The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I doubt that F. Scott Fitzgerald intended that The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories should ever be published, let alone read as a single volume. This is a mix of autobiographical pieces and short stories. The distinction between the two, if not marked by physical division, would not be immediately obvious. The short stories deal with individuals trying to be somebody, unconsciously aspiring to some form of American Dream that usually only exists while these characters are awake and often dissolves into an alcoholic haze of non-achievement. The author, in the autobiographical pieces, lives a similar life, except that in his case the achievement is tangible.

Fitzgerald always seems to adopt the position of outsider looking in. He never really seems to be part of anything. Even his standpoint as a third person narrator seems more removed than is usual, as if he is reluctant to allow his characters to adopt their own voices. Not that, as an author, he imposes his own values or positions. It is more a case of his being somewhat difficult to pin down.

Perhaps this is because he was from out of town, if that town be this book’s version of New York, where much of the action takes place. The author reminds us several times that he is a mid-Westerner from St Paul, an identity and origin he seems to regard as both safe and homely when compared to the candle flame attraction of the metropolis he dared not approach too close.

There is, however, a general feeling of the persistent little guy prevailing, of the propertied, apparently privileged receiving eventual, and a highly moral, comeuppance. It’s a perspective he would use in The Great Gatsby, where the observation of a highlife from distance renders it desirable, whereas greater proximity reveals its flaws.

But this is not a coherent set of stories. They stand alone and were designed to do so. They are clearly best experienced individually and then similarities of theme and style will not confuse. Modern readers need to be aware of the fact that these stories were written about a century ago and contain some attitudes and language that today would be difficult to express in public, let alone publish.

The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku, a visit to Sri lanka

Occasionally a reader chances on a real discovery. A few rupees to spare in Colombo International Airport in Sri Lanka prompted the purchase of a few books by local authors. Travel, if undertaken with interest in the world rather than the self, has cultural immersion and experience as a requirement. Foods, art, history, religions, cultures and music are all on the list, but literature and writing must also figure. What a reader would not predict from a cover that featured bananas and little else would be the fact that this set of short stories would prove to be nothing less than a revelation sufficient to deserve the description of “masterpiece”.

The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku is the book in question. It features seven short stories running to a total of around fifty thousand words, so is short enough for the traveller to consume before the west-bound aircraft out of Colombo even reaches Doha. But do not think that this implies something slight. On the contrary, the subject matter of these stories gets right to the heart of the social structure of Sri Lanka, its political and religious conflicts, its war, its highly unequal society, even its often fractious relationship with Britain, its former colonial master.

These stories address many issues and illustrate many arguments, but do not think for a moment that they are in any way didactic or heavy. The reality is quite the opposite, in that the writing style is sophisticatedly simple and transparent, the plots deceptively straightforward in their ability to convey complication with superb empathy. There is the Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim triangle, the Sinhalese-Tamil war, relations between the sexes and the generations, devastation by a Tsunami, the effects, intended and otherwise, of foreign aid, and even cricket. Anyone who has visited Sri Lanka will marvel at the brilliance with which these contexts are woven deftly into the tales of ordinary folk. A reader who has never been to this beautiful, troubled, welcoming and often frenetic island might even feel that these stories were the same as a visit, so vivid are the descriptions and so apparently real the scenarios. We even have a government minister being pushed though a crowd by the driver of his four-wheel SUV. Anyone who has visited Sri Lanka will recognise the requirement to get off the road. The reason, by the way, why minsters’ convoys behave so boorishly in traffic, is that they assume that bombs are never far away.

If this set of stories, The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku, contained only The House in Jaffna, it would still be worth buying, just for those twenty pages. In just a few thousand words, Insankya Kodithuwakku addresses inter-generational and cross-cultural differences, captialism’s empty consumerism that sees personality as merely the sum of consumption, the nature of nostalgia, the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, the fate of Jaffna and, overall, the appreciation of life being a process of change. It is nothing less than a masterpiece of the genre.

And Insankya Kodithuwakku’s writing style is always beautifully transparent, always engaging and regularly surprising throughout this set of stories. Insankya Kodithuwakku certainly displays a great talent. If you know Sri Lanka, you will adore these stories. If you have never been, then they will take you there for an authentic, enlightening and thoroughly entertaining visit. Please do read The Banana Tree Crisis by Insankya Kodithuwakku.

