"Summer of '38"

By Colm Tóibín

~6900 words

An elderly woman recalls her affair with a Nationalist soldier during the siege of a Republican stronghold in the Spanish Civil War.

Montse learns from her daughter Ana that a man from the electric company, who is writing a book about the civil war, wishes to meet with her. She is reluctant to do so but relents when he shows up at her doorstep. The man explains that a former general of Franco's, Rudolfo Ramirez, is coming to town for an interview and has asked to see Montse when he arrives. The news triggers a long flashback in which the young Montse has an affair with Ramirez as her village is besieged by the Nationalists. When the town is near surrender, Ramirez disappears and Montse discovers she is pregnant. She marries a local boy named Paco, who raises the child, Rosa, as his own. Montse comes to feel genuine fondness for Paco and has two more daughters by him, including Ana. The final scenes return to the present, where it becomes clear that Montse has never told Rosa that Paco (now deceased) was not her real father. Montse declines to have lunch with Ramirez.

The story is characterized by the type of quiet narrative that has been a staple of Irish literature since at least the time of Joyce's "The Dead": a highly reflective, internal meditation often revolving around a secret love or unfulfilled desire. In this case, it is Monte's muted love for Ramirez, whom she continues to see, long after he is gone, in the eyes of Rosa's three sons. In keeping with the theme of loss, Tóibín employs a classic framing device to embed the main narrative in a distant past that, despite the violence of the war, evokes a certain nostalgia for a lost way of life:

One night, there was a full moon and a clear sky. When the crowd moved to the edge of the water and let the fire die down, neither he nor she moved with them. When he spoke to her, she could not hear him, so he moved closer. She realized that no one had noticed that she had not joined the others by the water. Some of the soldiers there had stripped down and were swimming and splashing. Away from them, close to the dying embers, he touched the back of her hand and then turned it and traced his fingers on the palm.

For the most part, then, the story succeeds on its quiet terms. The characters are well drawn, the tension subdued. The storytelling, however, meanders a bit too much. We are introduced early on to two characters, Ana and the electric company man, who never reappear and thus feel contrived as a means of introducing the main narrative. It is debatable whether even one of them is necessary; we definitely don't need both. Would it not have been more effective to have the flashback triggered by a conversation between Montse and Rosa, given that the latter is the daughter most affected by the secret? As it is, Rosa is introduced very late in the story, and the reader does not have a chance to sympathize with her before learning the news about her father.

Another weakness is language. The understatement that Tóibín aims for in the plot is not reflected in the often clumsy and heavy-handed diction. Below are three examples with suggested deletions, followed by my comments in brackets.

Montse nodded calmly and then looked toward the window, as though distracted by something. 

[Nodding is calm by default; hence the adverb is redundant (as adverbs often are). "Then" is also redundant when used with "and" (one or the other is all that's required). Finally, there is a problem with the "as though" phrase. Since the narrator is in Montse's perspective here, he/she should know whether she is distracted and not have to speculate. At any rate the whole phrase is unnecessary because the distraction is implied in her looking out the window.]

And if he, who had been so enthusiastic, did not want her, then she was sure, absolutely sure, that no one else would want her, either.   

[A sentence choking beneath commas and unnecessary qualifiers. It feels as if the author is simply trying to fill the page.]

"The war was a long time ago." She was going to say something else and then hesitated. "It was fifty years ago. More."

[The fact that she was going to say something else is implied in the hesitation.]

Finally, it should be noted that the name Rudolfo (as opposed to Rodolfo) is extremely uncommon in Spain and most of the Spanish-speaking world. The American author Rudolfo Anaya is a rare exception. Also, Ramirez carries an accent over the i: Ramírez.

"Summer of '38" is a tender story with compelling characters. Many of my objections amount to quibbles, but the cumulative effect is enough to weigh down an otherwise strong effort.

Satisfactory.

Reader poll: I found "Summer of '38" to be ___.

"The Women"

By William Trevor
~7600 words

The appearance of two mysterious women in an adolescent girl's life raises unsettling questions about her past.

The story follows the main character, Cecilia Normanton, as she grows up in London in the "listless nineteen-eighties." The initial focus is on Cecilia's relationship with her father, described as a melancholy soul who was left irreparably wounded when his wife, of whom Cecilia has no recollection, left him for another man. When the father sends Cecilia away to boarding school at age fourteen, two women, later identified as Miss Cotell and Miss Keble, begin appearing at seemingly random moments—a hockey game, a trip to the post office, a roll call—and the story veers into their perspective on several occasions. Eventually Miss Keble tells Cecilia that Miss Cotell is her mother. Startled by the revelation, Cecilia at first attempts to dismiss it; when that proves impossible she tries, to no avail, to coax her father into confirming it.

