A merciful compare and contrast post so I can slack off: "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I'm almost always running out of gas by the time I get to the end of blogging through a short story anthology, and this year's run through the 2025 O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a. The Best Short Stories, is no different. I need to catch my breath. How wonderful, then, that I can do a compare and contrast post about "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih. It's the kind of post where it looks like I'm trying, but really the analysis kind of writes itself.

What am I comparing "The Three Niles" to?

I'll be comparing and contrasting it with "The Suitcase" by Meron Hadero, which was in the 2016 Best American Short Stories, the year before I started blogging all the way through it. Meron's story came to mind while reading "The Three Niles" because both were about children of immigrants to the U.S. from the Horn of Africa, and both involved trips made by those children back to the homeland of their parents. 

What's similar about them?

Both stories have children who go to the countries their parents came from, Sudan for "The Three Niles" and Ethiopia for "The Suitcase." Although I hate it when people treat all things African like they're the same and like Africa is one big country with a shared culture and heritage, in the case of Sudan and Ethiopia, there really is a lot that's shared between the two. They're both part of the Horn of Africa, which tends to have a lot of commonalities between countries. They even have their own regional quasi-UN, called IGAD. (Don't quibble about that characterization. It's close enough.) Both Ethiopia and Sudan are immensely proud of the Nile River and their country's share in the history of that cradle of civilization. This pride in the river isn't in "The Suitcase" the way it shows up in "The Three Niles," but it is a commonality between the two countries. Right now, Ethiopia is involved in Sudan's civil war, and Sudan is involved in Ethiopia's. The countries share a porous border.

Both "the boy" in "The Three Niles" and Saba, the protagonist of "The Suitcase," struggle with language. Saba isn't great at Amharic, the language of her relatives, and "the boy" is pretty bad at Sudanese Arabic. In both stories, the returnees from America are feasted and celebrated by relatives while in the homeland, but neither knows how to repay their hospitality or even to carry on much of a conversation with them. 

Both stories contain their primary image or symbol in the title.

Both protagonists feel, in different ways, that they "don't belong here." Saba thinks this explicitly, while it is simply implicit in the boy's every thought, word, and attitude. But here's about where the similarities end.

Obvious differences

Saba is twenty; the boy is thirteen. Saba wants to fit in and become more Ethiopian during her month trip to Addis Ababa; the boy just wants his three-day stint in Sudan, on the outskirts of Khartoum, to end as soon as possible. Saba, who actually did live in Ethiopia when she was very young, wants to connect with Ethiopia to be more fully herself; the boy, who has never been to Sudan before, wants to deny his Sudanese heritage, because he feels that it has nothing to do with his true self. He doesn't even want to be called by his name in Sudanese Arabic. In short, Saba is there of her own accord and wants to be there, while the boy is going purely out of what flagging sense of loyalty he has to his father. 

Photo by Humera Afrid. The boy is kind of a sacrificial lamb in this story, giving up part of himself for his father. But he doesn't give more than he has to.

Less obvious differences

While it's very easy to see not just the outward differences in age and sex between the boy and Saba but also the huge gap in dispositions toward their ancestral home, it might be harder to see the difference in how the major symbols in both stories are working. In "The Suitcase," the major symbol, according to my highly advanced ability in literary analysis, is the suitcase. Saba has brought it with her and now needs to pack to go back home to America. She has actually brought two suitcases with her, one with her clothes and the other with gifts from her family in America to all of her family in Ethiopia. Now that she is headed back, the family in Ethiopia wants to fill that second suitcase with gifts of their own for Saba to take back. They have too many gifts, though, and they are arguing about what to take out. The choice is given to Saba, who, pressed for time to make it to her return flight, decides to dump out her other suitcase, the one with all her clothes, in order to make room for all of the gifts. 

It's such a neat and apt symbol, one that serves as a metaphor for Saba's own process of identity shaping. In order to let in what Ethiopia has to give her, she literally has to empty out her own identity, in the form of the clothes she loves so much. She has brought something to them, and she leaves it there with her family. When she goes back again, it will still be there. None of her identity is lost, but it is reapportioned. The family shares not only gifts, but their core selves with one another, and so bits of who everyone is are shared across continents. I am often mystified when people talk about being moved by literary fiction stories, but this story did move me. It's about as happy a story as one of these anthologies will ever give you.

With "The Three Niles," I have to admit that the symbolism tricked me. The boy resists everything he sees while in Sudan with his father, from the Arabic language to prayers to lamb meat to even remembering who the relatives introduced to him are. At one point, the boy "hated every single person in that courtyard for what they made him do, what they reminded him of." What they remind him of is his cultural inheritance, the one the boy thinks belongs to his father but not to him. That's why when the boy once heard someone in America call his father the N word over the boy's head, he convinced "himself that word, that agony, was his father's lot and not his." This was true because of "how unlike his father he was." 

But I thought, near the end of the story, that Sudan was going to sneak into the boy in spite of himself. The boy has noted how "effortless" the "transition" from talking to killing the lamb to talking again happened, and for a moment, I thought that a similar effortless transition was going to happen to the boy, one where at least something of Sudan would get into him unawares. That moment comes on the last day in Sudan, when the Sudan-based family is taking the father and son out for a river cruise. The father is pointing out the sights of Khartoum, and he indicates to the boy the point where the White Nile and Blue Nile come together to form one river:

The boy looked to a spot where he saw, or thought he saw, a shifting band in the river where the two currents, one murky, one milky, met and intertwined. But there was no crash, no violence. No spectacle to suggest different currents fighting for dominance. The river ahead was complacent, the merging silent and unremarkable. Easy to overlook, were it not for his father’s finger showing the way.

"Aha! This is it," I thought. The boy's American self and his Sudanese self are coming together, and will form one whole, and it will happen so effortlessly, he won't even notice! But just as earlier, when the boy seemed to be sharing a moment of mutual understanding with his father, but it was interrupted, so this unnoticed mingling of two worlds is also interrupted. The family on the boat begins to sing a song in praise of wearing traditional clothing instead of Western clothing. The boy wants to "step into the center of all that dancing and singing, to silence it." He and his father almost share another moment of mutual understanding when neither can eat the sandwiches the family offers them, but then a storm comes up, the boat tosses, and the grandfather is pitched off into the river. 

When it becomes apparent that the grandfather had drowned in the Nile, the boy's main concern is for how long it will take to find him, because he still wants to get on his flight to go home. (God, I love this ending.) He is literally standing between his father and the rest of the family at the end. There is no fusion of identities, only a steadfast refusal to allow himself to be transported back into his other life, the one that might have happened if his father hadn't immigrated. 

Should we blame the boy?

For much of the story, I'd guess most readers would be fairly sympathetic to the boy. He's apparently gay and vegetarian, doesn't speak Arabic, and doesn't believe in Islam. He was so happy when his father couldn't afford to keep sending him to a private, Muslim school in America, he felt liberated, and now here he is in the heart of all that he got away from. Although we might feel the boy is wrong to deny all of his heritage, we can certainly understand it. It's not an unusual attitude for a child of immigrants raised in the U.S. to want to live like the people he knows live. 

Still, the myopia of the boy at the end is pretty startling. He's has a few moments while in Sudan of almost kind of connecting with his father. Shouldn't that have made him able to understand, even a little, how his father must feel losing his own? 

