This story from Katherine Porter describes the disoriented thoughts and recollections of a feisty eighty-year-old (Granny Weatherall) as she lies dying in the house of one of her daughters. Satisfied with her life, she awaits a sign from God to say that her time has come. In her last moments, she likens the absence of such a sign to being left standing at the altar sixty earlier. Major themes are perseverance, motherhood and faith. Other themes: aging and death, loss (over the death of husband John and daughter Hapsy), betrayal and repressed anger (over being jilted by George). More…
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The Master Thief
This Norwegian folktale is about a young man whose poor father sends him out into the world to earn a living. He joins a group of robbers, and is so good at stealing that he becomes their leader. The Master Thief returns home a rich man and decides to marry the Governor’s daughter. In order to marry the girl, he must prove how good a thief he is. This story goes against the English idiom: Crime doesn’t pay. The moral seems to be that crime does pay… but only if you are very good at it! More…
Where Is Here?
One of the beauties of this unsettling story by Joyce Carol Oates is that it is open to many interpretations depending on how much one reads into the visitor’s identity and purpose. At its simplest, the story involves a man behaving strangely as he confronts pleasant and unpleasant memories during a visit to his childhood home. More imaginative interpretations include revisiting a scene of child abuse and/or patricide, and a ghostly warning from the past or future about looming danger or a cursed house. Themes: (general) nostalgia, connection, domestic violence; (through the riddles) mortality, time, infinity. More…
Five-Twenty
In this story by Patrick White, a woman with very low self-esteem spends her life at the beck and call of a rancorous, dominating husband. As they age and he gradually wastes away, they spend their days “traffic watching” from the veranda of their small house on a busy road. She becomes obsessed with a strange-looking man who drives by at five-twenty every day and, following a chance meeting after her husband dies, experiences what may be her first passionate stirrings. Sadly, death comes between them. Themes include patriarchy, gender roles, aging, loneliness, lack of passion and fulfilment, freedom, loss. More…
The Return
Roberto Bolaño’s The Return is not your usual Gothic ghost story. The mood (though not the storyline) is more like the Patrick Swayze movie Ghost, which is referred to in the story. When a man’s ghost finds that it can communicate with a famous French fashion designer, it decides to spend its time on earth with him. The two hadn’t known each other in real life, and only met because the fashion designer had paid to have sex with the man’s corpse! Themes: death, the afterlife, necrophilia, disillusionment, insecurity, isolation, empathy. More…