Nine Stories - J. D. Salinger

I first read this collection in my teens. Fifty years later it still seems freshly-minted. Salinger arrived on the scene as a unique talent. Inventive, funny, entertaining – and always aware that a story should have a higher purpose. My two favorites (this time around) are “The Laughing Man” and “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes.” The first shows Salinger’s skill at entering the mind of a boy; the higher purpose is the boy’s initiation into the dark and painful complexities of adult love. “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” is a tale of adultery – its effect on the victim – presented in an indirect way (Salinger tended to approach things from a odd angle, which is part of the originality of his work). The story consists mainly of a telephone conversation (another Salinger strength was convincing, lively dialogue); the conversation ends, but the man calls back – and we’re given an emotional coup de grace. The two least successful pieces show Salinger’s weaknesses. Too often he tried to get cute, and when it doesn’t come off it falls embarrassingly flat. In “For Esme – with Love and Squalor” he gets cute with the too precious Esme and her brother (thrown in for comic relief, unsuccessfully). The worst story is “Teddy,” and it displays a tendency that would ruin Salinger’s writing. There’s being meaningful (a virtue) and there’s being  profound (a mistake). The precociously intelligent, spiritually advanced, prophetic little Teddy isn’t real or likable (in fact, he comes across as a windbag). Still – there’s much more of the good Salinger than the bad, which makes this a remarkable debut collection. *

Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz (Arabic)

This is the first of a trilogy, but I won’t be reading the others. Not that this book doesn’t have virtues. It’s substantial and truthful, the prose flows nicely. It presents the thinking of people who are foreign to me, living in a culture full of contradictions – or, to put it more bluntly, hypocrisy. At the forefront is the father, who professes an extreme religiosity while casually breaking religious rules with his womanizing and drinking. He exerts an imperious (even brutal) control of his household, where he’s feared by wife and children. Subservience rules lives, especially those of women. A large portion of the book concerns the ban on a man and woman even seeing each other before marriage, much less getting to know one another. About two-thirds of the way through I found that there wasn’t one character I liked (was this intentional on Mahfouz’s part?). When the revolt against British occupation became a big factor, I lost more interest. Maybe Mahfouz’s accomplishment was to offer a critique of the culture he lived in; if so, he succeeded.