Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq

“No matter how simple some things might seem, they’re not, or at least not always.” So begins Banu Mushtaq’s story, “The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri.” The opening paragraph to the story reads like an artistic vision for what the short stories in Heart Lamp explore. The passage continues:

People behave in strange and illogical ways when they’re afraid they may have to take responsibility. I have reason to think about such things. The revelation that I can no longer justify my own erratic behaviour on these terms is a recent one, however; it came to me many years after the event itself. No doubt this awareness gradually became stronger over time, but, even so, various aspects of that incident jump up from the depths of my memory every now and then, with a thud and without any warning. (187)

This personal reflection from the story’s lawyer protagonist gives voice to the deeply human quality of the stories from this year’s International Booker Prize winner. Banu Mushtaq’s stories are probing, examining seemingly simple phenomenon and adding layers of nuance so that the “illogical ways” people behave are explained more richly. For a number of characters, indeed, their behaviours are ways of coping with the fear of taking responsibility. In “The Shroud,” for example, the main character promises to, but ultimately neglects to, buy a funeral shroud for a poor woman while she’s on her Hajj, and has a complete breakdown from the guilt. In “A Decision of the Heart,” there’s a complex interplay of conflict between a man, wife, and her mother-in-law, which prompts the son to get his mother married off. The conflicted impulses of the story read like a Dostoyevski novel, with characters engaging in self-destruction to avoid confronting their own flaws.

The declarative tone of the passage above is also reflective of why I think that of all this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist, Heart Lamp is most likely to be seen as a ‘classic.’ The collection is not afraid of making assertions about humanity and grapples with art’s most classic topics: love, death, marriage, birth, religion. 

The construction of the stories is also compelling. It’s here that I’ll have to offer my first disclaimer in reviewing Heart Lamp. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I tend not to enjoy the short story as a literary form as much as I do poetry or novels; they often feel to me like seeing a passing acquaintance rather than bonding with a close friend. Just as I start to get to know the characters, their story is done. I had a similar dilemma with Mushtaq’s stories, but to her credit the artful construction of the narratives is an intriguing twist on the genre. Many of the stories start with descriptions of a particular set of circumstances and characters before shifting mid-stream to their ‘real focus,’ that is, the main character and conflict. Besides the social-realism of the approach, I also appreciate the resonances it creates. For instance, characters in the first part of a story may be introduced and we hear about their marriage and children before the ‘real’ focus of the story kicks in and we see another angle for the topic through another set of eyes. The doubling effect, sometimes only noticeable upon review, lets the stories cover a lot of ground in relatively little space.

Beyond the construction of the stories, their actual use of language also feels ‘classic.’ There’s a directness in the writing that imbues it with the authority of “the Greats.” Mashtuq is self-assured and offers stylistic flourishes strategically. There’s a scene in the story “Fire Rain,” for instance, that recounts a man’s burial and subsequent exhumation. The imagery of the scene offers some unsavory details about the “rotten body in the brand new, starched shroud” (38). Given the circumstances of the burial, it was “too rotten for ritual bathing” and “the foul smell made them want to retch, but no one showed it on their faces” (38). In context, the scene rides the line of comic and macabre and the paragraph ends with some symbolism of jasmine buds that hadn’t bloomed before offering the phrase “not all blooms have the fortune of adorning a bride; some flowers bloom only for mausoleums” (38). The poetic line resonates beautifully and stands out as an example of Mashtuq’s style.

Another factor in making the book read like a classic is the use of an omniscient narrator in most of the stories, which affords Mushtaq the opportunity to comment on a number of perspectives and universalizes the characters’ experiences. At this point, I feel I need to offer an additional disclaimer. A lot of what the stories’ characters go through is far disconnected from my own experiences. The barrier is my own lack of knowledge, but the characters are generally Muslim Indians and it is sometimes difficult for me to interpret characters’ feelings, given the role of Islam in their lives. The failure to grapple with nuances is my own, but in my reading the characters are more like ‘figures’ in most of the stories. They have discernible purposes and traits but they did not yet feel fully resonant for me. Apologies to Mushtaq for my own experiential gap here.

It’s tempting with any collection to give a full play-by-play of each short story Heart Lamp has to offer, but documenting all twelve feels quite impossible, particularly given that there are stories nestled within other stories. One trend I would note is that across the collection, the endings are almost always satisfying. “Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal,” the first story in the collection, depicts couples essentially competing with one another to show their love. One of the husbands says how he would build a Mahal for his wife to show how devoted he is to her. There’s some problems with this idea: first of all, it implies that she will die. At the conclusion of the story, his wife does indeed die and he remarries and talks about how much he loves his new wife—he never builds the Mahal. The discussion that follows was my first hint of Mushtaq’s craftsmanship for a fine ending.