Maybe it can't be helped. Maybe for the boy to be himself, to avoid the death that comes from giving up one's own identity, he has to keep his Sudan self at a distance. He can't allow himself to become blended from two distinct flows into one, because "His" Nile--the "White" Nile, tied to his white existence through his mother--can't join the other. 

Two different experiences of geographic origins as sources of identity

In "The Suitcase," Saba is presented with a seemingly impossible choice. During her entire trip to Ethiopia, her family has gone out their way to try to make her feel welcome and loved, but she feels she hasn't measured up. Now, she is being asked to choose which tokens of their love should make it back to America. It's a real Kobiyashi Maru scenario. But much like Captain Kirk, Saba doesn't believe in a no-win situation, and she comes up with a solution where identity doesn't involve hard choices. 

The same elements are there for the taking in "The Three Niles." We have three generations of men brought together at the convergence of the three rivers. The story could have allowed for an "effortless" blending of generations and rivers and identities. It would have been as satisfying as "The Suitcase." But for the boy, there is no way to cheat the Kobiyashi Maru of identity. For the boy, his identity is so completely at odds with the boy he would have been in a life where he grew up in Sudan, that the attempt to bring together the old with the new can only result in the stormy death of the old. 

Releasing versus freeing: "Rosaura at Dawn" by Daniel Saldaña París (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I don't have a grand unified theory for "Rosaura at Dawn," something that makes sense of all the parts both individually and in their relationship to the whole. (I just learned the term "mereological" this week, and I could have used it there to sound really smart, but I feel like it'll be obvious I just learned it and was anxious to show off.) I do, however, have some theories about the parts themselves, and maybe these will be useful to readers as they seek their own ideas for making sense of the whole.

Two physical landscape and one personal, bodily landscape

A lot of what's going on during the few pages of "Rosaura at Dawn" involves comparisons and contrasts. One very clear set of comparison/contrast going on is between the physical border between Tijuana, Mexico, and the United States on the one hand and the body of the unnamed female narrator on the other. The opening lines describe the border: "The fence is topped with barbed wire and winds between the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, zigzags capriciously, and extends into the ocean for about a hundred yards." There are two subsequent invitations to compare the narrator's body to this landscape, one explicit and one implicit. The first is when the narrator describes the scar on her leg from an undisclosed accident as resembling the frontier line, seen from above. (The "bird's eye" that the translator uses is a clever wink to the frequent appearance of birds in the story.) The second is when she refers to the scar on her leg, now fading, as "zigzagging," the same word she used to describe the border fence. 

This juxtaposition of the landscape of the border with the bodily landscape of the narrator likely means that the same feeling the border gives her, one of unfulfilled dreams, is how she feels in her own skin after her undisclosed accident in which her mother died. A body can be a prison, and our scars can serve to remind us of all that's gone wrong.

But then there is another comparison, one between the border and the aviary that Severiano has created for the exotic birds and reptiles the police bring to him after busting illegal exotic animal dealers. In some ways, the aviary performs the same function as the border fence: it keeps some things in and some things out. But instead of being "tall and threatening...the northernmost limit of a dream gone bad," it is, in the narrator's one-word assessment, "awesome." It is constructed "from metal tubes, like the ones used in market stands, and completely covered in chicken wire." Unlike the border, which was built by companies for profit using standard construction materials, this was built by salvaged parts out of love. Chicken wire is much less threatening than barbed wire. The aviary, like the border, is there to restrict entrances and exits, but it shows there can be more reasons for building something like this than fear or (as Severiano's brief time in "the can" reminds us) punishment. Walls and fences can also be a means of providing sanctuary.

There are prisons and border fences, but also bird sanctuaries. Which kind of building will the narrator's body, with its zigzagging scar, end up being? That is the question of the narrative. (Okay, that's sort of a GUT for the story, isn't it?)

The two openings

When I went back to re-read the story, I tried to find the original Spanish version. I succeeded, but only partly. I did find the original online, but only the first few paragraphs. That leaves me to rely on the translation for most of the story. In the little that is available for free online, I did realize that there is a version with a different opening paragraph. The translated version in the O.Henry Anthology goes: 

The fence is topped with barbed wire and winds between the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, zigzags capriciously, and extends into the ocean for about a hundred yards. It stands tall and threatening, rusting in the sunlight, the northernmost limit of a dream gone bad. People peer through it, projecting hopes and a new version of themselves beyond the ICE patrols. There is no escape from this place.

The other version, with my own translation below, goes:

The enormous fence, crowned with barbed wire, winds among the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, cuts a capricious zigzag and, out beyond where it can be seen, ends several meters into the ocean. But the waves that break upon one side are the same that break upon the other, and the clouds cross the line routinely, in both directions, without passports or visas. 

I'm not saying the translator made the first version up. I'm sure there's a different Spanish version out there somewhere. Authors change their vision all the time, including after something has been published, so I guess that between the version online and the publication in O.Henry, the author changed his mind.

The version one goes with has an effect on how one views the resolution for the narrator. Are the barriers of her body a sanctuary or a prison? If we read version one, perhaps the narrator views her scars and her body as a confinement to escape from, but her dreams of escape have been disappointed. Her journey is in learning not to escape, but to find a better kind of confinement, one that provides protection rather than restriction. But if one takes reading number two, then there almost never was a confinement. In nature, nothing respects borders. The narrator needs to learn from nature not, as in the first reading, how to find the right kind of enclosure, but how to ignore enclosures altogether. Version one emphasizes the eventual returning of Rosaura, while version two emphasizes the freedom of her flight.

Chickens

I count four references to chickens in the story. The first is when the narrator sees Severiano in Tijuana. She assumes he is waiting for a pollero, a colloquial Spanish term for a guide to take him across the border into the United States. (Coyote is an older term for the same thing.) A pollero is literally a farmer or poultry owner who takes care of chickens. In this figure of speech, all the people the guide takes over the border are chickens that he is herding. The narrator assumes Severiano is a chicken looking to escape from his cage. She is wrong, of course, just as she is mistaken a moment later when she sees Severiano take the cockatoo Rosaura out of a bag to release her. She thinks at first that it is a chicken he has released. But it isn't a chicken, and as he will point out, he hasn't really released her. The bird is going to fly back to the aviary.

The third mention is the chicken wire that protects the aviary, which is a much less threatening and muscular type of barrier than the barbed wire that protects the border. The final mention is the raw chicken that the narrator feeds the hawk in the aviary. If the people moving around the border are chickens, then the narrator is reminded that sometimes they will end up getting caught and killed as prey for the stronger birds. 

I'm not sure what to make of all this chicken imagery. Obviously, birds are ubiquitous quasi-characters in the story, and chickens, which can kind of fly but not very well, are a good symbol of humanity, which shares some of the natural and animalistic traits of birds but not all of them. Birds might be able to fly over borders easily enough, but not chickens. So humans will have to modify their notions of freedom.

The comparison between chickens and humans is apt.

Releasing vs freedom

The narrator mistakes Severiano's letting the bird go for freeing it, when it fact, Severiano is merely letting it roam for a while before it comes back. There is a secret ritual he performs in order to get her to come back, one he teaches to the narrator, but it involves an incantation she will not even share with the reader. 

When Severiano is gone to take care of old business, the narrator releases Rosaura, the cockatoo. She does it in one of the seediest parts of the city and awaits Rosaura's return back at the farm where the aviary is. When the narrator sees Rosaura returning at dawn (roll credits!), she is deeply moved by it. She'd seen this return before, but "it had never felt so personal, as though the birds were celebrating me too, rejoicing that something inside me had also returned." 

