When the Best Sex Is Extramarital

I have always loved fictional works.

In the early years, I feasted on generous servings in Thamizh and English.  The more I read, the more I enjoyed the serious works in both those languages because they made me think about, and understand, what it meant to be human.  Fictional worlds they might be, but they provided insights into how we humans behave and, more importantly, what kind of a human I wanted to be.

Contemporary fiction seem to always fail in that category.  I don't want stories to entertain me--I had plenty of those from my great-aunt who was a wonderful storyteller.  Especially as I race towards the end, I want to understand myself, understand my fellow humans, and understand the big picture.

Sometimes, the short stories in the New Yorker have enough of an oomph to make me think.  This week was one of those.
A story by Haruki Murakami.
Every one of his stories in the past issues of the New Yorker was awesome.
Give him a Nobel Prize already!
Did I tell you that I loved them all.
By extension, I knew I would enjoy this story too.

The guy tells an awesome story, which ends with a phenomenal image:

The willow branches swayed in the early-summer breeze. In a small dark room, somewhere inside Kino, a warm hand was reaching out to him. Eyes shut, he felt that hand on his, soft and substantial. He’d forgotten this, had been apart from it for far too long. Yes, I am hurt. Very, very deeply. He said this to himself. And he wept.
All the while the rain did not let up, drenching the world in a cold chill.

I closed the magazine, turned the light off, and was ready for sleep.  Content and happy, and at peace with the world.  I felt "the early-summer breeze" of the fiction gently rocking me to sleep on a mid-winter night.

What a joy it is to realize that I am a human, alive, and thinking and feeling, on a tiny part of "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

On literature: how universities kill them?

After a long, long time, last summer I picked up a full-length fiction piece to read.  I mean, I read short stories all the time.  But, it had been years since I read one that is a lengthy tale.  I re-read Gabriel Garcia Maquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.  I got way more from it this second time.  Then, I was back to short stories.  Over the spring break, it was a potboiler of sorts--Sacred Games.  I am now on to a third in a year: Zadie Smith's White Teeth...

Whether in the short or long form, well told stories typically are more than the simple story itself.  They help me (us?) understand the world, and somehow make order of the chaos that is outside.  As I have noted before, I found so much of valuable insights into what it means to be human from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Dickens, Narayan, Saroyan, Maugham, ...

But, as I have often remarked in this blog, the academic departments in universities present such a distorted approach to literature that I am, in more ways than one, glad that I never read in a classroom context any of the great works that I admire.
So, back to the book that I am reading, and its author ... The talented and accomplished Zadie Smith says:

I spent three years in college and wrote three and a half stories but I read everything I could get my hands on. White Teeth is really the product of that time; it's like the regurgitation of the kind of beautiful, antiquated, left-side-of-the-brain liberal arts education which is dying a death even as I write this. Generally, an English Lit degree trains you to be a useless member of the modern world

Yes, a "useless member of the modern world" ... boy, these writers have such a wonderful way with words :)  And, yes, I criticize universities for what we do now because I value liberal education way too much, and perhaps idealize it a tad ... oh well ....

Photo, and story, of the day: Somerset Maugham

The photo is of Maugham with Churchill and H.G. Wells.
Talk about the combined literature talent there :)

I lifted that photo from this review of a Maugham biography.  It was because of Maugham and O.Henry that, even as a kid, I got hooked on to short stories.  My favorite Maugham short story is about two brothers, and plays on the old fable of the ant and the grasshopper. (There were/are some wonderful storytellers in Tamil, too, that I read way back when ... Maybe I ought to check whether there are English translations of some of those ...)

Even now, I way prefer short stories to full-length fiction.  There is something magical about conveying a profound tale within a few pages.  Roddy Doyle's piece in the New Yorker is the latest short story I read.  And, yes, check out the Atlantic's 2010 fiction special.  I liked the Nigerian story the best.  BTW, an exercise for the reader: compare and contrast the husband's emotions in Doyle's story and this one, titled "Hopefulness" :)

Anyway, until I read this review, I had no idea that

Some 98 films were made from Maugham's material during his lifetime — "Rain" helped establish the career of Joan Crawford, while "Of Human Bondage" and "The Letter" provided Bette Davis with characters from which to shape her smart, ruthless screen persona.

98? Wow!

Of course, apparently the book discusses Maugham's (homo)sexuality, and the legal issues related to his estate and his daughter.  But, that is not news, really.
But, I did not know about Maugham's end:

Decades of wary plotting and carefully keeping the world at arm's length exploded. As Gore Vidal has noted, Maugham built his own monument — and then blew it up. He published "Looking Back," a vicious, ill-advised memoir, and slid into Alzheimer's. Nothing grates like hate, and by the time Maugham died soon thereafter, in 1965 at age 91, the world had changed its view of the grandest of grand, old literary men. The man who had known "everyone, from Henry James to Winston Churchill, from Dorothy Parker to D.H. Lawrence" came to his sad end, raving like King Lear.

Ouch!
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An emoticon story

Admitting to not reading "great" books

I grew up way more interested in short stories than in lengthy tomes. Not that I did not read lengthy tomes. I learnt a lot about life and humanity from short stories by, say, O Henry or Maugham, and later on from the stories in the New Yorker or the Atlantic. Which is why this piece from the Telegraph is neat: