every image has been carefully placed on the page and is of the utmost importance. For those who are new to Quignard’s philosophical and roving style of writing, A Terrace in Rome is a perfect first, short piece to begin an exploration of his writings. 

Originally published in French as Terasse à Rome, Gallimard Editions, 2000. First translated into English by Douglas Penick and Charles Re, Wakefield Press, 2016

‘Ovid’s Banquet of Sense’ by George Chapman

I have long been familiar with Chapman’s translations of Homer, but he is a brilliant poet when he is composing his own verses.

‘Ovid’s Banquet of Sense’ is a description of the first century Roman poet’s feast of senses that is trigged when he sees Corinna, the woman of his dreams, bathing naked in her garden. Chapman explains that Corinna is a pseudonym for Julia, the Emperor Augustus’s daughter, who has walked into the courtyard where she proceeds to bathe, play the lute and sing, all of which Ovid observes hidden by an arbor. His first sense that is stimulated by her is his sight:

Then cast she off her robe and stood upright,
As lightning breaks out of a labouring cloud;
Or as the morning heaven casts off the night,
Or as that heaven cast off itself, and show’d
Heaven’s upper light, to which the brightest day
Is but a black and melancholy shroud;
Or as when Venus strived for sovereign sway
Of charmful beauty in young Troy’s desire,
So stood Corinna, vanishing her ‘tire.

Although there are multiple allusions to the Metamorphoses, Chapman’s ability to capture the sensuality, atmosphere, and tone of the Amores is what impressed me the most about his short, narrative poem. 

Originally written in 1595, available to read online here

‘House of Asterion’ by Jorge Luis Borges

In the preface to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Borges’s Labyrinths, André Maurois writes: “His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound—he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas—but it is vast.” 

My favorite story in the collection is ‘The House of Asterion’, which gives Minotaur a background story that is compassionate and sympathetic. He is lonely and isolated and wants to be put out of his solitary misery. Borges is influenced by Ovid’s Theseus and Ariadne story, but gives us the Minotaur’s point of view. He tells us that every nine years a group of men enter his home but fall and die on their own. One of them prophesies Asterion’s escape:

“Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise about the dust. If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?

The morning sun reverberated from the bronze sword. There was no long even a vestige of blood.

‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ said Theseus. ‘The Minotaur scarcely defended himself.”

First published in Spanish as ‘La casa de Asterión’ in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, 1947 and collected in El Aleph, Editorial Losada, 1949. First translated by James Irby and Donald Yates and collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962

‘Theseus’ by André Gide

André Gide, in his short story ‘Theseus’ reimagines the myth of the Greek hero and fills in the gaps where the ancient narratives are lacking. Gide adeptly captures the pressure to perform that each hero experiences. In the first chapter, Aegeus, Theseus’s father, says to his son: “Your childhood is over. Be a man. Show your fellow men what one of their kind can be and what he means to become. There are great things to be done. Claim yourself.” After Theseus defeats various, local monsters, he is eager to take on his biggest challenge yet, defeating the Cretan Minotaur.

In Gide’s story, when Theseus lands in Crete he visits the artist Daedalus who explains to him how his labyrinth works and the only way to defeat it. This passage showcases Gide’s brilliance as a writer, an artist, and even a philosopher:

“I thought that the best way of containing a prisoner in the labyrinth was to make it of such a kind, not that he couldn’t get out (try to grasp my meaning here), but that he wouldn’t want to get out. I therefore assembled in this one place the means to satisfy every kind of appetite. The Minotaur’s tastes were neither many nor various; but we had to plan for everybody, whosoever it might be, who would enter the labyrinth. Another and indeed the prime necessity was to fine down the visitor’s will-power to the point of extinction.”

A relevant story for the 21st Century, where many are caught up in a labyrinth of their own choosing, a labyrinth composed of people and things that induce a “delicious intoxication” and are “rich in flattering delusions.”

Originally published in French as Thésée, Gallimard, 1946 and in English by Pantheon the same year. Newly translated by Andrew Brown, Hesperus Press, 2002