And so my journey through Presence (Bloomsbury), the collected short stories of Arthur Miller continued first thing this morning with a read of Miller’s 1951 short story, Monte Sant’ Angelo.
The story, which first made it’s appearance in Harper’s in 1951, follows close American friends Vinny and Bernstein as they tour the Italian countryside in search of Vinny’s Italian relatives. They arrive at the isolated and largely inaccessible village of Monte Sant’ Angelo, where Vinny has it on good authority that his relatives have resided in the village since the twelfth-century.
As with yesterday’s Miller short, I Don’t Need You Any More, I found in Monte Sant’ Angelo a story that is deeply sublime and wholly thought-provoking. At first, although I enjoyed reading it, I couldn’t make much sense out of the story. Then it kind of hit me right between the eyes. This story, penned only a few years after the end of WW2, is more about offering hope than anything else; hope projected through the story’s character Bernstein, an American Jew. It’s difficult to go into specifics without spoiling things to some degree, but suffice it to say that the story, in a subtle way, offers a glimmer of hope in relation to one of the greatest tragedies of modern times (of all time perhaps) – the Jewish Holocaust. If my notion is right on this (and I’m pretty certain it is), then this story shows what an incredible level of genius exists in Arthur Miller; something which his prowess as a playwright has already shown us. A delightful and clever story. I’ll score it 4 out of 5.
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Moving onwards, and I also managed to stay on schedule and tick off the second ‘chapter’ of city-lit BERLIN (Oxygen Books) today. The title of this chapter, ‘Out and About’ is not surprisingly focussed on exploring a number of the key locations of Berlin, and indeed the transport system of Berlin itself. Rather bizarrely perhaps, the exploration of transport was confined to the rails, which turned out to be no bad thing. From a not-so-subtle and wholly engaging reminder that the U-Bahn’s ‘honour system’ shouldn’t be abused, to the almost trancelike state that can invoked while riding the S-Bahn, these extracts are definitely a highlight of this chapter.
The chapter’s real winner for me though was Salil Triphati’s incredible description of a visit to Bebelplatz, and the ‘empty bookshelves’ memorial that marks the Nazi book burning ceremony in the square in 1933 (previously featured as Bookshelf of the Week on RobAroundBooks).
Overall a much more enjoyable chapter than the first so I’ll score ‘Out and About’ 3.5 out of 5
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I must have been on a roll today because as promised I also managed to make a start on Sank Pak’s debut novel Wait Until Twilight (Harper Collins). When it comes to debut novels I’m almost always sucked in to reading them. And that’s because the opportunity of perhaps discovery a new writer who moves me massively, is always a big draw for me.
With only two chapters of Wait Until Twilight ticked off it’s too soon to say whether Sank Pak is going to be one of those writers, but the book’s cover blurb by Booklist, which declares Pak as being ‘a careful and confident writer’, is certainly living up to its claim. So far so good. But it’s early days.
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::Reading planned for tomorrow::
- Story three in Arthur Miller’s Presence collection, Please Don’t Kill Anything.
- The next chapter of city-lit BERLIN, entitled Ich bin Berliner
- A long overdue return to my Trevor vs. Moore reading challenge, with a read of the Lorrie Moore short How, and William Trevor’s In At the Birth.
- If I have any reading time left then a little more of Sang Pak’s Wait Until Twilight
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