Well it was kind of a mixed day of reading yesterday. I began with a read through of the two Maupassant shorts that I’d scheduled for myself from the Oxford University Press collection, A Day in the Country and Other Stories. The first story was Out on the River, which recounts a boatman’s terrifying night alone on the river. Although you can read my afterthoughts on the story HERE, I’ll tell you that I really enjoyed it. The story is very Poe-like in its presentation – one of these psychological terrors – and it has a very satisfying ending.
The second Maupassant short, Simon’s Dad, couldn’t have been more different in terms of storyline. It’s about a boy who get’s bullied for not having a dad, and he decides to do something about it. The story has a couple of literary highlights, which mainly come from Maupassant’s sublime ability to describe scene, but ultimately this wasn’t one of my favourite Maupassant tales (you can catch up with my full afterthoughts HERE)
What I will say with regards to both stories however, is it’s nice to have a more readable translation than I normally do. The translator, David Coward (a Senior Fellow and Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Leeds), seems to have a knack for making the story flow a lot better than most translations I’ve read. And although he makes the little French kids in Simon’s Dad sound like a gang of Cockney Eastenders – “What they call yer?” – he’s still very readable.
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Moving on and I managed to work my way through my scheduled Arthur Miller story in Presence: Collected Stories (Bloomsbury), but boy what a labourious task. Not only was the story more the length of a novella (40 pages), I just couldn’t gel with Homely Girl, A Life as well as I have with other Miller stories that I’ve read. Don’t get me wrong here, the story is incredibly well conceived and up to the usual genius standard of Miller’s authorship, but I just found the story to be so tiresome and drawn out that I had to mentally force myself back to the page on a number of occasions – not good!
As I said the story is certainly well conceived. A woman (Janice Sessions) wakes to find her blind husband dead beside her, and she begins to reminisce on her life since childhood; her relationship with her father, her first husband, and her now deceased husband. But for me Homely Girl, A Life is all too allegorical, even a bit too political. Maybe I missed the point of the story entirely, but in all honesty I sit here thinking about the story and I can’t remember too much about it, which for me speaks volumes.
One thing that did clearly stick in my mind though with regards to this story, was the irony that Janice grew up not being particularly happy with her looks (is any woman? 
), and then she eventually marries a blind man. I loved that idea. Story Rating: 
::Tuesday’s reading plans::
- ‘Chekhov Tuesday’ so a couple of Anton shorts to look forward to. First up An Actor’s End, which sounds rather ominous. The second story is The Requiem, which doesn’t sound all that much cheerier either does it? We’ll see.
- I’m hoping that today’s Arthur Miller short is a lot better than yesterday’s one was. I move on to the final titular collection in Presence: Collected Stories (Bloomsbury) , and the first story in this final six, is entitled Bulldog.
- I didn’t manage to manage to dive into it yesterday, so hopefully, if I can get my forethoughts down for it, I’ll be taking my first leap today into The House of the Mosque by Kader Abdolah (Canongate).
So another day packed full of reading. Would I want it any other way? Nah!! See you tomorrow!
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