This story from Heinrich Böll is a social commentary about a rich family’s exploitation of farm workers. This occurs on three levels, characterized by different forms of “scales”: 1) systematic cheating, involving an incorrectly balanced set of weighing scales; 2) legal injustice, where the scales of justice are weighted firmly in favor of the landowners; and 3) social injustice, where the imbalance of power results in poor pay, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. The workers are incensed by the cheating, but accept the other injustices. Other themes: the whistle-blowing family’s courage and pride, church and wider community apathy. More…
Story in a Mirror
In this intriguing story by Ilse Aichinger, a woman’s life “flashes before her eyes” as she dies in hospital from an infection following an illegal abortion. During her death struggle she looks forward, picturing her burial, and then travells backward in time, re-living key events all the way back to her birth. An interesting concept is that the journey brings redemption… In the mirror one does everything so that it may be forgiven. For example, it becomes clear that she didn’t want the abortion, but rather was ordered to by her controlling lover. Themes include, death, time, memories, regret, redemption. More…
Taking Care
Written at a writer’s retreat in the early 1970s, this is Joy Williams’s first published story. An understandably distracted parish priest goes through the motions of fulfilling his duties as his wife wastes away in hospital from an unknown blood disorder, and he cares for his six-month-old granddaughter and a dog abandoned by his irresponsible daughter. Caring for the baby while his daughter “finds herself” in Mexico provides solace and a reminder that life goes on as he prepares for his wife’s anticipated homecoming. Themes include family, abandonment, responsibility, nostalgia, childhood adaptability, love, marriage, suffering, death, grace. More…
The Guilty Party – An East Side Tragedy
This story by O. Henry takes recent events in America, where parents have been found partly responsible when their child commits murder, to a new level. A young man boasts to friends that he will teach his fiancée a lesson by taking another girl to a dance. The fiancée makes good her promise to kill him if he does, then flees and commits suicide. A heavenly court absolves her of the crime, blaming a red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, sitting by a window reading while his children play in the streets.. Themes include guilt and innocence, parental neglect, love, betrayal, redemption. More…
The Spinoza of Market Street
Isaac Singer’s protagonist is an aging philosopher who has struggled for thirty years to write a commentary on the 17th century philosophical treatise, Spinoza’s Ethics. Frustrated, sickly and too weak from hunger to get out of bed, a reclusive spinster nurses him back to health. Her kindness leads to marriage and a wedding night in which he miraculously regains his youthful virility and passion for life. The story’s denouement: Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool. could thus be taken several ways. Themes: obsession, isolation and loneliness, renewal through passion, the difficulty in reconciling Spinoza’s views with traditional religion. More…