The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018
Edited by Laura Furman (Anchor)

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 contains twenty prize-winning stories chosen from thousands published in literary magazines over the previous year. The winning stories come from a mix of established writers and emerging voices, and are uniformly breathtaking. They are accompanied by essays from the eminent jurors on their favorites, observations from the winning writers on what inspired their stories, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction. (from the publisher's page, which also has the book's Introduction, providing synopses for the twenty stories)

I'm not a big reader of short stories, not going out of my way to read many of them. I had heard some buzz about "The Tomb of Wrestling" by Jo Ann Beard, so I checked this book out of the library to read it for myself. I'm glad I did. I may not have loved it as much as some commenters, but it's far and away the strongest story of the ones I've read in this collection so far. It begins, “She struck her attacker in the head with a shovel, a small one that she normally kept in the trunk of her car for moving things off the highway.” The reader finds out there is so much packed into that swing, allowing us to see the lives of Joan and her attacker as they meet in a tense and violent encounter.

I've jumped around to different stories and have enjoyed most of them. Two others I liked, "Stop 'n' Go" by Michael Parker and "How We Eat" by Mark Jude Poirier, are available at the LitHub link below. The latter story takes a strong will in order to handle this dysfunctional family. Also in the book are the jurors' top choices and why they loved them, as well as brief notes from the authors about their stories. Definitely worth checking out. And makes me realize I probably need to visit some of the previous years' collections.

Links
Literary Hub has the list of stories and links to four of them

René Magritte's 1960 painting "The Tomb of the Wrestlers" and a little history behind the inspiration/challenge behind it.

Immortality by Andrei Platonov

Illustration by Ragni Svensson
From Platonov's Chevengur: The Ambivalent Space by Natalia Poltavtseva

The May 2018 edition of e-flux contains the Andrei Platonov story "Immortality," translated by Lisa Hayden and Robert Chandler. It is a fairly simple but moving story of the railway station chief Emmanuil Semyonovich Levin tirelessly working to keep trains running on schedule. In addition to the difficulty of his work, he has to manage incompetent and belligerent employees. He has a dedicated household worker, but her skills are limited. Levin sacrifices time with his family, sleep, and food in order to make sure things run as scheduled. While Levin could be held up as a Soviet hero, his co-workers are far from ideal. There's plenty of humor in Levin trying to help these workers in their personal lives so they will work better on the job, but I got the feeling Platonov was winking at the reader and saying there would always be excuses for them not to improve. Amid the humor, though, lies a feeling of pathos for Levin and other like him who are giving everything for the state.

A lonely man, Levin rarely saw in person those faraway people for whom he worked. “That’s what my daughter will be like soon,” Levin decided for himself. “She’ll be even better, happier … But the station chiefs won’t be like me. They’ll sleep at night and go away on vacation, and they’ll live in a family, with a wife, among their own dear children.”

Also in the same edition is the article "Articulations of (Socialist) Realism: Lukács, Platonov, Shklovsky" by Robert Bird that provides background information on the story and looks at how Platonov fit into historical socialist literature of the time. "Immortality" was one of two stories Platonov was commissioned to write in 1935 for a project titled “People of the Railway Empire” despite running afoul of Stalin several times. Regarding the realism of "Immortality," Platonov had said, “In this story there are no facts that fail to correspond to reality at least in a small degree, and there are no facts copying reality." Bird looks at how that fits in with realism as Georg Lukács and others understood it, and how they thought realism should "be retooled for the aims of socialism."

I missed the publication of this story in e-Flux, so many thanks to Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven for her post that brought it to my attention.

Additional links:
Robert Chandler on Andrey Platonovich Platonov at Asymptote Journal

One of Platonov's most characteristic images, always connected in one way or another to the theme of revolution and utopia, is that of the train or locomotive. In 1922, in a letter to his wife, Platonov described an experience from the time of the Civil War: 'Even though I had not yet completed technical school, I was hurriedly put on a locomotive to help the driver. The remark about the revolution being the locomotive of history was transformed inside me into a feeling that was strange and good: remembering this sentence, I worked very diligently on the locomotive . . . ' The sentence the young Platonov remembers is from Karl Marx: 'Revolutions are the locomotives of history.' By 1927, however, Platonov had grown disenchanted—a disenchantment symbolized in Chevengur by the catastrophic collision between two trains that takes up most of the chapter published in this issue of Asymptote.

