encounters from africa short stories pdf

It’s about a murder – probably it’s a murder, because nothing is certain – and a love match that depends on keeping that murder secret. Like so many of Munro’s stories, this one has the scope of a novel yet never feels hurried or crowded. The sociology of a small town in rural Ontario is caught on the wing in the loose weave of her narration the story takes in whole lifetimes, and yet its pace is also exquisitely slow, carrying us deep inside particular moments. Tessa HadleyĪlice Munro carries us deep inside particular moments.Ī woman moves among the willows beside a river at night, making up her mind. Photograph: Alice Munro./Alamy “The Siren” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1961)īorn in Palermo in 1896, Lampedusa was a learned prince who died before his work was published. In addition to his celebrated novel The Leopard, he left behind some short stories, including “The Siren”, a mysterious masterpiece that jolts and haunts me every time I read it. It contains two narrative planes, two central protagonists, two settings, two tonal registers and two points of view.

There are even two titles though published as “La Sirena”, it was originally called “Lighea”, the name of the siren, portrayed as a 16-year-old girl. Lampedusa’s description renders this fatefully seductive creature specific, vulnerable and real. The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, will be published on 7 March. “A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert (1877)įlaubert wrote this story for his old friend and “fellow troubadour” George Sand. It’s the story of Félicité, an old servant-woman, and the diminishing loves in her life, the final one being a (live – at first) parrot. It has a sombre novelistic density, and is touching and tender, comic and grotesque. Control of tone is central to its effect.

It also exemplifies the Flaubertian principle that irony and sympathy are not incompatible.

Sand died before she was able to read it. “So it is with all our dreams,” noted Flaubert. This story tracks three friends as they visit a fourth who is dying. It ends with a brief conversation between the narrator, Faith, and her 18-year-old son. The piece has warm intimacy as well as cold spaces within it. It captures the all-encompassing intrusion of the world and its conditioning of our day-to-day emotions, our children’s colonisation of our hearts and our powerlessness ultimately to protect them. Its understated tone is perfectly pitched: the narrative moves gently, then soars, into either sadness, or joyful contentment – again and again.

Encounters from africa short stories pdf