Roxana: a short story

Prompted by Roxana I'll try and say what it is about Alice Munro that appeals (since you're only halfway through Dear Life that means this is going to be a short post). 

To my horror, I can't even explain my tastes (so much for rationality!). I suppose a part of our desire or our preferences is always blind, though. Maybe only after the fact can we look back, when things have calmed down, cooled down, and see what it was that drew us to something in the first place?

Short stories. In general I think the jury is still out. A short story seems too light and breezy, almost one-dimensional, a stand-alone deal; they're a bit like a good breakfast: unique, of a particular time, greatly satisfying but once you get to work you've forgotten about it. I think a part of us enjoys such forgetfulness. Light up a cigarette, smoke it, then its done. Return to life, dear life. There's some sort of instant understanding, a moment of clarity amongst the dross and confusion, and then it's gone.

What stands out for me in the short story is that so little stands out. There are few memorable lines and so little time for texture, for layered meanings and character development. Not many lines to mark, fewer passages that give you some much-desired density. I guess we want to see life in three dimensions sometimes, not flattened out. We want to experience life in colour, informed by the richness of ambiguity and diversions, meanderings. The short story seems, to me, to be bare, essential, a distillation of experience, which is why great stories are often described as 'gem-like': a hard, concentrated, minimalistic and refracted telling. Catch some details in a fine light but don't allow them to grow. The art of the short story seems to me about how the world revolves around a single sentence, how a life can be missed or turned around by a few words said in a particular tone. 

Our story is a short one; it could have been something else, might have panned out in a different direction had we the courage or the intelligence, or if destiny had been on our side. A short story, a profile,a  brief glimpse of one of the manifold possibilities. When all is said and done not much was really said or done.  

How is time organized in a short story?

In Dear Life one can hardly catch one's breath. There is something hypnotic in this book in the sense that it has real momentum. 

A short story is like a single black brush-stroke on a white canvas. That may be enough for some people: a world in a grain of sand. But is it a world? It seems more like the earth briefly illuminated by a flash of lightning. Don't we want our stories to connect, to link up to some kind of discernible pattern, as in a fable?

You've read half of Lorrie Moore's Birds of America (which you also like) but haven't had the heart to start Lydia Davis's collection. Someone mentioned VSP and Grace Paley as must-reads. Penelope Fitzgerald's short stories are also a delight but if you were pressed you'd be unable to say why, exactly, that is so.

My favourite short stories are by Karen B. Why? There's something magical and child-like about them, something that touches on the dream-world, a bit like the book you once recommended, Berberova's Book of Happiness, which turned out to be remarkable despite the awful title.

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Listening to Celia's Biber after all these years and loving it. It seems as if there's a whole world here in this music-and it's so selfless. On first hearing you thought it was too light, breezy..superficial, even, and it glanced over you. But there's a kind of confidence to the music that moves without knowing; there are distant reminders of childhood winters, perhaps also some notes of Turkish influence (that's just something I dream or instinctively feel).

A friend listened to it and it reminded of his time in Vienna with his Austrian girlfriend and how that part of his life had a firm and distinct line drawn under it now.

I think good short stories have that firm line in mind, since they point to what isn't said. Each short story starts somewhere but there was something going on, in the background, beforehand. 

The best short stories, though, are just a set of wavy lines.

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