As if this was the last thing Severiano needed to teach her, we find out immediately after this that he has left the farm to her. 

Freedom means the ability to roam wherever and not come back. Releasing means being free for a time an then to return. Whichever opening one uses, what the narrator learns is that there is a relationship between true security and true freedom. Without true security--which for the narrator, means a space so safe not even Jesus or Buddha can come into it--one cannot be well enough to venture out. Without returning to that place, our journeys will eventually wear us down. 

I think the theme of "Rosaura at Dawn" is similar to that of Robert Frost's Poem "Birches." While the transcendence of soaring into heaven is dramatic and liberating, it's the homecoming after the transcendence that is the point of the whole thing:

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Persian Paradise Lost that gets, um, lost: "Mornings at the Ministry" by Ehsaneh Sadr (O.Henry 2025)

I was pretty sure during my first read-through of "Mornings at the Ministry" by Ehsaneh Sadr that I was dealing with an unreliable narrator. Dr. Amir Musavi insists during his account of his dealings with the other, female Dr. Musavi, that he wishes her well at every turn until she becomes his supervisor, and even then that he only turns against her because of her unkind and dishonorable behavior. He explains that he never actually intends to turn over the incriminating evidence he finds against her--that she went without her chador and allowed men close to her while studying abroad--to anyone who could have used it to damage her. At the very end, we find that Amir is unable to hit his daughter in order to teach her not to be like the other Dr. Musavi, but that he does try to hurt her with words. Maybe Amir lacks the killer instinct needed to have really tried to do Ms. Musavi harm, and therefore, perhaps we can believe some of his claims to have not meant to hurt her. 

My guess was that if I looked at it more carefully, though, I would find that Amir is overlooking his own misogyny, his own complicity with Iran's patriarchal and highly sexually repressive society, and that because of this, he misses his own culpability in Ms. Musavi's undoing. On a second reading, I did find some evidence for this, but I would argue that Amir's moral position is more complicated than that of a sexist, Iranian version of Iago. 

Types of unreliable narrator

In considering whether Amir should be considered an unreliable narrator, it might be a good idea to consider some of the ways in which a narrator might be unreliable.

• They might simply be in a bad position to have reliable knowledge. They might have heard a story second-hand, or have incomplete materials to draw from.
• They might know they are lying, and the narrative is a deliberate attempt to deceive.
• They might have an inkling that they are being less than fully true, but they are deceiving themselves as much as the reader. This is probably the most common type of unreliable narrator in contemporary fiction. It's also probably the most common type of lie you'll hear in real life.

It suddenly hit me while reading through the second time that Amir isn't the narrator. This should have been pretty obvious, since it's a third-person narrative, but because it was so closely told from Amir's point of view, I nearly didn't pick up on it. The third-person narrator was revealing Amir's own self-justifications in Amir's own language, exactly as Amir's own thoughts would have run. Above all, the narrator was logging Amir's many examples of protesting too much that he had goodwill toward Ms. Musavi. For example:

• Amir expresses sincere regret that he and his wife Seema had not "gotten around" to inviting Ms. Musavi over for dinner when both Amri and Ms. Musavi were studying abroad in Australia. The justification is that Amir and Seema were too busy with their children. 
• Amir claims it wasn't just a surprise when Ms. Musavi joined his team back in Iran years later, but a pleasant surprise. 
• Amir records having done his best to get Ms. Musavi acclimated to the team, including getting her a better chair than she otherwise might have gotten.
• Amir, in an unexpected show of quasi-feminist enlightenment, scolds his wife for assuming that Ms. Musavi's high rank upon getting hired was a result of connections, a notion he derides as "sexist." 
• Amir supposedly admires Ms. Musavi at first, but does not sexualize her, in spite of the extraordinary amount of time he spends observing her eyebrows from within her chador.

Because I can never remember which is which, here's a helpful visual from the Montreal Gazette.

Everybody's nice until somebody gets promoted over you

Up until Ms. Musavi's promotion, Amir's claims (or the narrator's claims about Amir) to have largely congenial feelings toward Ms. Musavi seem plausible, perhaps even believable. But when she gets promoted over him, his feelings go off the rails. There are a few sources of his newfound hostility to her: she rebuffs his attempts to suggest she be more genial at work, she is tough on junior researchers, but mostly, he finds her sycophantic attitude toward senior officials at work repulsive--especially when contrasted to her bullying attitude toward junior members.

And here, I have to admit to having feelings a little like those that many people have when reading Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton did such a good job of imagining the motivations of Satan in his poem that many people--myself included--report feeling more sympathy toward Lucifer than with God when reading the poem. I knew that Amir's motives were suspect, and that I wasn't supposed to trust his account of Ms. Musavi, and yet I found myself rooting for him and against Ms. Musavi anyway. This is true even though I highly suspected while reading that Amir--or the third person voice reporting on behalf of Amir-was not reliable. Perhaps because the voice was in third person, I felt it was at least somewhat objective when it recorded events and attitudes. This was reinforced because of occasional admissions, such as Amir admitting to jealousy. Sure, maybe she wasn't as bad as Amir said, but still, she was bad enough to root against. 

Who is at fault?

I'm not going to do my "literary court" schtick here, but if I were to do it, this would be a good story for it. 

It is easy to sympathize with Ms. Musavi because of the pervasive patriarchal oppression she finds herself in. It's an oppression in which refusal to meet with expectations can be met with draconian punishments such as acid thrown into a woman's face. It's an oppression where the word "khanoom," a respectful title for a lady like "Miss," can also mean simply "wife of," such that the title that Ms. Musavi is given to disambiguate her from Amir, the other Dr. Musavi, makes her sound like she is his wife, rather than a PhD of her own accord. 

Even though it's easy to feel compassion for Ms. Musavi for being a highly educated woman in a society where she has to hide behind her chador all day in the presence of men, I still found myself not liking her, and agreeing with Amir when he dislikes her. Just like when reading Paradise Lost, even though I know that this isn't what I'm supposed to feel, I felt it anyway. Ms. Musavi strikes me as the type of woman I've come across in professional circles who was given bad advice about how to act like a man as an act of defiance and also as a way to insist on being taken seriously and get ahead. Most women I've known who adopt this philosophy act either like no man I've ever known, or like the kind of man nobody likes. Maybe a hard-edged, opportunistic shark of man does occasionally rise to the top, but in my experience, the one personality type that does well everywhere is the go-along-to-get-along kind. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it does seem to be a truth. Amir's advice to Ms. Musavi was essentially that: chill out, get along better with your colleagues. 

Amir has the good sense and tact to give her this advice one morning at the ministry when he and Ms. Musavi are the only ones there, so he isn't putting her on the spot. Up to that point, he had helped her out in her career and noticed her many strengths. The only drawback he has seen is her "inability or unwillingness to make friends at the ministry." He recognizes that as a woman, it is difficult for her to join in some of the banter with men that allows Amir to make friends. He isn't, perhaps, aware enough of the difficult she has as a woman, though, and as a result, he makes a mess of his advice. 

To my mind, though Ms. Musavi is unduly harsh with Amir. His advice is undoubtedly good, at least in spirit, although she was quick to point out the pitfalls in Iranian society of "making friends with all the men" in the office. Had she tried to respond more charitably, though, she might have learned something. If she came off as cold to Amir, she likely came off as cold to others, and it doesn't really even matter if that is just or not. There is a "perception is reality" predicament at work, and Amir, for all his tone-deafness, is trying to help her with it. 

