Engaging fiction from 100 words to 20 pages

Grant Faulkner's 2021 collection of short stories, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, has only 130 pages but 28 titled stories. They therefore range in length from twenty pages to a paragraph which might in some works be considered prose poems. He says in an Author's Note that he wrote the first in 1991, the last just before the manuscript was due to the publisher.

Faulkner is the former executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the co-founder of the online literary journal 100 Word Story,  the co-host of the podcast Write-minded, and an executive producer of the TV show, America's Next Great Author.

100 Word Story publishes stories that are exactly 100 words long. Stories published in 100 Word Story have been included on Wigleaf’s Top (Very) Short Fictions list and anthologized in the annual Best Small Fictions series and W.W Norton's New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction. Here is an example Faulkner titled Life Knowledge:

"She searched for the perfect place to live. She changed her name from Clara to Claire She drank one too many cups of coffee and then one too few. She painted porcelain dolls, then learned how to play the banjo. She made a promise in her diary never to get Botox. She asked, "Why do people hate the French?" She carried a pistol in her purse for protection, shampooed with anti-lice shampoo just in case. She tossed bread crumbs to golden carp and watched them mouth silent O's in the water. Poor things were too dumb to know anything about life."

So what is it? A story? An anecdote? A fragment? A poem without line breaks? Does it matter as long as it touches the reader—the reason I chose it. It may look easy. A hundred words? Ha! Until you try to write one. It's like trying to write a decent sonnet

Given the varying lengths and worlds of these 28 stories it is inevitable that readers (this reader) will respond more positively to some than others. I especially enjoyed Faulkner's longer stories in which he has more room to develop characters and situations. I found something to respond to in almost every one 28 and, personally more valuable, something that provoked an idea, a character, a situation.

Thank you Black Lawrence Press for sending me a copy.

The summer house is not only a seasonal retreat

Masashi Matsuie's debut novel The Summer House, skillfully translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is interesting on several levels. Readers learn a great deal about architecture and how an architect thinks about a building, about life in a small Japanese firm, about Japanese attitudes toward change, about changing Japanese society and more.

Although from the information in the book one would think that Matsuie's background is architecture, he was a fiction editor for Shinchosha Publishing, where he launched Shincho Crest Books, an imprint specializing in translations of foreign works. The Summer House received the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, an award that normally goes to seasoned authors who are well along in their careers. 

Tōru Sakanishi narrates the story as a middle-aged man recalling the past. When the book opens, he is a recent university graduate joining the prestigious Murai Office, a nine-person architecture firm founded by Shunsuke Murai, a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Although the firm does not ordinarily enter architectural competitions, Murai decides to compete for the design of a National Library of Modern Literature. It  competes against a larger firm that obtains one government project after the next, and the library design thread runs through the novel.

As the sweltering summer months approach, the Murai Office migrates from Tokyo to Kita-Asama, a mountain village and artists’ colony whose heyday has passed. With tighter homes and air conditioning there is less reason to escape the rainy season in the mountains. The village faces Mt. Asama, an active volcano that regularly threatens to cover the landscape with cinders and ash, another thread running through the book. (The Japanese title of the novel can be translated At the Foot of the Volcano.) Despite living beside a volcano, the character seem blasé.

Years earlier Murai had built and then expanded a house in the village, the firm's summer home, making it large enough to shelter the staff and where the architects––including two women Sakanishi is attracted to––begin working on a library design. Murai charges the firm's two senior architects each to come up with a design; he will select and modify the one he thinks is best. So while there is competition within the firm, the loser does not appear to have any ill feelings.

The Summer House is engaging and believable because the characters are affecting and plausible. They act in ways that are understandable even as the environment, technology, and society change in time around them. 

"I found myself in a dark wood, the direct way lost . . . "

 I'm not sure what to make of Jon Fosse's short novel A Shining.

Fosse is a Norwegian author, translator, and playwright. He was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in 1959, he has written over seventy novels, poems, children's books, essays, and theatre plays which have been translated into over fifty languages. 

