Nothing happened... (Books - The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio)

Appropriately enough, my entire day off yesterday was spent very laboriously - setting up my sleek new laptop. Just a little over 4 pounds and very slim, it required nearly five hours on the phone both with technical support of both the computer and my wireless router -we're a multi-laptop household with one internet hook up and a dislike of wires going every which way - and I'm still not finished figuring out Vista, and the new restrictions Microsoft has put on managing your email. I still have a few hours to go adding all of the technical programs I need for the lab. What price beauty?

That's put me seriously behind where I wanted to be in reading for classes (and we're just starting the second week). I know I will catch up but I like front loading my year to keep stress at bay. I was studying until about 11 last night. No Middlemarch for me, under those circumstances I wanted something short and sweet, so that I could feel like I had completed something. So thank goodness for C. B.'s short story challenge and Charles D'Ambrosio's The Dead Fish Museum. I have never seen such gushing quotes on a volume of stories - you would think the man had cured the common cold. He's compared to Raymond Carver. He's "consummate," he's "complex," he's a "paparazzo of the unguarded moment" for god's sake (according to a reviewer in Buffalo). Even Elle magazine was forced to use the word chiaroscuro. Good grief. Well I will say this. The guy writes well. His sentences feel like poems, only poems about rusty metal signs, smashed pop bottles, and wallpaper peeling off walls - not those of the "She walks in beauty like the night" variety. He reminds me a little of the sensibility of James Wright, one of my favorite poets ever. I'm just realizing I have never done a post on his poems - what's with that?

Anyhoo, reading one of his stories, I had the feeling I had been dropped into a world that already existed completely and somehow, although I had just gotten there, I knew everything about it.

At the Home I'd get up early, when the Sisters were still asleep, and head to the ancient Chinese man's store. The ancient Chinese man was a broken, knotted, shriveled man who looked like a chunk of gingeroot and ran one of those tiny stores that sells grapefruits, wine, and toilet paper, and no one can ever figure out how they survive. But he survived, he figured it out. His ancient Chinese wife was a little twig of a woman who sat in a chair and never said a word. He spoke only enough English to conduct business, to say hello and goodbye, to make change, although every morning, when I came for my grapefruit, I tired to teach him some useful vocabulary.

I came out of the gray drizzle through the glass door with the old Fishback Appliance Repair sign still stenciled on it, a copper cowbell clanging above me, and the store was cold, the lights weren't even on...

That's from the first story, The High Divide. It's the opposite, of reading Eliot's Middlemarch. Here I don't so much get the idea he is paid by the word as that he pays for them, through the nose, and will make every last one count. Each sentence is as lean as an alley cat, but so much information accumulates, having read them. In it an orphaned boy who is trying to teach himself Latin and is right on the divide between childhood and adolescence, befriends a boy who bullies him. That boy also has some problems of his own, it turns out. These stories are not heavy on plot, but life changes nonetheless for the people in them. This story is like the life of a ten or eleven year old boy. You asked him what happened this week and the answer is "nothing," and then you ask him the next week and he still says "nothing," because that's how he experienced it. Nothing happened to him and life is boring. Only at the end of those two weeks, you look at him and can see he's grown up.