My favourite ending is probably to the collection’s namesake. In “Heart Lamp,” a woman’s husband has lost all affection for her and is cavorting with another woman. Feeling desperately alone, the woman decides it is time to end her life. She circles the rooms of the house with kerosene, deciding which room would be best for self-immolation. The tension of the scene is finely crafted; it’s as if she is being controlled by some obscure force. You also feel concern for her sleeping children: would they escape the fire? She ends up outside, doused in kerosene, but before she ignites, her daughter comes out and makes the plea for her to stay. The central character “picked up the sobbing baby and hugged Salma to her chest, and, feeling as if she was being comforted, touched and understood by a friend, Mehrun’s eyes became heavy, and all she could say was, ‘Forgive me, my darling,’ as the darkness of the night was thawing” (111). I really love the phrasing of the ending: “the darkness of the night was thawing.” To me, that implies light. The idea of there being natural light, light of a different tenor, than the light that would have resulted from her ignition is such a great image to end the story on. It leaves things tense, tortured, but with that creeping light of optimism. 

Sadly, one of my favourite stories in the collection had the least satisfying conclusion. “The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri” is about a woman who works as a lawyer. She is separated from her husband and has two daughters that she can’t spend much time with, so she hires a private tutor. There’s a shroud of mystery around him as an outsider and she has concerns about leaving him alone with her daughters. There’s the implication that he, an unmarried man, might do something untoward. He’s surprisingly good with the girls, and even surprises their mother by having them stage a beautiful performance. One day the mother catches the three with oil all over their fingers in the kitchen and the teacher never shows his face in their house again. Supposedly, he got a fake recipe for making gobi manchuri. He’s obsessed with it. He eats it like I eat chips. For some reason, this breeds more distrust in the main character and everyone around. He’s framed as an unmanly man. It’s really weird and I was fascinated by it. It felt like a fun-house mirror of The Vegetarian by Han Kang—this guy that wanted to just eat his deep-fried cauliflower or whatever. The main character keeps hearing about this man trying to marry women but calling it off unless they can make gobi manchuri. The story ends by implying that he’s been fired from work, has married a woman, and that he beats her—but the main character still feels compelled to help him for some reason. It’s an understated tale that I thought was really compelling and the only of the stories that really felt like it ended too soon.

Peoples’ idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies take up their fair share of the stories. In that respect, “A Decision of the Heart” really shone as a perplexing nuance of desires. I also really liked the story “High-Heeled Shoe” and its symbolism. Like most stories, it offered multiple layers worth exploring. The story focuses on a man and wife who are in the process of renovating his house. He has chosen to sell off parts of it for rentals to make some extra money, meaning that he has also had to cut down the family’s mango tree. Throughout the story, different characters offer their reflections on the meaning of that mango tree to them, which has its own beauty. The real focus, though, is that the man is obsessed with his brother’s wife’s high-heeled shoe. He covets them (and her feet) as she floats through rooms. He becomes monomaniacal about it and his obsession makes him barge into a shop and demand they sell him the high-heeled shoes that match his sister-in-law’s. He makes his wife wear them, putting them on in a glass chair (like a reverse image of Cinderella?) even though they don’t fit and she can’t walk in them. He has already packed away her other shoes and she’s forced to walk home unevenly, eventually collapsing and hearing her unborn child calling out to her from the womb. The consequences of a man’s jealousy and obsession hit hard. “The Shroud” follows a similar path of unfulfilled desires and misplaced interests. I briefly mentioned that story earlier, so I won’t belabour the point here, but the fact that the main character loves shopping for herself (she buys a carpet and makes her husband lug it around during their Hajj) while not buying a kafan for her poor neighbour leads to a grief and guilt as literary as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The desperation she experiences to fulfil her promise when it’s too late is as moving as it as pathetic. I loved it.