Fascination by William Boyd: a virtuoso performance

Fascination by William Boyd is a set of sixteen short stories. This may not sound either surprising or original until one considers their form. The author uses at least nine different and clearly identifiable forms in which to present this work. One takes the form of a video. There are childhood memories, a diary, a journal, an A-to-Z listing. One story is a set of dialogues over lunch. Another is a set of monologues. And William Boyd’s use of these different forms is not just a writer’s trick to impress a critic. In each case to form complements the story, adds interpretation to the events and helps our understanding of the characters. Fascination is thus no less than a fascinating read, a tour de force in miniature by a great writer. 

 View the book on amazon Fascination

The Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser tales by George Bernard Shaw

The title piece in this anthology is a parable on the nature of religious belief. When first published in 1932 it caused quite a stir and I wondered whether the intervening 75 years might have rendered it something less of a shocker. I found that, apart from one violation of current political correctness and a few inevitable stylistic issues, the message had lost none of its poignancy and perhaps little of its ability to shock.

The Black Girl in Search of God is not a novel or a novella. It is not really a short story either. I choose to describe it as a parable because others have, but equally it could be classed alongside Plato’s symposium as a vehicle for examining a philosophical idea. It’s not a discourse, but it could be a meditation, albeit a rather energetic one. The idea in question, of course, is the nature of religious belief.

The Black Girl of the title is only cast as such, I think, to provide Shaw with a literary vehicle to convey his otherwise naïve questions about Christianity. To this end, The Black Girl is presented as a “noble savage”, and thus a tabula rasa. It is here – and only here – that Shaw violates current correctness. The character could have been cast as a child, but then she could not have threatened to wield her knobkerrie, her weapon, and nor could she have been portrayed as bringing no tradition of her own. We must accept, therefore, that there remains a functionality about the role of this character. She does not represent anything, except her ability to ask the questions she is required to ask.

The Black Girl has been converted to Christianity by a young British woman who has taken delight in amorously jilting a series of vicars. She then becomes a missionary, despite her clearly thin grasp of the subject matter. She is, perhaps, an allegory of colonial expansion. She goes abroad to teach others despite not having achieved fulfilment or knowledge in her own life. It might be important that the teacher and the taught are both women.

When her convert starts asking questions, fundamental questions that the missionary herself has never heard asked, never mind answered, she reverts to invention, not scholarship. Shaw’s intention is clear. She invents myth to mystify myth. And this cloak satisfies the curiosity of the average Christian, but not The Black Girl, who thus goes off in search of God.

And, guided by snakes, she finds Him. And not just once, because there is more than one God in the Bible she carries. There is the God of Wrath, who demands the sacrifice of her child. When she cannot comply, He demands she find her father so he can sacrifice her. A good part of the Bible thus disappears from her new-found faith.

She meets an apparent God of Love, but he laughs at Job for being so naively and blindly devout. More of her book blows away.

She meets prophets who, one by one, deliver their different messages, most of which conflict and communicate individual political positions or bigotry rather than personal revelation.

On the way she belittles Imperial power and male domination. She learns that most “civilised” countries have given up on God and hears a plea that people like her should not be taught things that the mother country no longer believes.

Scientists offer her equally conflicting opinions. They are careful only to describe, never to conclude or interpret. In a way, they are just modern prophets, each with their own interested positions.

There is an amazing episode where a mathematician implores her to consider complex numbers, the square root of minus x, which The Black Girl hears as Myna sex or perhaps its homophone minor sex, and is clearly a reference to feminism. Along with economic power and male dominance, The Black Girl sees guns as the highest achievement of white society. This anticipates the description of colonialism’s trinity in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood.

Then, in a strange section, an Arab discusses belief with a conjuror. These appear to be a pair of major prophets in thin disguise. But their discussions merely confuse the girl and their words skirt her questions.

And so she meets an Irishman, marries and settles down. She devotes herself to him, their coffee-coloured children and the fruits of their garden. Note that she does not devote herself to herself. She projects out, does not analyse within. And in this utterly humanist universe she finds not only personal happiness, but also fulfilment and, with that, answers to her own metaphysical questions that religion per se could not even address.

And so, as the parable closes, we ponder whether the Irishman she marries is Shaw, and whether The Black Girl is the questioning, non-racist, non-sexist, socialist and humanist vision of the future he has personally espoused.

And as for the Lesser Tales, they are generally lesser. Don Giovanni explaining himself was fun and the Death of an Old Revolutionary Hero was prescient of the role of the Socialist Workers’ Party adopted in maintaining Margaret Thatcher in power in the 1980s. A great, historical and fundamentally contemporary read.