Short Stories - Rittu

The desire to listen to stories were ever innate to human ears. Man, being a social animal, has always been interested in the whereabouts of the person next to them- experiences, trivial and incidental; made up fictions and truth; the unwrenched quest of a bearded traveler, to the top of a secret mountain and how yesterday Mr. Sam’s 102 years old grandmother made it back to life just in time. 

I think this feature of man’s mind might have created the art of storytelling. A form that defined our oral traditions, were made legit into written records, into different genres that cherished our literature. One such genre, we took into our Book Club discussion was short stories.

The short story as a genre, has been considered both an apprenticeship from preceding, more lengthy works, and a crafted form in its own right. It offers a single significant event to the readers, a minimalist novel. It’s considered as a prose narrative “requiring from half an hour to one or two hours in its perusal”. (Edgar Allan Poe: Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne ‘s Twice Told Tales)

Our session on short stories traveled into divergent manifestations of O Henry’s self-reflexive writing, to meta-fiction, and further to the ‘Kafkaesque’ style reminiscing the nightmarish qualities of Franz Kafka’s fictional world.

The narrative influence of a raconteur’s wedging out situational ironies and elevated style lay out a veranda of dusted sagas, yet to be discovered. Short stories can be rightly described as unfinished novels, a collection of carefully chosen words woven together to form a tale that, as Tagore described, remains unfinished even after the end.

Here’s a list of our selected good reads of short stories we discussed during our sessions, to binge read till next Sunday.

Good-reads:

·       Springtime A’ La Carte by O Henry

·       The Voice of the city by O Henry

·       If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

·       Sold to Satan by Mark Twain

·       The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

·       The Wanderer by Kahlil Gibran

·       Works of Vaikom Muhammed Basheer and Mathilukal(movie) (Malayalam)

·       Works of Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali)

·       Works of Balachandran Chullikkad

·       The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

·       Yellow Women by Leslie Marmon Silko

·       Malgudi days by RK Narayanan