How it turns out

In spite of being perceived as cold, Ms. Musavi advances to division leader over Amir. Her hard work and ability won out over her perceived aloofness. But I'm not sure Amir's feeling that she became unduly harsh can totally be written off as jealousy. I might be misreading the situation. Possibly, it's more normal in Iran for a senior boss to be very harsh, as Ms. Musavi seemingly was, and so she was just acting like any other male boss would have. But it's hard for me to think that, since so many of the workers in Amir's office seem to have been Western educated and to have picked up at least a little bit of the vibe to mellow out their conservativeness. I would guess the ministry isn't a place where her no-excuses toughness approach would succeed.  

The scene in which Amir goes to do the right thing and give Ms. Musavi the photos which were accidentally delivered to him, of her not wearing her chador and being casual in mixed company while in Australia, but then he is derailed from his good intentions by Ms. Musavi's own brusqueness, is pure Greek tragedy. Perhaps it's best to read the scene in that spirit, where Ms. Musavi's own strengths--her independence and her determination to be taken seriously--end up being her downfall. Had she not started the conversation with belittling Amir, he would have given her the photos and that would have been the end of it.

I think many Western readers--who, let's face it, if they're reading this story, are by and large liberals--will come to the conclusion that Amir was largely that ubiquitous boogeyman of online feminism, the insecure man afraid of a strong woman. That may be part of it, but to me, the story is better and far less obvious than this caricature of men that feminist activism often draws 

Rather than being a cartoonishly evil man who masks his evil through culturally accepted ideas of propriety, Amir is a good man who isn't quite good enough. He's been exposed to some modern ideas about women's roles, and to some extent, he agrees with them and is happy to comply. In a less unjust society, his casual willingness to be thoughtful when it isn't too hard for him would probably be all that is morally required of him. But in the context of an Iran that will put the feet of the non-compliant woman into a bed of cockroaches, it isn't enough. Amir is a man of average moral makeup when the situation requires moral greatness. 

Amir has good intentions but is irresolute. He has too much of a tendency to assume what has been passed on to him is good. He accepts most of the cultural conservatism as necessary, although he is willing to "be reasonable" about small sins. When confronted with his own daughter's laxity, his initial response, because he fears for his own daughter's safety, is to hit her for her own protection, in order to prevent her from ever ending up in the same compromising position as Ms. Musavi. He can't bring himself to do it, so he opts instead to call her a jendeh whore, which is kind of like calling her a whore twice. Even with that, though, he doubts himself: "Had he gone too far, saying words that might cause her to doubt her worth? All he wanted was to protect her." The story is a recognition of how difficult it can be for a person of ordinary moral judgment and strength to make sound moral decisions in a society where values are so wrong. 

Symbolism

Speaking of protecting, the story makes wonderful use of symbolism, particularly in the chador. When Amir and his wife were overseas, they tried to explain the virtues of the chador to skeptical Westerners. However, "Amir wasn't sure they were ever able to convince Westerners that the chador actually elevated and empowered women by protecting their delicate and yielding parts behind an impenetrable, iron curtain."

Amir believes that on an intelligent woman like Ms. Musavi, the chador served to both make her even more intimidating compared to unveiled men (maybe with a similar effect to mirrored sunglasses) and also to deaden sexual desire. And with this second claim, I do feel with a greater degree of certainty than with others that Amir really is protesting too much. The chador really does nothing to deaden his erotic feelings for her. He simply redirects them. Given only her eyebrows to work with, he manages to make them erotic and to fetishize them, to obsess about them until the mere suggestion of a similarity in his own daughter, another Ms. Musavi, drives him to act in a way he is himself ashamed of. 

The title of the story is "Mornings at the Ministry." There is only one morning at the ministry that is covered in any great detail in the story, and that's the morning when Amir tries to counsel Ms. Musavi. Yet the story is called "Mornings," plural, at the ministry. This title, perhaps, reveals what Amir has carefully tried to cover through the chador of a third-person narrator, which is that he sexualizes Ms. Musavi, in spite of himself, and that these feelings make him unable to keep his other feelings in balance enough to do the right thing. To the narrator naming the story, the thing that stands out most are the moments when Amir was alone with Ms. Musavi before anyone else came in to work.

It's possible that the erotic attraction is partly about more than sex. It might be that Ms. Musavi represents a greater cultural freedom that attracts Amir even while he fears it. Whatever the feeling is, Amir is eventually unable to reconcile his commitments to public rectitude with the private, undeveloped intuitions of his conscience. 

A merciful two-for-one: "Countdown" by Anthony Marra and "Just Another Family" by Lori Ostlund (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

There are two kinds of stories I feel I can mostly skip over when I'm blogging my way through one of the big short story anthologies. One is a story I think so bad, so undeserving of its place in one of those anthologies, that I just can't bring myself to look at it closely. Those aren't any fun to do. The other is a story that seems to me so obviously accessible to nearly any reader, there isn't much for me to do. If the point of me blogging is, for the most part, to help a bright and curious but non-literary-professional see things in a story they might not see for themselves, then a story that doesn't really present many difficulties for the non-professional is one where I can take the day off. 

That's the case for both "Countdown" and "Just Another Family" from the O.Henry 2025 Anthology. In the case of "Just Another Family," I've already dealt with it (or not dealt with it) before, because it was in last year's Best American Short Stories. It's a fun and funny story that pretty much anyone can read and enjoy, but it's also a little long for the kind of analysis I do here, plus I don't know that the analysis would add much.

For "Countdown," there might be some context to the story that isn't familiar to an American reader not familiar with life in modern Russia. However, I think most of that context can be inferred pretty easily, at least enough to understand the stakes of the story. It's very easy to find oneself sympathizing with the family trying to avoid getting pulled into Russia's immoral war with Ukraine, especially given that Alexei's brother sacrificed his own life for Alexei in another, earlier episode of Putin's adventurism in Chechnya. Alexei's many and familiar foibles add to our ability to empathize with the family. He's not a perfect person, and he has likely lived his life fully aware of how little he has justified his brother's sacrifice, but for that reason, he comes across as an underdog, and who can resist rooting for an underdog? Especially one in a beat-up car racing for the border? 

We probably tend to think (if we aren't repeating Putin's propaganda) of the victims in the war being primarily in Ukraine itself, but "Countdown" reminds us that there are plenty of victims in the aggressor country, too. American readers can perhaps see parallels from our own history of fighting a largely unjust war in Vietnam but still feeling sympathy for young American service members sent to fight there. 

I'll only offer two very quick observations, which are more questions I won't even bother to answer than they are analytical assertions. Feel free to answer these questions for yourself.

1. When I was in graduate school, I had a moment where I couldn't stand to read fiction anymore. On every page of every story, I felt like I could see tricks. Maybe film students learning about technique go through something similar where they can't just enjoy a movie as a normal viewer anymore, and it kills all the magic. Every time I saw a technique that felt "writerly" to me, the whole spell of the work was gone. I left grad school not wanting to read anymore, and it took me a few years go get over it. 

I'm mostly over that instinctive repulsion now, but there are still passages I read where I have a hard time staying under the spell of the suspension of disbelief. Here's one from "Countdown": Very early in the story Alexei and Sonya are sitting at the table talking about trying to get flights out of the country. "Sonya set her passport on the kitchen table. She'd been smelling the visa itself, which had the fresh, fibrous scent of a newly minted banknote." 

