Short Stories…

I don’t read short stories much and I have decided to change that. The best part is I can read them online without stressing my eyes for a long time and also I can read them at work when the work load is not much.

I am doing short reviews of each. There are no spoilers.

The Kiss by Guy De Maupassant.
I read about it first on Eva’s blog. It’s a story in the form of a letter written by an aunt to her niece educating her on the ‘art of loving’. I found the story amusing and entertaining but I don’t think most of it applies today.

Take for e.g. these lines.

Trust in the advice of my experience. First, never kiss your husband in public, in the train, at the restaurant. It is bad taste; do not give in to your desires. He would feel ridiculous and would never forgive you.

It all depends on whether a person likes public display of affection or not. Each to his own I say. It’s a fun read though.

Ghosts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Today I saw Ikenna Okoro, a man I had long thought was dead. Perhaps I should have bent down, grabbed a handful of sand, and thrown it at him, in the way my people do to make sure a person is not a ghost.

This is a story in the form of a conversation between a professor and a man whom he thinks is dead and has not seen for 37 years. They reminisce about all things lost after the Biafra war and how things have changed. A very beautiful story.

The Headstrong Historian by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Many years after her husband had died, Nwamgba still closed her eyes from time to time to relive his nightly visits to her hut, and the mornings after, when she would walk to the stream humming a song, thinking of the smoky scent of him and the firmness of his weight, and feeling as if she were surrounded by light.

Its a story about a woman called Nwamgba who after her husbands death, enrolled her son in a missionary school so that she could claim her land back from her husbands cousins. She got her land back but she lost her son to the missionaries. The historian here is her son’s daughter whom she thought carried her dead husband’s spirit and who after being a Christian for many years, returned to her roots.

I found this story to be inspired from Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe.
The thing I don’t like about short stories is that it makes me feel as if I have read an incomplete novel, a feeling which I do not like. But with Ms. Adichie’s stories, it is different. Her stories are complete however short they are. If you haven’t read anything by Adichie, try this story out. You can never go wrong with her.

The Ethical Dilemma of a Sandwich down the Pants by Kelly Shriver

We queue up at the Li’l Peach, the one on the town-gown line in Cambridge, and we’re dying. The woman paying the cashier is digging around for exact change, and we all want to yell “It would take way less time to break a fiver!” but we are all too chicken. We’re just strangers with a common goal. We shift from foot to foot, juggling our purchases from hand to hand. We are impatient, but we’re honest. We wait to pay.

Don’t you just love the title? This is a very short story. It will literally take you 2 minutes to read but you will enjoy it. A man is caught shoplifting, stealing a sandwich and stuffing it down his pants. The sandwich is put back in the freezer. There are a lot of moral view points to consider here. For an incredibly short story it is funny and will make you think.

The Fluted Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The fluted girl huddled in the darkness clutching Stephen’s final gift in her small pale hands. Madame Belari would be looking for her. The servants would be sniffing through the castle like feral dogs, looking under beds, in closets, behind the wine racks, all their senses hungry for a whiff of her. Belari never knew the fluted girl’s hiding places. It was the servants who always found her. Belari simply wandered the halls and let the servants search her out. The servants thought they knew all her hiding places.

A chilling and beautiful story about a girl called Lidia trapped under and a mistress and circumstances she cannot come out of. I loved this story. The writer captured the emotions of the fluted girl very well. Al though this was a complete story in itself, I wish this was a novel. I loved the concept and I would have loved to read at least 200 pages of it.

That’s it for now. I’ll definitely be reading more short stories whenever I get time. I have linked the stories to the respective pages where you can read them. Have you read any of these stories? Rather do you read short stories online or otherwise?

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On another note I really really really want to read these couple of books.

Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung and Rooftops of Tehran by Mahbod Seraji. I just love the covers and the blurbs.