Several of his novels have been described as post-modernist and avant-garde literature due to their minimalism, lyricism and unorthodox use of syntax. The Bergens Tidende reported in 2005, "Few and often nameless characters, little external action and a great deal of linguistic repetition, Jon Fosse writes in all literary genres, but his drama in particular has enjoyed fabulous international success." A Shining is a relatively painless introduction to his work if only because it's short.

We spend all 74 pages in the head of a nameless character who, bored, drives aimlessly until his car becomes stuck on a narrow forest road. He does not know where he is. He does not know where to find help. He has no cellphone. It's cold. It grows dark. He leaves the car but does not follow the road but wanders aimlessly in the forest until he's lost. It snows. He sees a shining . . . something. He sees his dead parents and talks to them. He sees a figure in a black suit, white shirt, black tie and barefoot. He somehow becomes barefoot himself. The book stops.

The language, a translation by one of my favorite translators Damion Searls, is relatively bland. Here is a sample taken at random: "For the shining presence's arm, if that's the right thing to call it, now felt something inseparable from my body, and to find out whether it was or not, to be able to find out, I would have to move, and that's exactly what I had no desire to do, or what it felt like I wasn't allowed to do. And this prohibition was binding and unalterable, that's how it felt." 

Because Fosse tells us so little about the narrator—his age, background, character, hopes, fears—the reader has none of the usual markers we use to understand the story. Because Fosse gives us so little and the narrator questions what he does think, we have to make up or own story (or throw the book against the wall). And perhaps that's the point. Rather than the author leading the reader, the point is offer conflicting, inexplicable clues and force readers to make of A Shining what they will.

It reminded me of, "In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost . . . ." Among the difference between Dante and Fosse is that Fosse's narrator has no guide—which I take as a comment on modern society—and no hope of redemption. He mentions God, but does not seem to believe that God (or a Virgil) can help him find his way.

A Shining provoked more thoughts and questions than most books. It is probably worth rereading and more thought, but there are so many other books I want to read, so many other things I want to learn, that once through was enough for me. Others will feel differently.

Strangers on a Russian train

The paperback novel Eastbound is deceptively modest. It's thin, only about 130 pages, and small, roughly 5 by 6 inches. It's more like a long short story or a novella than a free-standing novel. I'm impressed that the editor at Archipelago Books had the wit to acquire it and that The New York Times realized that it was worth reviewing as they did in 2023:

"When this brief lyrical novel was first published in France, in 2012, Russia’s war against Ukraine was no more than a psychotic gleam in Vladimir Putin’s eye. Today, Eastbound is a story of our time. In a book whose only battlefield is a cross-continental train, [the author] Maylis de Kerangal vividly evokes the Russian military’s disorder and brutality and the desperation of the men who have been forced to serve in it."

Virtually all of the action takes place on an eastbound Trans-Siberian train. There are two central characters,  Aliocha, a 20-year-old conscript who decides to desert rather than serve in Siberia, and Hélène, a French woman who decides to leave her Russian lover rather than live with him at a hydroelectric station in central Russia. Aliocha speaks no French; Hélène knows only a few words of Russian. Nevertheless, they connect under plausible circumstances and she decides to help him evade his vicious sergeant on the train.

Because Aliocha and Hélène cannot speak the novel has virtually no dialogue. We learn almost everything we know about the people and their situation by what they do and what de Kerangal tells us in Jessica Moore's smooth translation: "These guys come from Moscow and don't know where they're going. There's a crowd of them, more than a hundred, young, white—pallid, even—wan and shorn, their arms veiny and eyes pacing the train car, camouflage pants and briefs, torsos caged in khaki undershirts, thin chains with crosses bouncing against their chests, guys lining the walls in the passageways and corridors, sitting, standing, stretched out on the berths, letting their arms dangle, their feet dangle, letting their bored resignation dangle in the void."

While those sentences, the first two in the book, engaged my interest initially, I did not expect to become so invested in Aliocha and Hélène, to care about them as much as I did. The details of the train, the characters, the passing landscape all ring true. I believe that a young Russian conscript and an older French woman would, in a similar situation, act the way Aliocha and Hélène did.  An extraordinary book.