I recognize that this is good technique. Most of the story moves pretty fast, which is appropriate, because it mirrors how events moved fast early in the war and how quickly the family needs to make decisions in order to escape. This passage, then, has the effect of momentarily grounding the reader in the world through a slowed-down, tangible, five-senses observation. And because writing advice tells us that anyone can use sight or sound but real pros use taste, smell, and touch, it picks one of the cooler senses. Everything is right about it, but I felt that old, instinctive desire to keep the work at arm's length. This might explain what might be my own greatest flaw as a writer, because I tend to resist putting observations like this in my own work. I don't know how to alternate between movement and slowing down, because I myself so dislike slowing down as a reader. While there is nothing I can say to really critique a passage like this, because I know it's the "right" way to write, I do wonder, when I read it, if I've completely followed a wrong path in life with literature, because part of me is constitutionally not built for it.

2. I don't usually look up anything about writers themselves, because I think it's not relevant to examining the text of the story. For this story, though, I made an exception, because it made me wonder if Marra himself had a personal background in Russia. It doesn't appear to me that he does, although he has written about Russia and Chechnya before and once studied in "Eastern Europe." I'm sure he's done more than his fair share of research. Not just research, which has an end goal in mind, but study, which starts from a more open-ended perspective of wanting to discover truth. I write stories about Korea or Ethiopia, because I think I've studied enough to do them justice, and there's certainly no reason Marra couldn't do the same with Russia. 

But would a top literary journal like Zoetrope, and a top anthology like The Best Short Stories, allow a white male writer to publish stories about, say, Nigeria the way they allowed this story about Russia? Are there modern examples of a Conrad writing about Africa without added scrutiny in the way Marra writes about Russia? Isn't it at least as possible that Marra's outsider view differs in important ways from a native Russian such that the story would feel alien to a native as it is that an outsider writing about the DRoC would feel somehow odd to a native there? Do we allow white writers to write about Russia in ways we don't allow for with Latin America or Africa because most inhabitants of Russia are white, and our American liberal perspective tells us that color matters more than geopolitical or cultural complexity?

I'm certainly no expert on Russian affairs, but a few things struck me while reading "Countdown" (which, again, I liked very much and think of as an obvious "thumbs up") that felt slightly off. One was Alexei's penchant for taking his news from Reddit. I really had no idea if Reddit was popular in Russia. When I originally read it, I didn't know anything about Marra, so I thought, "Oh, that's interesting. Here's a writer of likely Russian origin telling me that Reddit was a big thing in pre-invasion Russia." But it turns out that Reddit wasn't really that big in Russia. VK is by far the most-used social media platform in Russia. But okay, maybe Alexei was very Western-leaning, and so he hung out on Reddit. Maybe he's an unusual Russian. I also wonder, though, whether Alexei should have been refreshing Instagram, which was blocked in Russia in March 2022, just a few weeks after the invasion. I don't know the exact time of the story, but it's not quite the very first days of the war, because we have a reference to "since the first days of the war." 

I'm not sure enough to call the inclusion of either of those sites exactly "wrong," but I guarantee that in the real world, Alexei would not have found flights to Pyongyang in 2022. The story has him finding "even flights to Pyongyang" booked. (I could be wrong that these are still the early days of the war, but it does seem that we are still in 2022 in this story. I think it might be late 2022, when mobilizations began. And if it isn't the early days, then there's no way Instagram is still working. Unless Alexei is cleverly using VPNs to access it, which we know he doesn't know how to do.) North Korea wasn't allowing any foreign flights into the country at this time. So you couldn't find "booked flights" to Pyongyang. You couldn't have found flights at all. 

Then there is the child, Masha, who repeats Alexei's cursing. This is a charming part of the story, and Masha's eventual cursing out of a car impatiently beeping at them presents a needed moment of defiance. Still, I can't help but wonder what the original Russian is when she repeats "Fucking, fucking fuck." There are times to present the dialogue in direct translation and times when it feels right to me to first present it in the original Russian, and this should have at least some reference in it to the original Russian. 

Again, this is a good, even a very good, story. I don't think any of these quibbles make it less so. But I do think it's quite possible that if a white, male writer did a similar story about a family in Sudan trying to escape the trials of war there, and there were a few small factual derivations from reality in it, it's possible there would be an outcry among some politically liberal readers in America. I think it's especially possible there would have been such an outcry if this story had come a few years ago, when being woke was safer. 

I don't think such a reaction is necessary or helpful in the case of this story, and I don't think it would have been necessary or helpful in the case of a story written by a white, male writer about China or India or Lesotho or Haiti, but I can imagine it happening for the latter cases much more than I can for Russia, and I 'm not sure the reason for this makes much sense. You can have stories written by insiders, like Maria Reva's amazing story "Letter of Apology," set in late-Soviet Ukraine, but you can also have a story written from the observations of a keen outsider who has done the work to learn from another part of the world than the one he comes from, as in the story with Marra. And if this is true of a politically complicated place like Russia, then it ought to be true of anywhere. 

Am I wrong? If so, am I wrong because it really would be wrong for a male, white writer from Nebraska to write about a family from Sudan, or am I wrong because if the story were good enough, there really wouldn't be any pushback, even if it contained a few minor errata? 

I guess you can't buy an epiphany: "Winner" by Ling Ma" (O.Henry 2025)

First, an update:

I said I might have to ditch blogging about contemporary short stories in my last post. That might still happen soon, but for now, I have a little bit of daylight and might as well keep going. I had already half-written this post anyway. 

Having been off of work for the past almost eight months provided me with an interesting perspective for reading "Winner" by Ling Ma, which I now launch into. 

Winners and losers

It's pretty common to speak of a capitalist society in terms of winners and losers. Those who really believe in the system tend to speak as though the winners--those who accumulate wealth--deserve to win and those who lose--the poor--deserve to lose. Critics of the system point out that there is a lot of contingency involved in who makes it and who doesn't. It could have gone a different way. Another word for "contingency" in this sense is "luck."

The unnamed narrator (N) in "Winner," a second-generation immigrant from an unnamed foreign country, knows she is lucky. She was struggling to survive in the system just like most of us, working late hours and coming home at night to eat, drink, and watch TV before passing out in her small apartment. Then she won $60 million in the Powerball. That's not Elon Musk money, but it is enough to never have to work again.

Immune...or maybe not

Common wisdom suggests that lottery winners often end up unhappy, although at least one article suggests that's not the case for most. According to widely accepted belief, which the story seems to at least partly accept when it warns of winners "falling into destitution," lottery winners are at profound risk of losing their moorings, making bad decisions, getting depressed, and blowing all their money in a short amount of time. Publicity surrounding the cases where this has happened may tend to make many people exaggerate the danger in a sort of availability heuristic. But even if the danger isn't as prevalent as many of us have been led to believe, the danger is there, and even if the average lottery winner doesn't blow all their money, there's still the question of what to do with your life now. Malaise can set in as winners struggle to figure it all out. 

N should be immune from the malaise. The tendency to blow money is American: “It is not choosing the ‘big’ things that is fundamentally American but the blind insistence on grandiosity despite the reality of circumstances. It’s not living beyond your means, it’s the unceasing, headless insistence on ‘the best,’ whatever that is.” But N, as a second-generation immigrant whose boss praised her because she's "no American," ought to be immune, right? She ought to be grounded in whatever traditional values she was raised with, the ones that make her work longer hours while slacking Americans dip out of work, right?