I've already linked the article "Platonov's Chevengur: The Ambivalent Space" by Natalia Poltavtseva, but wanted to highlight it again since it is helpful in understanding Platonov and his writing

Trains play important roles in Platonov's writing. My post on the train wreck in Chevengur.

The Novel on the Tram by Benito Pérez Galdós

Many thanks to Michael Wooff for translating this short story and making it available at Project Gutenberg. It's a wonderful piece that hints at what we will see in later works by Galdós. Published in 1871, "The Novel on the Tram" is close in tone and style to Galdós' first novel The Shadow. The story itself is sort of a historical document since the first tram lines began running in Madrid just a few months earlier in 1871. Galdós uses this novelty to wonder what would happen if we set Don Quixote on a tram? That's close to what we end up with in this short story.

The story is brief—the narrator gets on a tram to return some books to a friend. He bumps into a gossipy friend of his who begins to tell him about what may or may not be a true story. The friend, a doctor, tells about a beautiful countess who has an indiscreet admirer and a scheming butler. The narrator barely listens to the tale until the doctor tells about some mysterious hold the butler has over the countess. The narrator, his interest piqued, is left hanging as the doctor exits the tram and leaves the story unfinished. The narrator realizes the newspaper he has wrapped the books he's returning has a feuilleton printed in it that appears to pick up the doctor's story. He reads the continuation and, despite some differences with the doctor's story, begins to imagine characters from the story entering and exiting the tram. On his return tram ride he overhears snippets of stories and assumes they are part of the countess' story. The short story climaxes when he thinks he sees the offending butler from the story, assaults him and holds him for arrest. Finally he tells the reader that he has been institutionalized in an asylum for several months because of these actions, but he has returned to normal. Well, except for the part where he says he will devote the same consideration he spent on the countess' story to an amusing character seen on the tram.

The short story provides touches of humor and slyness that is more pronounced in later works by Galdós, with plenty of hints of ambiguity and irony. The narrator confesses early on that he can be self-centered: he muscles his way onto the tram "motivated by a self desire to sit down before others." His self-absorption lends itself to seeing everything unfolding around him as related to the story on which he becomes fixated. The narrator confesses the books he is returning to his friend are bad novels, apparently poisoning his mind so that he becomes preoccupied with searching for continuation of the feuilleton on the tram, drawing the parallel with Don Quixote's response to chivalric novels.

Galdós' first novel had been serialized and this short story appeared in two installments of La Ilustración de Madrid, providing some humorous comparisons of his own work to the installment in this story. There are some additional nice touches throughout the piece. The name of the scheming butler of the feuilleton is Mudarra. Mudar in Spanish means to change or move, possibly even shedding or molting. The story clearly changes the narrator's mind as he sheds reality with his flights of fancy, seeking to complete the fictional story from the newspaper in the real world. There's plenty of comic relief, too, with the repeated injuries our narrator causes to a humorously caricatured English lady and the reactions of passengers as the narrator inserts himself into their conversations. Dreams are often important parts of Galdós' later works, and one plays a central role here. Also, despite the action talking place on and around the tram, Galdós details the route and several of the surrounding landmarks so that it was easy for me to pull up an online map of Madrid today and follow where the action took place.

If you haven't read anything by Galdós, this short story is a good introduction. And if you have, you'll enjoy seeing some of his early developments toward his mastery of the novel. Highly recommended.

Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare

Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare
Edited by Daniel Hahn and Margarita Valencia
Introduction by Salman Rushdie
Los Angeles: And Other Stories, 2016. Paperback.

Links:

• Introduction by Salman Rushdie at the NewStatesman
• "The Dogs of War" by Juan Gabriel Vásquez at the Irish Times
• "Shakespeare, New Mexico" by Valeria Luiselli in Guernica

For this anthology, publisher And Other Books commissioned six Spanish-speaking writers to write stories inspired by Shakespeare and six English-speaking writers to do the same for Cervantes. The impetus behind the project being, of course, the 400th anniversary of the death of each writer on the "same day" (or a day apart), although with England was using the Julian calendar and Spain the Gregorian system, which meant they died approximately ten days apart. Regardless, it's close enough to support such a project.