“Soft Whispers” and “A Taste of Heaven” are the two other stories that I found to be most noteworthy. Like the others, they are rich and layered. “Soft Whispers”, written in first person, has such a wonderful sequence embedded in the middle where the young girl is at a pond where a boy is trapping birds for the entertainment of other children. I can’t quote the whole sequence, but Mushtaq depicts his mischief beautifully. The boy asks the girl if she wants an egg from the bird he has trapped. He then proceeds to slit its throat, cut open its guts, and pull the egg out for her. The other kids are all clambering to see it, and so she holds it closed in her fist and as they all try to see, she crushes it. It feels symbolic. Then, the boy dives underwater and pops up and kisses her on the cheek. She sobs and tells her mom all about it. Flashing forward, the boy becomes a religious leader. The sequence has such a strong focus. In “A Taste of Heaven,” we see more childhood mischief. Again, the story is really about other things for most of it, but essentially the kids have an aunt (?) that lost her husband when she was young and she never remarried. One girl gives the woman’s ja-namaz (prayer rug) from her wedding to a boy so he can clean oil off of his bike. Despite being stoic and pleasant about everything, the woman essentially has a breakdown over this. Long story short, the children come together to conspire and the woman walks in. The most mischievous of the three children gives her a Pepsi and tells her that it’s the drink from the afterlife, that she has indeed passed away and that they are angels. She asks: if she has made it to the afterlife, where is her husband? They sprinkle flowers from behind her and say that he is there but that she musn’t look at him. The whole scene plays out like something out of The Decameron or 1001 Nights. After that, though, the whole family is placed in a position where they essentially have to keep up the ruse that she’s in heaven and all she drinks is Pepsi and the kids are worried about the guilt of murdering her with malnutrition. The whole story was both entertaining and troubling. It’s certainly one of the most memorable in the collection.

So here we are. It’s the end of the year. I left Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp as the final book for my reading goal (70 books) and my final review of all of this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist. Heart Lamp won, so it only seemed appropriate to leave it for last. While I have some contextual barriers and preferences for novels over short stories, Mushtaq still offered a good deal of discussion-worthy stories. They’re provocative and well-wrought. Where the characters feel figural, the stories themselves achieve, I think, what ‘classic’ literature aimed to accomplish: Mushtaq offers a clear vision for humanity’s biggest issues: life, death, birth, marriage, religion—alongside all those other feelings of guilt and jealousy that pop up along the way. Every International Booker Prize shortlist has been so different and compelling in their own ways, and I’m glad that Mushtaq’s English translation has found such success.

To another year of reading.

All the best.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

    I was meant to have read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall approximately fifteen years ago for my Victorian Literature seminar about women and animals. With apologies to Professor Berg, I never got around to it at the time and, still unable to grapple with re-attempting to read Wuthering Heights, I picked the book before it on my unread shelf. So, here we are with Anne Brontë’s book about insufferable men and the supposed responsibilities of wives towards their reform.

    The basic premise is this: a mysterious widow and her child arrive at Wildfell Hall (as tenants, no less!). The surrounding community, and Gilbert Markham in particular, take an interest in her and it is only after much cajoling that he gains access to Helen’s private diary, which becomes the central narrative of Brontë’s text for about two hundred pages. The first part of the book is Markham writing a letter to a man he has offended for not being more forthcoming with his own story; within the letter, he reproduces the pages of Helen’s diary—she, also, is not very forthcoming with her own story. Her tale is unraveled as a more traditional novel, documenting her marriage prospects in respectable society. She rejects her first suitor, the one her family encourages, because he is a boorish bore and she does not have any genuine affection for him. Instead, she marries Mr. Huntingdon, only for things to quickly turn sour—he is an incorrigible sinner and Helen is a woman of immeasurable patience striving to bring him back to God. That said, he is exposed as an adulterer and Helen tries to build a new life for herself without him, which returns us to Markham’s narration and the culmination of their love story. The book reads similarly to Pamela by Samuel Richardson—also epistolary in nature, also about an abusive and domineering husband, with some information missing to give it a gothic kind of quality.

    Literary theorist Irving Howe makes the claim that it is a challenge to engage with literary works from the past; the more time that passes, the more inaccessible works become. While I’d say that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is pretty good, there’s definitely some unavoidable presentism in my reading. Helen’s story reads as pretty repetitive, bludgeoning the reader with how vile Mr. Huntingdon is to justify Helen’s respectable remarriage. There are any number of moments that I would deem to be the ‘last straw,’ but given the religious and societal mores of the time, it seems that Brontë really needs to convince the audience that Helen deserves to be free of her husband.

    Truly, though, the men in the book are insufferable. Mr. Huntingdon and his friends drink, gamble, and hunt for months at a time. He takes prolonged vacations to the city, leaving Helen alone and pining for him. In one conversation, he asks her why she does not worship him (or at least his body) and hold him in higher esteem than God (the blasphemer!) and Helen tries to convince him to be more pious, less tempted by fleshly delights. Later, as I mentioned, he is exposed as being a long-term adulterer with his friend’s wife. Later still, he destroys Helen’s art and studio tools. Later still, he reads her journal while she tries to reclaim it from him and then tries to prevent her escape by limiting her finances to a set allowance, the expenditures of which she is forced to report. Any one of these things would be sufficient grounds for a dissolution of their bond, but Helen continually thinks she can bring him back to God. (There’s a footnote in my edition that comments on the trope of women in literature reforming their husbands and implies Brontë is taking a swipe at the convention—why is the responsibility on the eternally suffering woman?). The other historical factor is that Huntingdon refuses to allow Helen to leave because people will talk. Despite the open secret that is his relationship with Lady Lowborough, he will not suffer people to talk about his failed marriage. The notion that it would be worse to be seen as not having a good marriage than to actually have a bad marriage is pretty firmly rooted in the Victorian era.

