Another draft I'm dragging to life.
I read these, not to completion, in January. I am not about to make any excuses for why this is, (time is one of them) so, moving on. The pic I took before knowing this fact; the plan was to read them and write up a read reflection, alas. My memory from what I did manage to read is rather hazy, but I did note down a few thoughts on a couple of the short stories, to follow after the jump.
From left to right: 16 Stories (an anthology of short stories by South African writers), edited by Clive Millar (1976); The Joke, Milan Kundera (1967); Six Fang Marks and a Tetanus Shot, Richard de Nooy, (2007).
Some of the shorts I enjoyed:
Sponono is a light-hearted read with an underlying sentiment. In (mis)communication, loyalty and a kind of friendship that's more about a unspoken bond than it is about time-spent together.
The Coffin is what short stories are generally made of. No deep-running plot, but there is a story threaded that keeps you bound, the characters are peculiar, but they are portrayed in an endearing manner—the reader latches onto them. Also, although the plot is thin, and maybe also shallow, there is an outcome already created that you must see through.
- Lost and Found, by Stuart Cloete
A story of moral fibre, I would say. A young boy who acts out of love. His close observers see him as "mad", which so often happens. Society's tendency to name-call/shame as soon as someone veers outside of normativity never gets old. The young fellow is drawn to animals, the "lost", and the vulnerable, and he seems to understand their language. I like how Cloete only shows the boy's endearing seat of behaviour much later in the story, so you're left to read and guess through the obscurities. Again, the dynamics of a short story was wonderfully met here.
- Through the Tunnel, by Doris Lessing
What a gripping story. This is a moral-of-the-story type. Its mild action keeps the reader's imagination reeling line after line. Here the protagonist is a young boy, too, out at sea, out to discover not only the depths of the waters, but his own proficiency, endurance, fight and hunger to fulfill his agency of pride. Almost a coming-of-age story, yes! that's exactly it.
And of course, the anthology would not have been complete without a couple of Herman Charles Bosman shorts. I enjoy reading his works. I personally own a copy of Mafeking Road: and Other Stories (1947), an anthology of shorts romantically told by the imaginative and humorous Oom Schalk Lourens as narrator of the tales.
Some day, I will, definitely, return to that local library and borrow the Kundera and de Nooy (grew up in SA, now lives in Amsterdam) reads, and I will return here, definitely, and boast about it. I've been terrible at finishing books this year. There are about a dozen of stop-starts to get through. Will I ever...?
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