"Reading Comprehension: Text No. 1" by Alejandro Zambra

This story can be found in the July 6, 2015 issue of The New Yorker magazine.  

My comments can also be found on The Mookse and the Gripes.
 
First Line: "After so many study guides, so many practice tests and proficiency and achievement tests, it would have been impossible for us not to learn something, but we forgot everything almost right away and, I'm afraid, for good."

Last Line: "You all weren't educated; you were trained."

Something is missing here for me on this one.   It feels like a memoir/essay that moves clumsily into an anecdote, then crashing with a “thud” into a slightly humorous satire.

 

This tale is set-up perfectly for an honors English to take and dissect into form and feature.  The quiz at the end is a parody of the theme – a gimmick to be sure – but one that will introduce students to a new author and will offer opportunities to compare and contrast education across cultures.

But for me?  At this point in my life?  I have heard great things about the creativity and skill of Alejandro Zambra, and I am disappointed that “Reading Comprehension: Text No. 1” was my introduction to his work. 

I was not reading a story here.  I was reading an English Comp paper written by a student who decided to be clever – and even a bit trite. 

Not every writing by a well-praised writer can be praiseworthy.  But in this magazine?  Surrounded by accolades in an interview and laden with commendation in an interview?  This piece does not warrant the laurel leaves.

Photo credit:  http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31WsBJrMvxL._UX250_.jpg

 

Connor Doran

Amy Doran walked onto the gymnasium floor at an elementary school on a Friday morning.  “I’m here to share a story.”  The story was about her son, Connor, and his dream to appear on America’s Got Talent back in 2010.  He wanted to show America his indoor kites, but she hemmed and hawed, trying to push him off.  Connor has epilepsy, and Amy was nervous about all the things that could go wrong chasing this dream.  He was insistent and eventually his mother gave in.  She sent his video to NBC studios.  Producers proclaimed him “stellar”, inviting him to audition in Portland, Oregon. 

Flying a kite requires wind and a lot of space outdoors.  So, how does this happen indoors?  Amy told the students, “instead of flying with the wind, these kites fly with movement.”  Connor blew away the judges on America’s Got Talent.  The kite sailed up and down, over and around, to his elegant and musical movements.  It was art, like a dance.  A unanimous “yes” vote sent him to the next round in Las Vegas. 

When Connor was eventually eliminated in Las Vegas, he had already received an invitation to fly his kites at the Washington Mall in Washington, DC for 8,000 people.  This dream snowballed, becoming bigger and bigger.  And then the producers of the show called again, inviting Connor and his mom back for the wild card round.  He placed 12^th in a field of 90,000.  And for the last five years, he has been traveling all over the United States and Canada, spreading awareness of epilepsy, encouraging people to follow their dreams, and flying his kites.

Over 125,000 Americans are diagnosed with epilepsy each year.  Epilepsy is a group of disorders of the nervous system, marked by recurrent seizures (http://www.webmd.com/epilepsy/).  Connor was diagnosed at the age of 4, having 30-40 seizures a day.  Amy explained epilepsy and its attending seizures to the students, saying that “the brain gets too busy and it takes a break.  It needs to reboot.”  With medication, Connor has been seizure-free for five years.

Their Dare to Dream Program takes them many places, sharing their story of resilience and hope.  “If you have a dream, do it.  Don’t let anyone say you can’t.  Be nice to yourself and work hard.”  Amy told them to be determined in the face of naysayers, saying she learned by watching Connor’s resolve in the face of her “no”.

The elementary students were moved by the connection Connor has with his Revolution quad-line indoor kite.  The performance brought smiles of awe.  But Connor, having achieved a dream, wanted the children to know that it is okay to have more than one dream - and to continue to chase others, even when some have been realized.

Connor can also be found at connordoran.com.

"The Flower" by Louise Erdrich

This story can be found in the June 30, 2015 issue of The New Yorker magazine.  

My comments on this story can also be found at The Mookse and the Gripes.

First Line: "Outside an isolated Ojibwe country trading post in the year 1839, Mink was making an incessant racket."