    Even the “good” men of the book are awful and in this Brontë is prescient of the “nice guys” that are secret misogynists. When Helen’s marriage is in decline, Mr. Hargrave steps in, wanting to save Helen and steal her away because he loves her so. She asks him over and over again (the book is repetitious, after all) not to comment any further on his love for her. If he truly loves her for her own sake, she says, he would be willing to hold that love in silence and not attempt to bring her further from God. The dweeb sure is persistent, though. The central narrator and new prospect for Helen, Gilbert Markham, while seemingly the protagonist of the novel, demonstrates the same toxic masculinity as all the others. He insists on seeing her paintings, which she does not want to show him. If you think about it, the very novel is a huge betrayal to her—he is exposing all of her secrets and experiences to a friend of his and a stranger, presumably, to her. Even when the journal cuts off and Markham returns to his own letter, he admits that he finds it more painful to read the parts of the journal where Helen is in love with Huntingdon than the parts which follow. He’s a selfish brat that betrays Helen’s confidence, which makes the climax of the novel where he rushes to interrupt what he believes to be her wedding fall a bit flat—why would I root for this guy?

    All things told, the book is pretty good, if overlong. The writing style is not as far removed from current conventions as you might expect, making the novel pretty accessible. As unlikely as it seems, I would actually step up to defend Anne Brontë. It seems to me that everyone talks about Charlotte’s Jane Eyre or Emily’s Wuthering Heights and that Anne gets unfairly discounted by a lot of literature enthusiasts. She’s worth the read.

    Happy reading!

Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler

        In the opening pages of Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler, the titular narrator struggles to come up with the word for a pasta strainer: colander. It’s not the only thing he struggles to remember. As he recounts his life and the history of his three wives, he routinely gets details wrong. Timelines are off; dates don’t align; certain facts are missing, suspect, or unverifiable. It makes a colander the perfect symbol for a failing memory. As much as we try to retain, our memories leak out.

Luckily for us, one of Barney’s sons adds footnotes to correct the record, which, incidentally, is what Barney is trying to do. There’s a mystery at the core of the text: what happened to Barney’s friend Boogie? We find out early on that Barney was accused of his murder, put to trial, but has clearly escaped mostly unscathed (although one of his ex-wives most assuredly does not believe him.) The rest of the book is a slow unravelling of Barney telling his side of the story, in which he continually professes his innocence.

Barney isn’t an easy person to believe. He makes assertions that are clearly incorrect, repeatedly shows himself to be a mischievous rabble rouser with a penchant for sending fake letters, and admittedly lies in his initial testimony to the police. He’s also misogynistic and racist in that 1960s literati way. 

In the moment, there appeared to be a lot of ‘fluff’ to the book—scenes that did not really contribute to the overarching narrative of the book, but to Richler’s credit, the different arcs culminate beautifully. The book is structured around Barney’s different wives. The first wife, Clara, is part of a thriving 1960s expat arts and literature group in France. Others warn Barney of her being unstable but he pursues a relationship anyway. I feel like Richler captures the rebellious spirit of the writers at the time and lampoons (through Barney) the experimental poets of the period. In the tumultuous whirlwind of Barney’s first marriage, we see Clara give birth to a baby who, by its skin colour, is revealed to be Boogie’s child. Then, a tragic fallout and sequence of events sees Clara deceased by suicide. After her death, her art work takes on a new significance and Barney helps to ensure that it is published and exhibited; as it turns out later on, he was donating all the funds—an amusing and surprising turn given his record of misogyny and bias against women’s art.

In the second section, Barney recounts the story of his second marriage to a woman he consistently refuses to name. This section was probably my least favourite, but it still culminates beautifully. Barney narrates how he fell in love with his third wife the night of his second wedding; he tries to run away with her and leaves his wedding to be with her. It doesn’t work out at the time, but it’s a wonderfully romantic (and terrible) moment. Barney then proceeds to woo her over years.

This is where things get wild. I apologize if this review is reading more like a summary, but the plot is so wonderfully crafted that all of the pieces need to be lined up before seeing it all come together. Not wanting to be with his second wife, Barney concocts a plan with his lawyer to get her to agree to a divorce. Essentially, the lawyer will pay to have someone sleep with Barney so that his wife can catch them in flagrante delicto. They talk through the specifics of the plan and then when Barney returns home, everything works out beautifully for him—he arrives to find his second wife in bed with (who else but) Boogie as he recovers from his drug addictions. This gives Barney the ground to leave her and pursue Miriam. His second wife leaves immediately and then he is left alone with Boogie. This is where the record gets uncertain because Barney and Boogie are left alone together—and Boogie is never seen again.

