damn, i am BURNT OUT on short stories. i can’t even get into Chekhov.

all the Anne Carson books i’d like to take out at the library are always missing from the shelf—i finally took this one out so i could stop frowning at it. as i thought, i’m not so into the story here: it’s “the story of a marriage” and throughout the characters are called “the wife” and “the husband” but other characters have names. i love the way she writes though, the way she approaches her ideas and presents the concepts. i think over half the references went right over my head.

there is a reading group guide at the vintage website.

written by one of sandi’s professors at wvu, these stories are all set in guatemala. it’s a little weird reading stories about guatemala from the perspective of a white american, but he seems to bring light to the tense and sometimes tenuous relationships between the indigenous people, those of spanish decent, and less frequently the foreigners. the longer stories pack the sturdier punches, especially “A Detective’s Story” and “Bathwater.” the stories all seem to be pretty melancholy, and i wonder if that is really the message he intended.

we saw arundhati roy speak last month, with her cleverly titled Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free). i expected nothing less than these eloquent essays about globalization and privitization of public assets in india. her writing is so engaging and accessible that it’s gratifying that she writes on these topics.

after the essay on the dam projects, it’s sad this week reading about the three gorges dam in china and the various effects it is already having.

the back of the book claims these are “set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century.” i don’t want to nitpick or anything, but several are mostly set in the twentieth century and two are set in the eighteenth century.

the stories all hinge on the sciences—from genetics to zoology to public health to several other branches–and that is definitely what makes this collection so outstanding. i love the concept of the littoral zone (in the story of the same name):

… that space between high and low watermarks where organisms struggled to adapt to the daily rhythm of immersion and exposure.

the story that caught me the sharpest was “Rare Bird,” but then it ended so mysteriously and i’m still annoyed. i wanted to know what happened at the end, even if the characters didn’t.