Sort of. N doesn't seem to have blown all her money. She thinks, while she, her husband, and her child drive around town on a Saturday, that they could be mistaken for a normal, middle-class family. Their home does have some extravagances in it, but they're extravagances that are accruing in value. She insists on buying toys for their child, but that's hardly going to bankrupt them. 

So N managed not to blow all her money, but she's also pretty clearly rudderless and unsure what to do with all her luck. That's why, when she finds the keys to her old apartment, she makes a totally unnecessary trip back to the building where she used to live.

                        This story got this song stuck in my head, so I'm paying it forward to you.

Normally, if keys are a symbol of anything, it would be of unlocking some clue that leads to enlightenment or resolves a difficulty. Finding a key should be the thing that immediately precedes the main character's epiphany, but in this case, it's the opposite. Finding the keys leads N to become more enmeshed in her confusion. It's significant that the keys are on a "daisy key chain." This could mean, of course, that it's a keychain in the shape of a daisy, but it also suggests the notion of the "daisy chain," when one thing after another is linked together. It suggests that as much as N's big moment of winning the lottery should have freed her from her troubles, she's still linked to the same things that were troubling her in the past, like her need for acceptance from her boss and, by extension, her parents. The keychain isn't a symbol of solving a puzzle; it's a symbol of staying stuck. 

This is one kind of daisy chain. Also, I think Daisy Chain would be a good name for a female professional wrestler.

Critic of the system...or maybe not

In N's pre-lottery days, she worked in an insurance brokerage company. She was miserable, working for another person whose origins were in the same country as N's parents. N's boss took advantage of this to shame N into working longer. N hated working there and was generally unhappy in life. She sees having won as having "narrowly escaped" her life. 

N is full of quips critiquing capitalism. There's the comment quoted above about Americans always wanting to choose the best of everything. (If that's true, why do so many people shop at Walmart?) Then N calls insurance brokerage "ugly and corrupt, like all things healthcare-related in the United States.” She notes with sadness the creeping gentrification of her old neighborhood. The old liquor store now has a mural on it of "animals punching each other in a rainbow boxing ring," surely a metaphor for the dog-eat-dog competition of capitalism and how it's covered over with glitz. She also notes that her old apartment isn't too far from her current one, a nod to how in America, the rich are sometimes a block away from the poor. 

This might make it seem like N is anti-capitalist, but she's not, at least not enough to really get away from it. She notes that money did do one good thing for her, which was to enable her to get fertility treatments that made her son a possibility. When her son is struggling for life in the NICU, the only thing N can think of as an enticement to her son to stay alive is that all her money will give him a nice life. She promises him a nice life through plastic, the same material the fake bushes in front of her old apartment are made of. N then follows this up by spoiling her son with toys. Her husband notes that they're "doing it wrong" by raising their son this way, but N only responds with a non-committal "I hear you." 

Escapee returns to the scene of the crime

N refers to herself as having "escaped" from her former life, and confesses that this makes her feel guilty somehow, although she knows that "being lucky isn't a crime." So why does she go back to the old apartment? Not just go back, but break in, using her old keys? She justifies it by saying you "can't trespass into what's familiar," but I don't think this is a sound legal defense. Being lucky might not be a crime, but breaking into an apartment is. It's the kind of risky behavior people engage in when they're deeply bored. 

There's something about N that makes her want to go back to her old life. She keeps going back to the old apartment, and while there, she's applying for work. It's something she and her therapist have cooked up, to get her back to "gainful employment" (whatever that is). She claims that going to the old apartment is the most "productive" (whatever that is) that she's been in a long time. Unsure what to do with herself, N resorts to nostrums of capitalism, seeking "gainfulness" and "productivity." 

It isn't just N, either. Her old boss, "Mr. B," has sold the apartment building for "a tidy sum," enough that he can now retire to the fancy old folks home not far away. But even though he seemingly hated working when he owned the place and did nothing but watch TV whenever tenants came to him with problems, he now keeps coming back to the building to tidy it up. He asks N, without any sense of the irony he is engaging in, what he's supposed to do with his retirement, watch TV all day? 

I'm sure we all know people who talk their whole lives about retirement, and then when they get there, they complain they're bored and go looking for something to do, often another job. I have to say, after eight months of being quasi-retired, I do not understand this. Not working for most of these last eight months has been everything I ever dreamed it would be. The only thing that's ruined it has been the need to look for work, which in many ways is more time-consuming than work is. (I have a pension, but it's not enough to live off of by itself for long. We've been slowly going through savings and trying to live thriftily, but at some point, I'm going to need a job.) People who get antsy in retirement actually make me angry. I do not understand it. With full and real retirement, I would: do volunteer work; workout; read; write; put more energy into this blog; fuck off and do nothing when I feel like it. I foresee zero existential crises from this lifestyle. But N and Mr. B both seem to not know what to do with themselves now that they have the gift of time, which is really the best thing money can buy.

N's dull-headed epiphany

N sort of finally cracks this revelation near the end. "I think the real trick is to convert money into time," she declares, as though this is any kind of discovery. She ends the story by crawling into bed to take a nap, insisting that time is hers to waste if she wants. It appears that the closest thing she's had to a revelation is to stop feeling like she needs to "produce" or be "gainful." She can waste time if she wants to. In the words of her therapist, she can take up space, both in the temporal part of space-time as well as the spatial part. N worried there was something "disgusting" about this kind of sprawl, but her therapist assures N that she is "American," meaning it's her God-given right to take up as much space and time as she can afford to. Her spreading out beneath her sheets in the middle of the day is her taking up both space and time. 

Sometimes, stories present us with clear and strong epiphanies. The character thought one thing, then went through some kind of experience that made them think another, and now they've changed for good. Other stories present us with a very minor epiphany, one that more closely mirrors the kinds of changes people go through in life. Then there are stories that present us with false epiphanies or refused epiphanies, where the protagonist either is offered a chance to change and decides not to or the protagonist thinks they've made a change for the good, but we, the reader, can see that they're actually going in the wrong direction. There's probably an argument to be made that N has either made a minor change or that she's actually experience an anti-epiphany, a faulty realization that will actually do her harm. Life has come to her, presenting her with a valid point in the same way her husband has presented her with a valid point about raising their child, and N has politely ignored the advice in favor of her own mistaken beliefs. N's therapist has helped her into her bad realization, although maybe the therapist can be forgiven, because the bad and somewhat stereotypical therapist advice--to take up space--is partly a result of N not being honest during her sessions.

N misses both what's good and bad about capitalism

As a lottery winner, N's story is really capitalism in microcosm. All winners in capitalism have some luck; N just knows it. Her awareness of her luck, in addition to her status as a quasi-outsider as a result of her feeling uncomfortable being an American, should make her able to provide a unique perspective on the contradictions of capitalism. But N is too busy being swallowed up by those contradictions. 

On the one hand, in spite of her proclamations about the disgrace of American health care, she's unable to see what's bad about the system she lives in. She doesn't notice the bushes at her old apartment are fake until she gets up close, and she doesn't realize her old apartment she's crashing into is now the model home that nobody lives in until Mr. B catches her in the apartment one day. She literally can't tell fake from real. 

On the other hand, she also misses some of what's good about capitalism, and yes, in spite of all the terrible contradictions and inequalities of capitalism, there are some positives. Her skepticism about healthcare ignores all the hardworking nurses and doctors in the NICU who help save her son when he is born. N sees these doctors and nurses quickly moving from one patient to the next, rather than spending all of their time with her because she is rich, but she doesn't note the egalitarianism of the NICU, the way the caregivers treat every patient the same. 