Barney admits to certain things in his version. He explains how he wanted Boogie alive so that he could have a witness that agrees to Barney’s account and thereby justifies the divorce on Barney’s terms. Remember, though, Barney has reason to hate Boogie for having slept with both of his wives. When Boogie, feeling used, says he wants to have a swim to think about the situation, Barney tells him he’s too drunk to swim and shoots a gun above his head to scare him into staying.

However, when police come investigating, there are all kinds of details Barney cannot account for. For instance: why does he have rough hands? He suggests to the police it’s because he was digging Boogie’s grave—as a joke, surely, but… He confesses to shooting Boogie in the chest and cleaning up all the blood, but that’s also a joke…right? Richler crafts the voice so wonderfully that it creates dramatic tension: Barney is always sarcastic and joking and so the truth becomes more obscure. This, combined with the fact that he can’t remember the dates and details make him an unreliable witness. Even worse: in his old age he develops Alzheimer’s.

The entire closing sequence of the book is simply fantastic. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful and terrible all at once. We can watch Barney’s descent into worse and worse Alzheimer’s. Details become even more unreliable and obscured. It’s heartbreaking when he starts to piece details together and realize that he has Alzheimer’s and when he’s truly at his worst, he can’t even clothe himself properly. He goes for dinner with Miriam after a prolonged estrangement (did I mention that he cheated on her and she left him?) and the disconnect between his own belief of how things will play out and the reality is tragic. He’s convinced that they can reunite; he gets flashes of their first meeting; he thinks they’re still married. It’s really rough and I loved it.

In a moment of lucidity, Barney is able to recollect the details of what happened the night of Boogie’s death and reaffirms his innocence. He explains what happened but admits that there was a detail he left out before. As it turns out, the fight was not so amicable. Boogie, a friend he has long professed to admire, actually has harsh words about Barney’s wives, particularly Clara. He says that Clara dying was the best thing she could have done for her career and, after almost four hundred pages, we finally get a redemptive moment from Barney, who defends her honour. This adds to the tension of the mystery; it’s one more reason for him to kill Boogie—although his body was never found.

As a comedic work, Barney’s Version works reasonably well. As a dramatic work, I’d argue, it works even better. The character and voice of the text is so finely wrought and the storyline is so finely crafted that it feels so satisfying when everything comes together in the end. Even the epilogue has something to offer that allows the audience to reconsider the rest of the story. Even to the last page there are revelations about Boogie’s unsolved disappearance. Despite all the ambiguity, the ending was extremely satisfying.

Due to a friend’s recommendation, I had been intending to read Barney’s Version for years and I’m so glad I finally got to it. It was well worth the read and I finally understand why it’s a sort of CanLit classic. Like Barney, I’m sure I don’t remember all the details, but the broad strokes are enough to solidify itself in my memory as a really positive, worthy reading experience.

Happy reading!

The Woman from Andros (Andria) by Terence

        The Woman from Andros, alternately called Andria is the next play in my collection of Latin Classics in translation. It’s another comedy based around misunderstandings, secrets, and deceptions in along the lines of the previous Latin play I’d examined, Plautus’ The Haunted House.

The premise of this one is essentially a long game of marital chicken. Simo, an Athenian nobleman, is worried about his son Pamphilus’ morals and future. Simo suspects his son has fallen in love with a lowly woman, Glycerium—and indeed he is correct—and so sets about planning his marriage to Philumena. It’s a similar overbearing father situation akin to something like The Taming of the Shrew. While Simo is actually absolutely correct, he’s missing more information: not only is Pamphilus in love with Glycerium, he is also secretly engaged to her and she is pregnant with his child, about to deliver. Meanwhile, Charinus, who is actually in love with Philumena, is crushed by his friend’s sudden engagement to her. So, they’re all in a love triangle and trying to avoid the wedding.

Simo instructs Davus, Pamphilus’ slave, to ensure that the marriage goes off without a hitch, leaving him torn between allegiances. Does he help his master to remain faithful to his true beloved or avoid the inevitable punishment if he gets in the way of the wedding? The idea of tricky slaves trying to avoid punishment seems to be emerging as a theme in Latin theater…

Davus discovers that the wedding is a sham and engages in a series of deceptions for Pamphilus to save face. Simo is trying to expose Pamphilus and so he’s certain Pamphilus will refuse the marriage; Davus encourages him to agree to the wedding, which puts father and son into a game of chicken: who will back down from this wedding nobody actually wants?

