beginners & mcsweeny's.

The title of this post is not the title of a novel. Because I have still not allowed myself to embark on a new novel as I still have essays and things. (The only downside to university life - school work.) But as I mentioned before, I have been reading short stories. Beginners, a birthday-book from Dora, by American author Raymond Carver whom she likes very much. And a collection of various short stories by various authors for McSweeny's Quaterly Concern edited by Dave Eggers, also an American. One can't seem to escape them. Especially if one is reading short stories which the Americans seemed to have claimed but admittedly do very very well.

Short stories are like amazing train conversations with an interesting stranger. You know the encounter will end soon, but you're not sure how it will end. They don't really enter your real life but they do affect your life undeniably. Short stories do not belong to routine, like a half-an-hour-evening-reading of a novel when you get to know characters and catch up on what happened yester-evening. Rather, short stories break the routine. Leave you wondering and often dissatisfied but nonetheless pleased with what just happened. At least, good short stories do this. In my opinion, a bad short story is a too-long short story. But I am learning, the more I read, that this is not always so.

Beginners and McSweeny's are so different it's almost silly to put them in one post. But they do complement each other well. Because all the stories in Beginners are written by one author, writing in a very specific time and the stories tend to become somewhat repetitive, blurring into each other and following similar patterns. But it is a sad, beautiful and poignant pattern. McSweeny's on the other hand, jumps around like a schizophrenic dancer because each short story is written by a different person (and not all of them are American or male). The stories I have encountered in this anthology range from humourous to dark to uncomfortable to tragic to terrifying. And when I tire of this whirlwind I settle back in Raymond Carver's inherently American and sadly beautiful stories. It's a good balance.

In one of Ali Smith's short stories, two men have a conversation about the novel and the short story. They decide that the novel is a "...flabby old whore... Serviceable, roomy, warm and familiar, but really a bit used up..." and a short story is a "...nimble goddess, a slim nymph. Because so few had mastered the short story she was still in very good shape."

The story goes on to discuss this idea about short stories and whether or not it holds any truth. It is a marvelous story to begin a book of short stories with, I think. The story becomes increasingly funny and thought-provoking and you should all just go read it. Because it's great. And short. ('True Short Story' by Ali Smith).

I'm not sure a short story is a nymph. After reading Lolita (yes, I still think about it...) the word 'nymph' has a new, somewhat tainted meaning. But I would suggest you start acquainting yourself with short stories, they are fantastic things to have on your shelf and in your life.

(Oh, the other wonderful thing about short stories, is that they curl up in dark corners of your mind so that one day when conversation reaches a certain topic that reminds you of a short story you read, you can whip out this fanastic story and you are not quite sure where it came from... Did someone tell you this story? Is it a movie you once watched? Or did it actually happen to you? I would suggest you go with the last one and people will think you're a brilliant interesting person just because you happened to have read a brilliant interesting short story once... It has worked for me before.)