I've commented before that most fiction I read can easily tie back to Cervantes, and that's not just true of the Cervantes-based stories in this collection but the Shakespeare-based stories, too. And I guess you could say several of the Cervantes-based stories show touches of Shakespeare as well. All of which reflects the importance of the two on current authors. One thing that comes across in each story is the universal nature of Cervantes and Shakespeare. Stories are based from the modern day back to the early 17th century, in locations all around the world, and all of them seem fresh and current. It's a fine collection highlighting the pervasiveness of each author.

The opening story by Ben Okri, "Don Quixote and the Ambiguity of Reading," perfectly sets the tone for the collection. The knight shows up at a printing shop and reads about his adventures as written by a Ben Okri from oral histories as well as from "manuscripts originally written by Cervantes, who wrote his from papers he discovered by Cide Hamete Benegeli, who got it from an Arabic manuscript." The matryoshka doll-like nesting of narration calls up Part I of Don Quixote while visiting the printing shop borrows from Part II. But this Don Quixote tries to teach Ben Okri how to read, which is, in large part, what Don Quixote is all about. This crazed version of the knight notes," Reading is about understanding that which cannot be understood, which the words merely hint at." The fact that the pages he read contained nothing like what he said he read makes the narrator wonder, "There still remains some doubt as to whether his reading of this secret reality is a consequence of his madness, or whether our inability to read it is a consequence of our dimness." I feel his pain.

There are other Cervantes-based stories from Don Quixote and his Exemplary Novels. Rhidian Brook's "The Anthology Massacre" tells of the narrator's completion of a novel told from Rocinante's point of view, obliquely references the collection of stories we're reading, and has a bodycount that would make Shakespeare envious. Kamila Shamsie creates the storyteller Mir Aslam, who seems to share characteristics of both Don Quixote and Cide Hamete Benegeli. Nell Leyshon and Deborah Levy start with "The Glass Graduate" from the Exmplary Novels, but take the premise in different directions, each of which touch on the psychosis of the original.

There is a similar range in the stories based on Shakespeare. Marcos Giralt Torrente's "Opening Windows" borrows heavily from Hamlet, especially the play-within-a-play device. Vicente Molina Foix's "Egyptian Puppet," set in Shakespeare's London, tells of a couple going to the Globe Theater to watch Antony and Cleopatra. The next morning the husband, a jailer, leaves for work but is never seen again. His wife moves on with her life, yearning for the man who once was while suffused in melancholy (very A&C-like). In the link above to "The Dogs of War," Juan Gabriel Vásquez gives us real life characters stepping directly from Julius Caesar into 1984 Bogotá, Colombia, filling their roles a little too convincingly.

Valeria Luisella's "Shakespeare, New Mexico" took a while to grow on me, but it gradually became my favorite Shakespeare-based story. A ghost town off the beaten path has become a tourist attraction with actors re-enacting historical characters and events. The catch is that the actors are permanently in character, even when there are no tourists present. The narrator plots to commit adultery with Billy the Kid while one character opts for a Mickey Mouse costume instead of historical dress. That's when things turn weird. Each actor tends to strut and fret upon their own stage of life.


Lunatics, Lovers and Poets proves to be a fine collection that commemorates Cervantes and Shakespeare and their continuing influence, not just on these writers but on all of us. Recommended.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
are of imagination all compact.

— A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Two short stories by Mikhail Shishkin

I linked the short story “Calligraphy Lesson” in my post providing an outline/highlights of the May 4th event with Mikhail Shishkin and Marian Schwartz. Schwartz translated Shishkin’s short story and it was published at Words Without Borders. Be sure and read her Translator’s Note since it gives background to some challenging areas on translation. The story follows anecdotes between a court secretary and several women during writing lessons, covering what they have recently seen and done. Or that’s my guess...I may be completely wrong. Their conversations and instructions prove to be the important parts of the story.

In her note Schwartz comments on the story as “highly allusive and attentive to the formal qualities of a story both inventively told and steeped in Russian atmospherics.” There are also plenty of themes and motifs that appear in Maidenhair and The Light and the Dark. The most important theme is the importance of words, in this case especially in writing. Several writing lessons happen in the course of the story, demonstrating that the physical act of writing provides as much importance as the message carried by the symbols. The study of closeness and distance is highlighted: “Take any two points in space, any two objects, and you can draw a line connecting them. There are these invisible strokes between all the things in the world. They make everything interconnected, unseverable. Distance is totally irrelevant.” People live close together often without knowing or understanding the other person. And there are plenty of violent acts reported. It’s a story where characters reveal a lot about themselves whether through their speech, their actions, or, fittingly in the court case at the end, their writing.