"Winner" seems on the surface to offer a critique of capitalism, but looking deeper, as N does with the bushes, one can see that this isn't really where the story's headed, because its protagonist isn't capable of looking at it closely enough. There are some scattered observations about the lack of logic in the system, but nothing coherent and unifying. The story works better as a study of the psychology of the lucky winner. Whether destitute lottery winners are really as ubiquitous as believed, it's certainly true that capitalism's winners of all types, whether they won the lottery, inherited a building from their parents, or simply had enough things go right in life that they are finally able to retire in comfort, often act in ways that don't make a lot of sense. What we're really all chasing in the rat race should be time, but we need to develop ourselves such that know what to do with it when we get it.  

BASS drops today, so why aren't I writing about it?

All evidence to the contrary, I don't like to indulge too much in talking about myself on this blog. It started out with it being all about me, but I discovered after not too long that even I didn't find myself that interesting, so I switched to talking about what I was reading. That was a good change, and I've mostly stuck to it. I'm happy to insert my own life into a discussion of what I'm reading if I think it'll make it more relevant, but I try to only make a post all about me when my own life is getting in the way so much of blogging about literature that I can't avoid it.

Now is one of those times. Today is the day Best American Short Stories 2025 comes out. For the last seven years, BASS is the one thing I've been consistent about doing. Even when I've quit on BASS, I've gone back later and finished it. Last month, I started working on the O.Henry Anthology, hoping I could finish it quickly enough to get to BASS today. I didn't. I'm only about halfway through O.Henry, and I'm not moving in any great hurry. I think I owe readers an explanation of what's going on.

Job front

I mentioned last month that I was about to start a new job, and that it was possible this job would keep me from being able to move forward with blogging. That job was as a 911 dispatcher. After more than six months of looking for work after leaving my job at NSA, I wasn't finding anything. For the most part, I wasn't even getting responses. There had been numerous instances of being completely ignored I found especially humiliating. I applied for an admissions counselor job at my alma mater, Walsh University. I was their honor graduate in 2000, and I feel like my resume since that time is nothing to sneeze at, so I thought I might at least get a call, but I didn't. I applied for a Korean language administrative job near Youngstown, about 45 minutes away. I was rejected for that without an interview, even though they're still advertising for it. How many Korean-speaking applicants do they get in Youngstown that made them so sure they didn't even need to interview me?

There have been many more indignities such as these I've had to face. Entry-level open-source intelligence analyst positions I didn't get past the first round with. Others where I've received responses that said, in coded language, that I was overqualified, no matter how much my cover letter and resume tried to account for that by explaining the unexpected change of life I've had and why it meant I was now applying for entry-level jobs. 

So when the 911 job only took into account my score on a civil service exam and my stated willingness to take it, I thought I'd better try, even though I had my doubts I'd be able to do it. I'm not a great multi-tasker, and midnight twelve-hour shifts sounded like they'd be a lot for me. They were. I've already quit that job. It seemed unlikely to me I'd ever become good at listening to four things at the same time, and I go to the bathroom more in 12 hours than all the other dispatchers I was watching did combined. So I'm back to no job, no prospects, and feeling like garbage. I still think I did the only morally permissible thing for me when I left the government, but it's gone even worse than my low expectations anticipated since early March.

Law School

Because I don't think my prospects are great, I've thought of going back to school. I took the LSAT in the beginning of October, and I'll find out the results on Friday. When I was taking practice tests, I wasn't doing that great, but on the actual test, I felt like I did amazing. That also had something to do with my decision to leave the 911 job. That job requires about 4-6 months of training before you're a real dispatcher, and after taking the test, I felt like I would have probably just gotten paid for those months of training before leaving to go to law school. That didn't feel like a fair thing to do to a kind of poor city that needs every dollar it has. 

Maybe I'm overly confident here, and maybe my LSAT score won't be that great, but if it is about where I think it is, I only intend to apply to one school, and I only intend to go if I get a full ride or something very close to it. I don't need more student loans at my age. If I can get this deal, then law school seems like the best bet for me. Even with all the doomsday prophecies about AI taking entry-level law jobs, I think this is a better choice than anything else I can come up with right now. I don't need the top job at the top firm. I just need a job. 

So close to retired and yet not quite there

I'm very lucky, and I know that. I have a pension now. Because the government drawdown included an offer for early retirement, I am now getting paid every month to do nothing. I get paid about as much as a technician at Jiffy Lube has to work 40 hours a week to make. In addition, my parents, who are beyond thrilled to have one of their children living near them, have helped us out financially with the move back. Without them, I wouldn't have been able to absorb all these months without work. I have a lot to be grateful for. 

With all that good fortune, though, I'm still not quite able to really retire, at least not if I want to live more than hand-to-mouth from now until I die. We got a late start on our 401K savings, and shaving off the last five years of my government career when I was making my highest salary really killed any hope I had of making up the ground. I'm going to have to leave what I have saved there for a long time and hope it grows if I want it to help when I really am too old to be able to work. That means I have to find something now.

When I first started looking for work, I wanted a real career like the one I had just before retiring. I was looking for something challenging and interesting. The longer I went without getting something like that, the more I started to think I'd be happy to do anything. Maybe, I thought, it'd be better to have a kind of ordinary job, one that didn't require me to learn anything new, because that would leave me free to blog and read and write. I don't need much in terms of salary. I just need a job of some sort. But when I apply for those jobs, no matter how much I try to dumb down my resume, I don't get calls. 

If I were really retired...

If I were able to really retire, I wouldn't go to law school. Law is interesting, but it's not the most interesting thing I can think of. In fact, I'm not sure I'd even spend any more time than I am spending currently on literature (unless I somehow got paid to do this blog, and that was the thing making it possible for me to stop working, but that is never going to happen). 

When I left my job, the first thing I thought of that I wanted to do with my life was return to studying one question: Does God exist? Since I was sixteen, it's been the question I've been most interested in, although for many decades of my life, I had to put that interest on hold while I did dumb things like join the Marine Corps, go to grad school, get married, have kids, and work to support a family for over twenty years. 

Lately, I've found myself listening to podcasts and looking, at a beginner level, into philosophical discussions about God's existence. If I didn't have any responsibilities with my life, I can easily see that being what I'd do with most of my day every day. 

Of course, the question of whether God exists goes beyond philosophy and requires an understanding of science, math, history, linguistics, and literature, all of which I could dig into as much as my old brain could handle if I didn't have to worry about working. And maybe my current background in literature and even literary theory might be useful in thinking about the God question. Since most prominent thinkers involved in the discussion surrounding God's existence don't have backgrounds in literature, I might even be useful to such a discussion. So if I were really retired, I probably would continue to read literature critically, but all the other stuff I'd be reading would definitely change my output. 

"Isn't the ontological argument just a modus ponens argument that can be undercut using a modus tollens argument in response?"