The play is reasonably straightforward in that sense and has some comic moments with its dramatic irony. It doesn’t have the flowery language of a Shakespeare comedy, at least not in this translation, so the comedy is principally based on the situation and the characters’ refusals to concede. There are also some funny misunderstandings where Simo gets so close to knowing the truth but then misreads it. For example, when he overhears a baby being born he thinks it’s a tactic to scare the partners away from the marriage and that it’s all a ruse. Davus very kindly lets him fool himself and then speaks honestly, sort of, to suggest that the baby is a tactic from Glycerium to scare Pamphilus off from his marriage. 

The plot gets more complicated from there and I won’t trouble you with the details. Besides, for the humour to land, you’ll need to be at least a little surprised by the kinds of tricks the characters play.

It’s a fun little play that will take you about two hours to read. Might as well give it a shot.

Happy reading!

The Haunted House of Plautus

    The first time I moved into a house that was not my parents’ was around 2009. It was an attic bedroom in a student house in Kingston, and when I went into the closet I discovered a set of history textbooks someone had left behind, sometimes with post-it notes still embedded. One of those books was an anthology, Classics in Translation Volume II, edited by Paul MacKendrick and Herbert M. Howe. I don’t know what compelled me to pick up the book so many years later, but the first play in the collection is The Haunted House of Plautus, elsewhere titled Mostellaria.

    Most of us, I think of classics as exclusively Greek tragedies, but Plautus offers here a Latin comedy. You know that trope in movies and TV where the kids are having a house party and then the parents come home unexpectedly and everyone has to hide and pretend there was no party? Well, that’s The Haunted House. Philolaches is a young man whose father, Theopropides, has been abroad for three years. While he’s been away, Philolaches has been engaging in debauchery with his friends, hosting alcohol-fueled ragers. He has also paid to have a sex worker become his exclusive mistress. When they discover that his father has returned, the house goes into a panic and Tranio, one of their slaves, has to take action.

    Tranio develops a plot that requires more and more effort to sustain. He tells everyone to lock themselves inside the house and then when Theopropides returns, Tranio emerges to warn him that the house is haunted and that by even knocking on the door, he may be cursed. It’s like an episode of Fraser from there, where one lie requires another, requires another, requires another, requires another. Tranio is nearly a comic version of Iago, praising the value of lying as he digs himself in deeper. Philolaches owes a lender money for all the booze and Tranio develops a plot to have Theopropides pay off the debt because—oh, it’s not for booze or buying the freedom of a sex worker—it’s because the house was haunted, so they bought the neighbour’s house at a huge discount. When Theopropides wants to go into the house, Tranio has to approach the neighbour and say that Theopropides is looking to do some renovations and wants to inspect the house. Luckily, he’s able to get in and inspect without too many questions, but the tension of the play is that the lie is ready to unfold at any moment. It’s a fun, short little piece that tells an essentially sitcom-esque story. I think it’s hard to genuinely connect with a piece so old. Our expectations of stories have changed over time, and so there’s always a bit of a distance (cf. Irving Howe’s History and the Novel). I think comedies in particular are difficult to sustain over a long period, but the comedy comes primarily through the situation rather than the language, so The Haunted House maybe has an advantage in that respect.

    Structurally, the play is pretty interesting. The opening scene of the play is an interaction between the city slave and the country slave to set the stage. Throughout the play, we get songs (?) where characters offer their life philosophies. There are also tangents that take up a significant amount of time, the most notable of which is a lengthy exchange between Philematium (Philolaches’ mistress) and her elderly maid Scapha with Philolaches eavesdropping. It’s a comic moment where Philolaches offers comment on Scapha’s advice and he’s getting increasingly annoyed with her.

    Other than Tranio, Philolaches is probably the character about whom we learn the most. In his life philosophy song, he explains how life is like a house that needs constant repair. He displaces responsibility from himself and blames his father for not maintaining him well and allowing cracks to form in him. In those cracks, love seeps in and now he sees himself as no good, giving up his life for his lover. It’s an insight into Athenian life, which is also noted in the introduction by the translator, about how much influence parents ought to have on their children.

    I wouldn’t put Plautus on the same level as current playwrights, but I was surprised by how ‘modern’ the work seems relative to other narratives. Perhaps it’s because the play had to appeal to lowest common denominator, but it actually has stayed an entertaining premise, even if it’s not going to change my world.

    Short play, short review. Happy reading!

