Carnival

This evening I will finish writing my last undergraduate research paper. The subject is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalesque as seen in Jhumpa Lahiri’s excellent short story “Interpreter of Maladies” in the Pulitzer-prize winning short story collection of the same name. Vanity urges me to make this the best paper I’ve ever written, but realism reminds me of my motto this semester: Work smart, not hard. And anyway, after all the energies that I channeled into my honors thesis, I would be kidding myself if I thought I had enough left for excellence.

Today I was soaked by rain from the sky. It made my skin cold and clammy, and even though I’m dry now, the effect hasn’t worn off.

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I’m all finished. Farewell paper-writing, hello fiction.

New Zealand Stories

I’m appalled to say I was not able to finish it.

This collection of early twentieth-century New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield’s stories originally intrigued me because I enjoyed “The Garden Party” in a British literature survey course a couple years ago; but I am now forced to acknowledge that the authors of the Canon chose well in this case. “The Garden Party” appears to be Mansfield’s best work.

I began reading at the beginning, as one does, and quickly thought, But this is terrible! The writing was immature and the stories repetitive and by no means compelling. I struggled through the first fifty pages [Always Read the First Fifty], but felt glum about the prospect of forcing myself through rest of the book. A trip back to the index taught me that the stories were arranged chronologically by date written, so I skipped forward nine years and read, “Her First Ball.” Leila, a girl from the country, attends, as you might guess, her first ball. It was a good story, but the exact same themes (loss of innocence and idealism) were handled more deftly in “The Garden Party.”

Musing on this makes me fear becoming the author of only one worthwhile story. But I must comfort myself with a reminder that even one is worth it.