Put it all together

To sum up everything I'm thinking in one run-on, stream-of-consciousness sentence, which is, it so happens, more or less how I actually think about my life at least once an hour, it would run thus:

I don't want to work anymore but I still need to work but I can't find much of anything so I should go do something that will help me find a job but that will require a lot of work and even thought I might enjoy that work I wouldn't enjoy it as much as other things and for the time being since I have some time maybe I should keep blogging about literature since I've been doing that for a long time but also maybe I should be getting ready for law school or maybe I should be studying the philosophy of religion since that's really the thing I'm most interested in in all the world but then again that's a pretty big subject and I'm new to it and probably too old to ever become an expert in it so maybe I should just read about it on the side and focus mostly on literature since I do sort of know about that already or maybe I'm dumb and I should quit thinking about stuff that doesn't matter and only think about a job and taking care of my family and what's wrong with me that I can't find a job. 

So to sum up, I may or may not be blogging on BASS this year, or ever. 

A 1960s existentialist play smashed into a 2025 short story: "The Spit of Him" by Thomas Korsgaard (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I had two thoughts during the first half of reading "The Spit of Him" by Thomas Korsgaard. First, what I thought I was reading was something of a mashup between Death of a Salesman and Waiting for Godot. I thought I was going to read about a salesman wandering from house to house in search of someone who might take pity upon him and buy what he was hawking. This was, in my imagination, going to be some kind of metaphor for the human condition, in which we wander in a cold rain looking in vain for someone to empathize with us. My guess, until Kevin meets the Madsen family, was that he would continue wandering and never finding anyone to connect with, and that this would all reflect his early reflection that "There were so many people you would never meet. Most, in fact."

The second thought I had was that the style was very much similar to Raymond Carver or other highly stripped-down, bare-prose-style writers, the kinds that introduction to fiction writing books or many graduate writing programs of the 2000s favored. Most of the language is describing only what Kevin sees, what he says, what he does, and what others say and do to him. There are only a small number of trips into Kevin's head, and even those are short-lived, although they do get a lot done in terms of filling in gaps.

Surprises everywhere

While the second impression held throughout my reading of "The Spit of Him," the first one didn't. It turned out that Kevin's decision to head to the next town over to sell Christmas sticker in spite of warnings from his old man wasn't about the journey, it was about the destination. This is true even though Kevin was unaware of what the Madsens meant to his family, and seemingly remained unaware even after his meeting with them. 

The whole story gets turned on its head when Kevin shows up at the Madsens. In most short stories that appear in an anthology like O.Henry or Best American Short Stories, there are plenty of surprises, but not really what you'd call a "twist." Twists--the girl in the boat was the escaped convict, the apparent victim was actually the thief, the main character was dead the whole time--are for movies or plays, not literary short stories. Meg Wolitzer's introduction to Best American Short Stories in 2017 warned against the use of "unearned surprise for a surprise's sake" in short stories, and it seems most literary stories heed this warning.

But the twist in "Spit" is completely natural, possibly because the story itself feels more like reading the script of a play than a short story. There are actually two surprises revealed during Kevin's interaction with the Madsens, at least for me. I was thinking Kevin was in his twenties, perhaps, and possibly a person with special needs who had been tasked by an organization responsible for helping him with going out and selling the stickers. I did not realize this was a nine-year-old kid, and I was surprised when that fact came out. The second surprise, of course, is that Kevin's father used to live in the town he warned his son to stay away from but left when he hit and killed the child of the town's candle-making big employers, the Madsens, in an automobile accident. Henrik Madsen, the father, seems pretty convinced that Kevin's father was drunk when the accident happened, although if that's true, one wonders how Kevin's father has seemingly been present for Kevin's whole life instead of in prison. 

So it turns out the story isn't an existentialist tale of wandering, but instead about this interaction between the child of the guy who killed a young man and the parents of the dead child. In addition to being the kind of pared-down prose fiction primers like, it also uses dialogue in the way that those same introductory texts call for. The mother and father don't agree with one another about how to deal with Kevin, and every word they say contradicts each other. They are also talking past Kevin the whole time. 

Symbols and theme

Just because the prose and the settings are plain doesn't mean there isn't a lot going on to think about. All of the three houses Kevin visits have changes of lighting. The first one has lights on until he knocks, at which point the lights go off. The second house's lights are off, until the owner approaches Kevin from behind and, seemingly knowing who he is, gets angry and goes in the house, turning the lights on as he does. 

The Madsen house ought to be the very symbol of light. They make candles, a business that they say employs half of the town. And, in fact, when he rings the doorbell a second time, the lights come on, and mother Birgitte answers. She's a little stand-offish, but seeing a child out in the cold rain badly dressed for it, she takes pity on him and decides to buy his stickers. It seems that his journey to find a sympathetic soul is over after only three houses. But when Henrik arrives at the door, he recognizes the boy because he's "the very spit of" his father, and that leads to a longer interaction. 

Right after Kevin mentions Thailand, where his father's girlfriend's son lives, and adds that he has never been there, one of the candles on the chest of drawers in the Madsen's hall goes out. Birgitte re-lights it. 

One of the few entries we have into Kevin's head gives us the line about there being more people in the world you don't know than you don't. The mention of Thailand as a place Kevin has never gone, and likely will never go to, adds to this original line. There are also more places in the world you'll never see than there are places you will. Because of this unavoidable lack of experience, none of us really receives much light or knowledge in our lifetimes. We're all kind of provincial, tied only the the small number of experiences even the most cosmopolitan of us can ever have. Kevin is an extreme example of that kind of insularity, because he's never even been as far before as this one little town not far from his own. His father isn't exactly going to open up the world to him, either. One house he's been to turns its lights off when he approaches, literally refusing to share its knowledge with him. The second turns its lights on only after it has told him to leave. The third turns its lights on, and the mother, at least, makes an effort to keep them on when they threaten to go out. But it's only the sputtering light of a candle, and even Birgitte's care can't make it much more light than that. 

At one point, Kevin literally attempts to allow in more light. When Henrik says that Kevin looks like his father, Kevin points out that he has his mother's eyes, and he "widens them so that both Henrik and Birgitte could see." But Henrik ignores this and points out Kevin's nose, which is exactly like his father's. Kevin has traveled in search of bettering himself, but the world seems not to want to answer when he knocks. The scant light from a candle that the one sympathetic person he finds lights for him is scarcely enough to help him to see with. 

In addition to light that is unavailable to him to see with, there are also signs he cannot decipher. He sees a sign at the first home offering appointments to shop in the store attached to the home, but no phone number. The Madsen home offers a candle showroom, but Kevin, although he knows about the candles, is not brought in to see them. Finally, there is graffiti-scratch on the bus stop he is waiting at near the end of the story when he is ready to go home. The graffiti sort of offers several versions on it of microfiction, tiny stories told only by the smallest of hints. "torkild lund is a joke" is one. A "for a good time call" phone number and subsequent commentary on the number is another. These microfictional stories further emphasize the theme of how many people there are in the world, each with their own story, and yet we will never be able to enter in to those stories.

Even the few openings we have into Kevin's interiority are kind of like microfictions themselves. We get a paragraph about his father, spitting his phlegm into the sink. We get the heartbreaking look at his party box under his bed and his hope that he'll be able to add the Madsens to his list of invitees. Last, we get him remembering his father's commentary on the moon in Thailand, and how by comparison, the moon in Denmark where Kevin lives is small and pale. Again, this last little peak into Kevin's mind emphasizes how small his world is and how little chance he has for enlightenment living in it. 

Nod to the translator, Martin Aitken 

I don't speak Danish, but I've been a translator for most of my adult life. I know how hard it can be to get certain phrases translated well, especially when there's a play on words in the original. I don't know what the Danish original was for "Cow-hoof trimmer? Age's no beginner!" but I'm impressed by how it came out in English.