The second story is “Of Saucepans and Star-Showers,” translated by Leo Shtutin. You can find this story in the April 2013 issue of Spolia magazine ($5 for the current issue). Once again many of the same themes and motifs emerge but with Shishkin it doesn’t feel repetitive. He approaches them from different angles, emphasizing different aspects or features. Here we have a narrator much like Shishkin (he visits the Norwegian translator for Maidenhair, for example). The narrator is waiting for his adult son to visit, which causes the narrator to reevaluate his relationship with his father as well as the one between his father and grandfather. “It’s so important to be proud of one’s father. But I was ashamed of mine.” It’s a story with plenty of poignant and funny moments, emphasizing the importance of the little things in addition to big events when keeping a person alive in your memory.

Enjoy both stories, whether you’re a fan of Maidenhair or if you would like an introduction to Shishkin’s work.

Update: How's that for timing...the Spoila blog just posted an excerpt from "Of Saucepans and Star-Showers".

Ten Tales by Leopoldo Alas: Doña Berta

Ten Tales by Leopoldo Alas (Clarín)
Translated from the Spanish by Robert M. Fedorchek
Introduction by John W. Kronik
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000
ISBN 0-8387-5436-8

In this post I’m going to focus on the story “Doña Berta,” one of the richest and most perplexing short stories/novellas I’ve read. I commented on the other nine stories in this collection in this post. I’m hurrying to post this today because I think it makes a great Valentine’s Day story (just like “The Burial of the Sardine” is the perfect Ash Wednesday story).

I’m going to rely on John W. Kronik’s introduction on Alas to highlight the difficulty of this story (emphasis is mine):

Students of Alas, availing themselves of differing criteria, have made efforts to classify his body of stories. Such attempts have demonstrated, more than anything else, the broad range of themes that they treat, their multiple aims, the disparate techniques on which their confection relies, in sum, their rich variety of styles and content. These studies, as any reader of his stories quickly confirms, have also discerned common denominators among them, notably two main components: on the one hand, an acerbic sense of humor borne as a piercing critical weapon; on the other, a sensitivity, a consummate tenderness that elevates the lowliest of creatures to the highest emotional pitch.

What I found in “Doña Berta” was one or both of these components. While I’m not sure which of the two he intended I have my suspicions through Alas’ plot devices, so the usual notice of spoilers is in place here. A summary of the story: Doña Berta de Rondaliego lives with her four brothers in an estate in the Asturian countryside. The family remains withdrawn from society, valuing honor and “purity” over everything else. During the first Carlist War a captain from the Whites (followers of the queen regent Doña María Cristina) stumbles onto Posadorio (their estate). Even though the brothers are firmly on the Black (Carlist) side, they take pity on the captain and, while his body is mending, his company. Berta falls in love with him and …well, I’ll let Alas cover what they valued, how romanticism warped Berta’s mind, and what happens next:

All the brothers were confirmed bachelors; they were cold and apathetic, although kindhearted and courteous. Their idol was their untainted honor, their immaculate noble blood. The sanctuary of that purity was to have been in Berta, the sister, but Berta, even though like her brothers—fair-skinned, stout, gentle, and relaxed in her gestures, voice, and walk—had inside her tender qualities unknown to them. The second-oldest brother, somewhat of a man of letters, would bring home contemporary novels, translations from the French. They all read them. On the men they left no impression; on Berta they wreaked interior havoc. Romanticism, which for so many men and women in cities and town was merely a topic of conversation, at most a pretext for roués, in Posadorio had a veritable priestess, even though it arrived there as an echo of itself in ponderous newspaper serials. The brothers could never have suspected the existence of the flames of idealism and pure sentimentality under their roof in Posadorio. Not even after the misfortune did it occur to them that romanticism had caused it; they attributed it to chance, to opportunity, to treachery, which were also to blame. Perhaps the most evil-minded of the four [brothers] even ascribed it to lust, which was nonexistent in Berta, whereas nobody gave any thought to innocent love, to a heart that melts on making contact with the fire it adores. …

The captain had departed from Zaornín the day after he knew happiness in the garden; nothing was learned of the dishonor that he left there until, to the amazement and horror of the brothers, and to the amazement and lack of horror in Berta, the wretched young woman fell ill with a disorder that ended up in a mysterious, secret baptism that was treated like a disgrace.

