This autobiographical story by Christa Wolf provides a unique perspective on the final days of World War II, told from the viewpoint of a middle-aged German woman looking back on her time as a teenager fleeing the Russians with her family. Part of a column of refugees, she recounts being strafed by American fighter planes, learning of Hitler’s death, encountering a retreating Wehrmacht unit, and coming face-to-face with liberated concentration camp survivors. Ironically, some confronting experiences on reaching the “safety” of American lines leave her in tears. Themes: war, the vagaries of memory/selective amnesia, changing perspectives, dislocation, loss, death. More…
The Great Rat Hunt
This memoir from Laurence Yep includes themes of father-son relationships, accepting differences, and facing fear. A young boy with severe asthma feels left out when he can’t join his father and brother in practicing ball games. Everything changes after they notice signs of a rat in their apartment. When poison and an exterminator don’t work, the father borrows a gun and invites the boys to join him in a hunt. Although no shots are fired, the father claims success. The narrator shares a “trophy” and learns some important lessons about fatherly love and focusing on one’s strengths rather than weaknesses. More…
The Sacrificial Egg
The major theme of this story by Chinua Achebe is culture clash, as reflected in the changes forced on the Ibo (Igbo) people of South-Eastern Nigeria as they reconciled their traditional values and beliefs with the effects of Westernization under British colonial rule. One of the biggest changes observed by the narrator is the move from a village-based to an urbanized society, which resulted in a resurgence of smallpox. We also learn how some people, including the narrator, try to minimize such conflicts by maintaining a foot in both cultural camps. Other themes include colonialism, tradition, superstition, compromise. More…
The Bog Man
As in an earlier Margaret Atwood story, The Age of Lead, The Bog Man revolves around a long-dead body. A university student’s hero worship of her archaeology professor leads to a torrid affair during which she accompanies him as his ‘assistant’ to inspect a 2,000-year-old body preserved in a Scottish peat bog. As his invisible wife comes between them, she feels “cheap and furtive”. Recognizing his shallowness, she ends the relationship. Like the bog man, over the years he becomes flatter and more leathery, as life goes out of him in her mind. Themes include infatuation, sexual exploitation, desire, guilt, empowerment. More…
Leaving the Yellow House
In this depressing but captivating story by Saul Bellow, a seventy-two-year-old woman reviews her life of lost opportunities after an accident threatens her ability to live independently in her off-the-grid Yellow House. A heavy drinker, she is portrayed as irresponsible, selfish, brash and demanding. With no close relatives and the six other eccentric white people in her isolated desert community tolerating rather than befriending her, she has no one to turn to and, more importantly, nobody “good enough” to bequeath her only treasure (the house) to. Themes include poverty, aging and death, identity, self-deception, alienation and isolation, disconnection, alcohol abuse. More…