The Penguin Book of Short Stories edited by Jhumpa Lahiri

        Let’s begin with my obligatory note about the challenge of offering reviews for anthologies: given the diversity of the content within any themed collection—and the vast amount of content not included in it (and of that, the majority being unfamiliar to me personally)—who am I to decide whether the collection is representative? Inevitably, my commentary can only be limited, my review incomplete. Second disclaimer: I read this book over more than a year in small bursts of a story or two at a time, so it is not the most fresh in my mind.

Disclaimers stated, I next have to state my admiration for the editor of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri. First of all, it’s clear that she has an immense knowledge of and passion for Italian literature, given the depth and breadth of the selections. Lahiri’s editorial voice is also as illuminating as it is engaging. For instance, the introduction to the book discusses the way fascism attempted to control language in Italy, like through the rejection of words imported from the Spanish, in work for publication. Those historical details are interspersed throughout the prefatory remarks for each of the authors in the collection, which helps to weave a grander narrative around the individual pieces. Moreover, Lahiri’s introductions to the authors themselves are brief and, often, deeply engaging. She has a knack for highlighting the elements of the work in a way that compels me to read more of each authors’ works, even in situations where the selected story didn’t specifically touch me. The literary portraits are themselves rich works of literary biography worth reading.

There are more stories in the collection than would be worth counting for the review, but an early standout in the collection is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s mythical story “The Siren.” Incidentally, there is a motif of mythical creatures throughout the collection, which also appear in Primo Levi’s “Quaestio de Centauris.” Some of the more magical and surreal stories stand out as the highlights of the collection. For instance, “And Yet They Are Knocking…” by Dino Buzzati was one of my favourites, in which an aristocratic family stays in their home amid rumours of a flood. One of the central characters gives away dog statues, which are then seen being claimed by someone the other character deems unworthy. While they discuss it, various servants enter to warn them of the rising water levels and they live in willful ignorance. It’s one of those stories that reads as a cautionary tale with rich allegorical layers, but with the added touch of the Kafkaesque. It was great, like a bizarre and suspenseful stage play or Kaufmann film. 

Perhaps the strangest and most amusing story in the collection is Tommaso Landolfi’s “Gogol’s Wife.” The story centers the narrative on the historical literary figure Nikolai Gogol and focuses on his relationship with his wife, who, very unhistorically, is a balloon. Yes, you read that right. Gogol is married to a balloon, and Landolfi’s tone is completely deadpan. Every character just accepts that Gogol is married to a balloon, and when he gets mad he wants to deflate her, and the story builds towards a popping. It would be a narrative well-adapted into film by an art-house director. Everything about it was so weird and yet so human. It’s even funnier if you do some cursory research and find that Gogol was never married and that people have criticized his writing of women as being “impossibly virtuous” or witches, which adds to the rich absurdity of him being such a monster to his inflatable wife.

Beyond the strange, in many cases, Lahiri’s editorial choices tend toward stories of failed dreams and disappointed expectations, particularly when it comes to women and, even more specifically, their married lives. One especially moving story is “A Pair of Eyeglasses” by Anna Maria Ortese, which is about a girl needing glasses and her family spending an immense sum to cover her prescription. Everyone talks about the girl’s prospects being virtually nil—with glasses only making it worse. It’s a gorgeously written Bildungsroman that considers wealth and beauty and a loss of perspective, and it’s particularly powerful because Ortese’s style is replete with stunning imagery, especially following when the central character gets her glasses, which is such a lovely stylistic flare. I consistently appreciate when a writer immerses you in the experience of characters by playing with style, and this story is a masterful delivery.

Stories like “The Milliner” by Antonio Delfini and “My Husband” by Natalia Ginzburg explore the married life of women through a particularly depressing lens. In the former, a young girl with dreams of starting her own fashion house finds herself subject to the support and subsequent abandonment of Arturo. Her dreams of him bound to her ambitions, the ending of the story feels like a particularly sad state of affairs. Things don’t get much better for married life. In the story “My Husband”, the main character and her husband have a tepid relationship. She clings to him despite his continual lack of interest in her. He is particularly flat when expressing his affection for her, so while the words may be intended to express love, it comes across more like that song from My Fair Lady: “I’ve grown accustomed to her face.” However, the husband maintains an affair with another woman and is honest with his wife. As much as she tried to train him out of it, he returns to making love in the woods with his mistress and she becomes pregnant. The final pages of the story are a riveting climax. The husband, a doctor, is meant to deliver his mistress’ baby. Meanwhile, the wife is enlisted by the midwife to help. I am tempted not to spoil the ending, but it’s just too compelling: the mistress and child die during childbirth and the husband dies shortly after, leaving the wife on her own to go wheresoever she pleases. What makes Ginzburg’s story so powerful is the conflicted emotions and position of the wife at the end of the story. She discusses her pleasure at the death of the mistress and revels in it, and then when her husband dies she finds herself free but unable to think of where she wants to go. It’s a finely wrought psychological and emotional conclusion to a story that just feels me with depressing dread.