The brothers entrust the infant to the care of a religious order, telling Berta that he had died. Feeling betrayed by their sister, the brothers leave the estate. Two die in the second Carlist War, the other two bankrupt themselves in supporting the losing side. Berta stays on the estate, insulated from the rest of the world until one day at 70 years old, she meets an artist tramping around the countryside. They feel a connection and the artist provides her with two new paintings of his: a copy of a portrait of the young Berta, capturing her better than the original, and the bust of the subject of his last painting. The subject, the painter’s friend killed in the second Carlist War, looks just like “her” Captain joined with herself—she believes the subject to be her son. She mortgages the estate and sets off to Madrid with only her cat to find and acquire the original painting. A rich Latin American tycoon has bought the painting and is about to ship it to his mansion in the new world, but he allows Berta to visit every day and look at the painting. On the day the painting is to be packed for shipment, Berta is hit and killed by a horse and streetcar. Her cat, caged because it could not conform to city life, dies forgotten in the attic of the boarding house.

This summary obviously doesn’t do the story justice. I would have expected to hear such a story in the Gentleman’s Club of Vetusta (yet another La Regenta reference). The excerpt gives a hint at Alas’ wonderful prose, the subtlety building over the course of the story until you realize you’ve been hooked by this haunting tale. The story follows a razor’s edge between satire and tenderness. Other characters laugh at this old deaf woman, sheltered all her life from an evolving society, but the narrator doesn’t. There is the obvious contrast between settings—the idyllic, verdant country, untrampled and undisturbed (except, of course, when it is), and the busy, dusty Madrid, with dangers of death or theft at every turn. But there’s plenty of irony housed in these settings. Berta is “disgraced” in the countryside. Even though the family helps with local charities, officials turn a blind eye (through “their slowness and apathy”) to thefts of estate property. The local notary fleeces Berta with “cold shears” in her business dealings with him. Offsetting the cold Madrid side, residents of Madrid turn out to be friendly toward the seemingly mad woman, helping her in the streets and providing contacts she had no rights to expect.

One of the most interesting details for me is Berta’s love of romantic stories. In Alas’ longer books, characters enjoying such fare are clearly inferior readers and people. In this case, it’s almost all she has—the estate library is limited to “religious tomes of withdrawn, secluded devotion and books of heraldry.” Her love of these stories doesn’t condemn her because that is all she has…she’s limited by her experience and capabilities. Mimicking this symbolism is her deafness—she can’t hear because of her old age while other characters refuse to hear or understand (through a choice she doesn’t have).

But getting back to the ambiguity of the story…
The bust that the artist gave to Berta provides certainty for her that the subject was her son. She mortgages her estate, knowing she will never see it again, basing everything on the bust. Once she sees the original work of the artist, though, she’s not so sure. She debates whether the subject might be her son until she surrenders certainty for faith: “In the end Doña Berta felt the sublime, austere joy of faith in doubt.”

In the end, though, she meets a similar fate to that of her son—a death in the fog of war/city that would be completely forgotten if it weren’t for art. The son’s last charge is perfectly captured by an artist. Doña Berta’s last moments (OK, and the son’s) by Alas. Both works capture a look, whether in the painting or in the story, of certain defeat as well as determination. In either setting, both carry through on the faith of their mission.

So we come to the ending, anticlimactic in several ways, but I don’t think Alas could have done it differently if he wanted to convey sympathy for Berta. In the end she loses everything—son, estate, painting, life. The denouement focusing on the fate of her cat adds to my certainty that Alas means Berta to be viewed sympathetically instead of critically.

It’s a beautiful story and I highly recommend finding a copy to read (it’s about 50 pages in this version). There are some issues, and if you’re of a practical nature you’ll note a few. But for anyone that has tried to tackle La Regenta and felt there were too many moving pieces and storylines, this is Alas telling a complex story with a tight focus. It’s a great introduction to his work.

