“Spring in Fiata is cloudy and dull. Everything is damp: the piebald trunks of the plane trees, the juniper shrubs, the railings, the gravel.”
Perfect piebald! From Nabokov’s story, “Spring in Fialta” in The Penguin Book of International Short Stories, 1945-1985 I’m reading. Am struck by the datedness of the stories and also their eventfulness, so unlike the Chekhov type of short story where everything and nothing happens. In Nabokov’s, the love interest dies in a car crash, in John Updike’s “Separating” the couple is doing just that (naturally enough for Updike whose males have such a monstrous sense of romantic and sexual entitlement) and in William Trevor’s “Beyond the Pale”, a character goes insane when truth breaks through the veneer of daily convention and habit.
Most startling of all, Mishima’s “Patriotism” describes, in minute detail, the Japanese ritual suicide of disembowelment (seppuku). Doesn’t get much more eventful than the blade becoming entangled with the entrails, “pushed constantly outward by their soft resistance”. So eventful I had to put it down until another time. How eerie to come across this in an anthology as if it were just another story. How doubly eerie to realise its author, Yukio Mishima, suicided in the same way in 1970, just four years after he wrote it.
Yukio Mishima at the age of 6
The story by William Trevor, a kind of Irish Summer of the 17th Doll, is the most stimulating. A reviewer writing in the New York Times in 1982 says of him:
Such range and authority are not much in vogue today and may be facilely relegated to the bin of English social fiction – sensitive, humane but small. We have gotten out of the habit, I think, of prizing writers of objective fiction: the right word, the right image, the right detail, so that the words seem artless, life speaking for itself. Our important fiction today is typically concerned with the self-revelations of the writer and of the medium. We have become so habituated to a literature that uses the world as a mirror that we hardly know what else to look for.
(Ted Solotaroff, “The Dark Souls of Ordinary People”, New York Times, February 21, 1982)
If he thought we’d become “habituated to a literature that uses the world as a mirror” in 1982, what would Mr Solotaroff say of today?
