Gymn class for me when I was this age was all about trying to avoid field hockey. Handing frustrated adolescents field hockey sticks and letting them have at it was hard on the ankles.
There’s something very appealing about these two forms of weightlessness.
Heather
Gordon, Carol, Donald, the chicken, Barbara
Donald looks very pleased with himself. The chicken looks calm. My mother and aunt look solicitous, most likely of the boy since they didn’t like the chickens.
The man taking the picture, I’ve recently learned from my mother, was probably laughing. Vernon, it turns out, was a bit of a joker.
A three or four weeks ago I read Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006) which I enjoyed. It’s the type of book you have to take your time with: if you expect great lashings of plot or endearing characters you’ll likely be disappointed. But it you like steadily-paced social satire you might like it. (The New York Times review has a good summary of the book’s themes and there’s a roundup of mostly glowing reviews here.) The novel is drawn to a close by the events of 9/11 as the characters see themselves and the world as permanently changed. I’m uneasy with the positioning of that one day as life-altering but I can’t quite put my finger on the reason. My reaction has something in common with my negative reaction to Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a novel that takes place in London on the day of the February peace march. I’ll have to re-read The Emperor’s Children in a couple of years to see if I can figure it out.
Anyhoo. I thought Messud’s writing was interesting and picked up The Hunters (2001), a collection of two novellas. And while they’re technically accomplished, they didn’t quite work for me. Partly I suppose the problem is that I prefer longer fiction and usually impatient with novellas and short stories. I can see, though, that there’s a thematic connection between the the two books: In "A Simple Tale" Messud is interested in the ways in which large, historical events like the Holocaust shape (or fail to shape) lives. It’s the stronger of the two pieces and makes some pleasing gibes at Canadian and Torontonian smugness. The second story, "The Hunters", seems on first reading to be a technical exercise–can she tell the whole story without revealing the gender of the first person narrator. A patient person, perhaps someone who liked the Turn of the Screw, could probably go through the text and make a case for first one gender, and then the other. Me, I’m not so patient.
Heather