Ten Tales by Leopoldo Alas

Ten Tales by Leopoldo Alas (Clarín)
Translated from the Spanish by Robert M. Fedorchek
Introduction by John W. Kronik
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000
ISBN 0-8387-5436-8
Reading and posting had suffered of late, so I’ll try and get caught up with a couple of posts on this collection of short stories by Leopoldo Alas. Ten Tales includes stories

which are singled out by the above mentioned critics [who acclaimed his short stories], and others, as representative of Clarín’s best pieces of short fiction. They span a sixteen-year period, from 1883 to 1899, and explore themes—a frustrated artistic ideal, religious belief, spiritual love, loss, death, tenderness, social division—that reflect the “interior man, his thoughts, his feelings, his wishes” cited by the author in the preface to his Centos morales [Moral tales] (1896).

(From the preface by Robert M. Fedorcheck)

The stories in Ten Tales are listed below:

• The Two Boxes
• Doña Berta
• The Lord
• A Day Laborer
• Change of Light
• The Golden Rose
• Queen Margaret
• Torso
• The Burial of the Sardine
• Two Scholars

I’ll run through a few comments on each of these stories (excluding Doña Berta which will have a separate post). John W. Kronik provides an extremely good introduction to Alas and these stories. I’ll try to highlight aspects of these stories that are different from his introduction but there will be overlaps and quotes from his essay.

Underlying many of the themes in these stories listed by the translator (above) lurks a frustration…a disappointment…an inability of a character to accomplish something. Alas can be lighthearted about this tension or he can be serious. In the same manner his narrator can be ironic, providing a distance that allows the reader to laugh at failures, or let him sympathize with the character’s plight. Many of the stories provide characters or actions that call to mind La Regenta or His Only Son, whether through similarity or contrast.

“The Lord” (El Señor) describes a priest, Juan de Dios, who turns out to be the opposite of Fermín de Pas in La Regenta. Where Fermín gives in to his passions about Ana Ozores, directly and indirectly, Juan’s suppression and sublimation of his love creates a perverse martyrdom. It’s difficult to tell if Alas is criticizing the Catholic Church for the celibacy requirement of its priests or if he’s parodying romance stories by going over the top in the suffering. This ambiguity is common in many of these stories and provides much of their enjoyment in trying to figure out Alas’ intention.

Despite Alas’ anticlerical barbs an abiding religious faith comes through in his work. It’s when the church fails in its mission, whether through personal failings or through its politics, that Alas delivers his harshest criticism. “The Golden Rose” (La rosa de oro) provides an example of a leader of the church eschewing the expected politics of the day and helping those the church should serve. “The Golden Rose” also makes use of a folktale tradition while adding to its structure. As Kronik points out in the Introduction, “it is a story about storytelling” that

reveals the distance that Alas put between his stories and the narrative practices of his time. Even the descriptive details are at the service of an esthetic order different from that of the realistic novel. In this instance, Alas subordinates the psychological component to the creation of image and mood. That is achieve through the special manipulation of language, through the lavish use of metaphor, and through an associative process between writing and painting.

Another story addressing religion and faith, anticipating later writers (I’m looking at Unamuno’s “San Manuel Bueno, Martyr” in particular) is “Change of Light” (Cambio de luz). Jorge Arial wanders through different occupations but his crisis begins when he begins to doubt the existence of God. Or rather he contemplates there may not be a God. Even though he maintains a façade of belief for his family’s sake, matters worsen with the loss of his sight. Alas focuses not just on the capacity of human suffering but the sources of creativity within. Jorge’s faith strengthens from music (playing and listening), even when totally blind. “Queen Margaret” (La Reina Margarita) draws on the power of music, too, in this case through mediocre performers (both of Alas’ novels have plenty of those). Alas ruthlessly portrays a society unable to appreciate art, showing spectators more interested in money, appearance, and gossip at the theater than the compositions and performances they hear. His sympathy is clearly with the two performers who refuse to pretend to be more than their meager talent allows. Even so, they are able to find happiness with each other. Another story where the power of music can fail is in “The Two Boxes” (Las dos cajas), which follows the labors of the violinist Ventura as he tries to develop a natural, sincere music that captures the listener’s inner feelings as a poet would. His frustration in developing such a sound implodes when he sees his wife’s apparent unfaithfulness, followed by his son’s death.

