Book Review: 21 Great Stories

I flicked this high school book from my brother-in-law in search of something to read on the flight back from New York in September. However I only ended up finishing it last week, and can I tell you, I was riveted. (Everytime I write a book review I feel guilty about how biased I must sound, praising everything i read, but then again, what you are seeing here is a very biased selection of books already - books I know I would like).

Wow! What stories! The English/American equivalent of the Khushwant Singh selects series, with excellent short stories from mostly the US and Europe (England ad France), handpicked by two High School English teachers, who provide a useful note about the story and the life of the author before each tale.

Included in the list are such notables as Luigi Pirandello, who writes about parents in a train compartment talking about their sons in the field during World War I, Saki, with his famous Tobermory, the embarassing talking cat, who Ive seen featured in at least two other school anthologies in our very own country, Edgar Allan Poe with a murder tale, and Arthur Conan Doyle with a Sherlock Holmes mystery, both of whom Ive never been eager to read before but lately have been, Guy de Maupassant with his irony par excellence in the tale of an aspirational young woman and her miserable fate, Jack London with his descriptions of snowy Alaskan situations, James Joyce, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck.

Among the people I hadnt heard of, I LOVED Ray Bradbury's There will come Soft Rains, Lord Dunsany's The Two Bottles of Relish, Carl Stephensons' Leiningen Versus the Ants and C.D.B. Bryan's So Much Unfairness of Things. Why? Because the first speaks about one of my favourite topics, how man is nothing against nature, and how he and his technology will one day come to naught unless he stops being selfish and short-sighted. The second is a mystery in which, as the note says, all the clues are given, and we are left to guess the ending - and also because I guessed it halfway through the story hehehe! Leiningen versus the ants is about the sort of man it is both exhilarating and nervewracking to be around - the never-say-die types, who believe they can do anything and do! Almost magical, if it wasnt realistic in its own way. The lats is about a school boy caught cheating and his consequences, along witha host of other issues. Definitely brought a tear to my eyes.

Another interesting story worth analysing is Kaatje Hurlbut's Eve in Darkness, about an innocent girl and her fascination with a statue in her grandmother's living room and her first acquaintance with the concept of sin. Quite beautiful in a twisted way, the working's of a child's mind as opposed to that of a pre-conditioned society. Frank Stockton's The Lady or the Tiger? reminds one of that Prisoner's Dilemma game, leaving the reader to guess an answer for him/herself, which is very frustrating, despite all the clues having been given.

Of the known authors, I loved James Joyce's Eveline because I found it very close to my heart. It could almost be my story, I imagine. And that is the conflict of the trade-off that everyone faces in their lives - do you give up the routine, the familiar, the secure present, unhappy though it may be, for a future that, by its very unfamiliarity, even if the unfamiliar is just the promise of adventure and/or happiness, is rendered uncertain?

The Pearl by John Steinbeck, the grand finale of the book, is a parable, a novella, a treatise on mankind and its greed, of the exploitation of authority, of the misery of the native, the conquered, the poor, the oppressed, of the differential degrees of misery of the relatively better off, of stories and the inability to blame, of music and security and instincts, of our helplessness against fate, of our fear of the unknown, of the risk of being the pioneers in anything, most certainly in carving out a new fate/position for oneself within society. It tells of a simple native American who finds a stunning valuable pearl after his son gets bitten by a scorpion, of the way people turn against him at his newfound wealth, of the consequences of his wealth, mainly for him, in a tragic tragic way. What did he lose and what did he gain? Is money everything? Can poor people ever rise from their positions, especially when they are tangled in so many intersectionalities? Can humans ever overcome their greed? What is worth it at the expense of others? At what cost to our humanity? Do we ever stop to think about the implications of our actions on others? Do we go back and uncover the essence of our religions, steeped as they are now in meaningless rituals? Who is human who the animal when emotions take over? Who decides justce besides the people in power? What do we remember and what do we forget? How many of us are in touch with our innate instincts, come of living in close harmony with the earth? Very sad story.

Conclusion: Something for everyone - nature, adventure, mystery, children, death, politics, domesticicty, rural/urban landscapes, from the Regency Era till the 1960's. Except for the die-hard romantic chick-lit types. Really really good.