In this Italo Calvino fantasy, a bored man spends his lunch breaks following a neighbourhood cat on its afternoon rounds through his rapidly growing the city. Thanks to the cat, he discovers a secret world within the city known only to its feline inhabitants. The story takes a grim turn when the cat steals a fish and leads the man to an overgrown garden that provides the last sanctuary for stray cats in the city. When progress tries to claim it, the cats and other animal residents fight back. Themes: social class, the negative aspects of progress, adaptivity, rebellion. More…
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Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies
This story by Salman Rushdie satirises several aspects of life in post-colonial Pakistan. When an attractive woman steps off a bus outside a British Consulate for a visa interview, wily “advice expert” Muhammad Ali sees her as any easy mark. However when they meet, he is so struck by her beauty that he offers to help for free. Muhammad is confused when the woman rejects his assistance, attends the interview, and comes back into the street very happy, having failed to get her visa. Themes: power, emigration, deception, tradition (women’s subservience, arranged marriages) and change (women’s growing independence and freedom). More…
Valediction
This coming-of-age story by Sherman Alexie was extracted from The Rumpus website. Valediction means the act of saying farewell, and in the story two boys who have been close friends for years break up over an act of shoplifting. They had shoplifted together several times, but when guilt and fear cause the narrator to stop, his friend continues and is caught. Disappointingly, instead of thanking his friend for telling authorities he wasn’t involved in the previous thefts, the narrator cuts him off without a word. There is no valediction. Themes include choices and consequences, crime and punishment, reputation, shame, ingratitude. More…
The Horse Dealer’s Daughter
At a simplistic level, this story by D. H. Lawrence can be looked upon as a traditional love story. However, with Lawrence’s reputation as a writer who explores human nature through psychological insight and sexual descriptions, it is highly unlikely he would write a story with such a straightforward message. Alternate interpretations include: 1) a tale in which a desperate, calculating woman tries to seduce a vulnerable man; and 2) a religious fantasy in which a near-death experience results in an epiphany that awakens feelings of love and desire. Themes include family relationships, patriarchy, misogyny, despair, death, rebirth, passion. More…
To Da-duh in Memoriam
Set mostly in 1930s Barbados, this memoir by Paule Marshall explores the rivalry between a feisty nine-year-old American girl and her eighty-year-old Barbadian grandmother. During the girl’s first visit to her parent’s homeland the two engage in a process of one-upmanship. As the grandmother extols the natural beauty and bounty of her country, the girl counters with the modern wonders of New York. Despite the conflict, the two become so close the girl later feels that the grandmother’s spirit continues to live within her. Themes include pride, rivalry, connection, contrast (age vs. youth, rural vs. urban living, progress), colonialization. More…