“Silence” by Aldo Palazzeschi is a similar depressing story of an increasingly misanthropic and reclusive man, who speaks less and less and, after the death of his father, hardly utters “yes” or “no.” We are aligned with his housekeeper, who puts in relentless effort to meet his particular needs and tastes. One day, Benedetto Vai begins returning home with packages—an unusual, rather an unheard of, gesture. Leonia feels a deep resentment, knowing that he must have spoken to someone about the price of his purchase. Having worked for him for years, “She felt tricked, deeply violated. And for the first time she felt like the victim of a madman. It had not been a deep-seated necessity arising from his nature and spirit that had led him to such extremes after all, but an intriguing experience, the caprice of a lazy man, a game conjured up by an empty mind, a joke in very bad taste” (166). The sense of betrayal that he could open his mouth for such a senseless purchase and not talk to her is a painful one. The irony, too, that a misanthrope purchases wine glasses, offers a particularly bitter sting. Benedetto Vai continues to buy ostentatious glasses and cutlery while succumbing to some kind of illness. He spends his days rearranging the cabinet and admiring it until he becomes bedridden. When he is about to die, Leonia performs a final act of service by setting the table with all of the glasses. Benedetto Vai stares at her and continues to glance towards the door and the story ends with an ethereal image: “Someone came in as lightly as mist, and so white as to be indistinguishable from the air. Only Benedetto Vai was able to make out the pale apparition that advanced from the door to the festively laid table which was being fixed for all eternity in those wide blue eyes” (170). There’s a lot in the story to grapple with, and Palazzeschi captures our internal contradictions nicely.

Some of the stories take a more surprising turn with respect to relationships. In particular, “The Other Side of the Moon” highlights a woman who has an affair with a gangster. They plan crime together and the life they plan seems so full of promise, but by the end of the story, she realizes that he’s no better than her husband and walks out on him. The ending provides a bizarre twist that highlights the impossibility of being in business with criminals. 

The subtext of many of the pieces reflect the conflicted political history of Italy, as well. I think the best story in that respect is “Invitation to Dinner” by Alba de Céspedes. In that story, a decorated British diplomat comes to dinner with an Italian couple in the postwar period. It’s a story that highlights the dramatic tensions following World War II, where conflicted emotions surrounding the defeat of fascism and the resentment towards Britain’s self-appointed superiority exist in uneasy connection, which plays out at the micro level in the dinner party in a tense, seemingly prolonged meal. It is not a story that gives easy political answers; it is a story that recreates the discomfort and lets you sit in it, and I really liked that.

A number of the later stories in the collection deal with twist endings in various forms, “The Smell of Death” by Beppe Fenoglio and Antonio Delfini’s “The Milliner” among them. In both, there are surprising deaths that provide the climax with a dramatic force to punctuate the tale. “The Smell of Death” in particular establishes some rich imagery and symbolism for a fight between men and the disapproving spectator / love interest. There’s a wonderfully ominous quality to the story, but not without its own tenderness. The remorse Carlo feels after fighting Attilo seems to linger in the air—like the smell of death.

Speaking of the smell of death, Silvio D’Arzo’s story “Elegy for Signora Nodier” is a pretty strange little tale that highlights a taxidermied dog that was the beloved’s when he was alive. There’s a sort of amicable-seeming love triangle, but by the end of the story there’s a dognapping, (not a dog napping), and years later the dog appears embalmed in one of the women’s apartments. It’s a bizarre story where I found myself reading the end several times just to let it marinate. I quite liked it.

Beyond these, a number of the stories were quite enjoyable. For instance, there is a selection of vignettes by Giorgio Manganelli that would be interesting to explore further: his book is called Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels [how great is that title!]. As I’ve mentioned, Lahiri really knows how to sell works. There were a number of other stories worth reading that haven’t made it into this review—and I fear I haven’t done the collection justice anyhow—but I can’t help but feel that my experience would be much improved by reading full collections of these authors’ works. You don’t realize how powerfully adapting to a writer’s voice can improve your experience of their work overall until you find them presented in rapid succession, longing for more time to connect with them before moving on.

In any case, if you’re in the market for short stories, I think The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories has a lot to offer. I imagine the collection is curated with university courses in mind. It addresses a number of the major touchstones of literary criticism; you’ll find stories that connect directly to feminism, new historicism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, politics, and more. As different as the stories can be, there nonetheless remain those subterranean threads that compel us to find the connections that link a tradition together. Lahiri has seen them, and hopefully she’ll make you see them too.

    Happy reading!