As I’ve highlighted in previous posts on the author, Alas is always the critic. Two of these stories specifically target scholarly activities and tendencies of his day, satirizing the vanity of the profession: “A Day Laborer” (Un jornalero) and “Two Scholars” (Dos sabios). Fernando Vidal in “A Day Laborer” has to defend what he does to an unruly mob, providing a hilarious send-up through his description of his sufferings in his work. The unjust resolution of his defense can't help but bring a smile to the reader, showing Alas' masterful use of irony. “Two Scholars” provides a good example of what Alas does in several of these stories, revealing bits of information as the story unfolds in order to continually add irony to the situation. The changing points of view in the narrative are, as Kronik points out in his introduction, a “clever exercise” “whose crossings allow the reader to see as the characters do, yet with knowledge superior to that of any given character.” The scholars end up being anything but wise men, instead providing perfect examples of Sayre’s law.

“Torso” (El Torso) and “The Burial of the Sardine” (El entierro de la sardine) are included in the English translation of Alas’ story collection titled Moral Tales (to be reviewed here soon) because of their parable-like nature. “Torso” looks at class relationships in the Spain of his time (a common theme, come to think of it, in Galdós). In La Regenta Alas skewered students leaving the village to study in Madrid, returning with superficial knowledge that they ignorantly and incorrectly applied. The same goes with the young duke of this story who goes to England for his education. He has failed to learn, though, the strength of human bonds, preferring social convention instead. The young duke learns all the politically correct things of the day but acts like less of a man than the peasants he derides. The elder duke resigns himself to what the education has created while the son notes the apparent hypocrisy of treating servants as equals (ellipsis and italics in original):

[T]his did not prevent him [Don Juan, the elder duke] from sighing when he noticed that Diego [the son] had adopted ideas, habits, and tendencies that were a far cry from the Castilian simplicity that for Don Juan constituted good manners and character. Their son looked more like the duchess than the duke, and the education that he called rigid, proper, and cold accentuated the differences between them, differences that Don Juan sincerely regretted. But the duke did not complain. To each his own, he believed. Neither Diego nor anyone else would change his ways now, but his successor, well…let him become what God had ordained. Don Juan had demanded freedom for himself, and he allowed others to live as they wished. One thing, however, was clear: while the old duke was alive, his house, no matter how annoyed the young master appeared to be, would bend to his will.

Diego, as a matter of fact, felt an insuperable repugnance for his father’s ways. He, who had had student servants, who from his time at the boarding school had learned to measure the distances that reality out of necessity establishes between different classes, even saw a kind of hypocrisy, or at least a ridiculous illusion, in bad taste, in this apparent equality of treatment which did not go beyond the surface, which could only be skin-deep. All of this, he thought, is a grotesque comedy that annoys the rest of us and would humiliate the poor peasants themselves if they were more sensitive.

The “poor peasants” understand much more of the world than Diego does, although he figures things out after his life falls apart. The other point to note in "Torso" is the abdication of responsibility by Diego and others of his generation toward the peasants. His concern for their well being was as skin-deep as his complaints about their humiliation. An evolving or modernizing society doesn't necessarily seem to bother Alas, it's the nature of certain aspects of this evolution (lost personal ties and responsibility, especially) that concern him.

It’s difficult to say which story is my favorite (after the novella “Doña Berta,” that is) but for some reason “The Burial of the Sardine” sticks with me. It’s also why I wanted to post on it on Ash Wednesday, even though this post isn’t ready for prime time. See here for a description of what the ceremony represents. While describing the ceremony in one village, Alas directs the focus toward the people participating in it, similar to the focus of Ana Ozores participating in the religious procession of La Regenta. There is another echo to that procession of the novel with the character of Celso Arteaga, the principal of the local secondary school. Celso provides the speech at the end of the ceremony , half-drunk, calling to mind the teacher in La Regenta that walks each year in the religious procession as a penitent. “The Burial of the Sardine” provides an implicit criticism of the clergy suppressing joy for 364 days of the year. The one day each year Celso is allowed to experience unbridled happiness isn’t enough to bring him together with the woman he believes may be intended for him. Even though Alas builds on powerful emotions he grounds the story in realistic characters and situations, balancing his technical skills with a rendering of personal stories at odds against a superficial, stifling society.

OK, more on this collection, especially “Doña Berta” in the (intended) next post.
Update: see this post for comments on “Doña Berta.”

Francisco de Goya's "El entierro de la sardina" (The Burial of the Sardine)
Picture source