Last Line: "Much to far for a head to roll."

Again, I am a new reader to a New Yorker author.   I have heard the name before and even picked up one of Erdrich’s books (The Master Butchers Singing Club).  I had found the title fascinating, but was not pulled in enough at the beginning to continue reading. 

I am sitting with those same feelings here after reading “The Flower”.  And I must begin with the title!  I understand why “The Flower” was on the list for this story, but it seems more of a working title to me.  And the piece itself?  There were good ideas, pretty little nuggets, woven together, but then sealed with a rather flat and predictable ending – an ending meant to sew in the loose threads and keep some of the vicious things within quite neat and tidy.

But I wanted more.

At eleven years old, “Flower” is abandoned by her mother: sold to the trading post owner, into sexual slavery, for alcohol.  The clerk, Wolfred, merely seventeen, recognizes the child’s beauty and tries to hide the attractiveness from Mackinnon.  Eventually Wolfred comes to recognize, instead, the signs of her subjugation to the ruthless man’s demands.   

“For the first time in his life, Wolfred began to see the things of which he was capable.

“Wolfred sorted through his options…”  

And this is when the story has a promise of becoming fun…  the head of a dead man rolling around, drums appearing out of nowhere, a grotesque poisoning, violent killing and re-killing, trips outside of the body and into the night air, dividing the self in parts and hiding some in trees… 

And then it just ends.  There’s some more plot to bring us to an end point– missionaries and boarding school, names and proposals - but it is heavy and wooden after all of the earlier animation. 

I read in “The Page-turner” that this was written – collected - from bits and pieces of Erdrich’s upcoming novel.  It was disappointing to realize that this was not a story unto its own, but I was a bit relieved, too.  Maybe I will find something by Erdrich that I will enjoy from beginning to end.

Photo taken from www.famoouswiki.com/image/20295/13742/louise-erdrich.html.

 

"The Grow-Light Blues" by Ben Marcus

 
This story can be found in the June 22, 2015 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

First Line: "Carl Hirsch didn't do holiday parties."

Last Line: "Maybe, in whatever time he had left, Carl would work as hard as he could to keep the verdict on that question, along with every other question that pressed in, as far way from his family as humanly possible."

Wow!  I truly enjoyed this story.  It was my first reading of anything by Ben Marcus, and he did not disappoint.

The story starts out with a man, who works for a Research and Development firm called Mayflower Systems, entering a holiday office party.  He is uncomfortable – socially, physically.  His face is disfigured.  He is not only an employee but also a research subject for his company. 

Mayflower is trying to capitalize on the current state of the world.  They tried to track emotions and then pair people up with those that had similar feelings.  When unsuccessful, the firm decided to remove the need for the process of eating.  They tried a complete nutrition liquid (that did not work) and now, they were hitting Carl with UV rays to cover all of his nutritional needs. 

It is a sad tale – a parable of sorts.  It voices a concern about our time.  Are we removing the important, vital functions of our lives which in turn help us to access our intuition, our ability to choose, sensual pleasures, and sociality?  

Small glimpses of hope are seen in his mother’s “revisionist birth narrative” despite the doom and gloom Carl reads into it.  We meet those hopeful emotions at the end when he, himself, has married and has his own son.  

The idea is creative and the writing is fantastic.  It is clear, clean and crisp.  Ben Marcus is poetic in this story, juggling clever phrases to bring us inside Carl’s head.  Those pieces of masterful language give stunning visual imagery, for we are to know all about this man and his face to truly understand his pain… without a photograph.  There is true storyteller craft at work here.   

I loved these lines:

·         “…Carl instead collected drive-by hugs.  He was heavily touched, right on the body, by people he’d hardly even met.”

·         “Carl and his team were pressured to pee-shame the status quo.”

·         “Rough on the eyes, tough to the touch.”

·         “The winter failed, and along came April, one of the twelve punishments.”

I look forward to more by Ben Marcus. 

 
photo from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Ben_marcus_3041200.JPG/220px-Ben_marcus_3041200.JPG