I liked the premise of this story but found the execution lacking. The narrative is ultimately about the relationship between Cecilia and her father and how it is tested by the two women and their shocking revelation. The long digressions into Cotell's and Keble's perspectives prove unnecessary and often confusing, cluttered with details intended to provide motivation and backstory that only end up bleeding the main story arc of tension. There is a single short section told from father's point of view, in which he watches Cecilia perform in a play, that also seems superfluous. (As an experiment, I reread the story by skipping over the sections told outside Cecilia's perspective and found it much improved.)

While "The Women" is based on an intriguing premise and graced with beautiful diction, it is marred by unjustified perspective shifts and cluttered storytelling.

Weak.

Reader poll: I found "The Women" to be ___.

"Ox Mountain Death Song"

Runner-up, 2012 Criticus Award!
(View announcement here. Winner here.)

By Kevin Barry
~3200 words

A soon-to-retire police sergeant stalks a terminally ill sociopath.

The omniscient perspective in this third-person narrative moves between Sergeant Tom Brown and a young rake referred to as Canavan (presumably his last name). Brown's determination to have Canavan "looked after" before his retirement in three weeks becomes a morbid obsession that drives the narrative. Meanwhile, Canavan's cancer diagnosis encourages him to act with impunity, pillaging widows and "planting babies all over the Ox Mountains." His preternatural knowledge of the landscape—"He knew the bog roads, the copses, the cypress arbors. He knew the recesses of the hills and the turlough hides. He knew the crannies of the coasts"—keeps him one step ahead of Brown for most of the tale.

The story has a fable-like quality that comes across in references to the characters as "particulars" but also as "types," and in allusions to the cyclical nature of the struggle in which they are engaged:

The years gave in, the years gave out, and only the trousers changed—breeches of sackcloth gave way to rain-soaked gabardine, gave way to tobacco-scented twill, and on to the denim variations (boot cut; straight leg; at glamorous times, beflared), and then to the nylon track pant, and then to cotton sweats. The signal gesture of a Canavan in all this time did not change: it was a jerk of thumb to the waistband to hoick up the pants.

The symbolic dimension is enhanced by consistent animal imagery. Canavan is compared on several occasions to a ferret, "the forked spit of the tongue lapping at the neck blood, the pointed teeth taking tendon and bone apart." Brown himself is a large, sweaty man who sucks honey straight from the tub, a fitting denizen of the eponymous Ox Mountains:

It was a place haunted by desperate mammals since the hills and mountains had cracked and opened—as the province of Connaught formed—a place with a diabolic feeling sometimes along its shale and bracken stretches; a darkness that seeped not from above but from beneath.

As the narrative progresses and Brown nears his much-coveted goal, it becomes clear that Canavan is not the only "desperate mammal" lurking in the Ox Mountains.

"Ox Mountain Death Song" is a unique story written in hauntingly beautiful language. One can practically hear the author's Irish lilt in the ebb and flow of the syntax, and the effortless lyricism pushes the piece into the realm of prose poetry. Despite the quasi-mythic dimension, however, the narrative manages to produce a pair of remarkably complex characters.

Outstanding.

Reader poll: I found "Ox Mountain Death Song" to be ___.

"Transatlantic"

By Colum McCann
~8400 words

A chronicle of the first transatlantic flight, by British aviators Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown in 1919.

The strength of the story lies in the suspense that accompanies the flight narrative: exposure to the elements (wind, rain, snow, and numbing cold), malfunctioning equipment, and a harrowing stretch in which the plane gets lost in heavy cloud cover and comes within a hundred feet of crashing into the Atlantic.

The story is marred, however, by a third-person omniscient voice that jumps back and forth from Alcock to Brown and even to a journalist covering their flight, making it difficult to appreciate the uniqueness of the main characters or even to differentiate between the two. Indeed, it sometimes feels as if we were reading about Siamese twins:

Alcock and Brown rise at sunup, then wait. Turn their faces to the weather. Walk the field. Play gin rummy. Wait some more. They need a warm day, clear skies, a full moon, a benevolent wind. They figure they can do it in less than twenty hours. Failure doesn't interest them […].

It would have been more effective to limit the perspective to either Alcock or Brown and show the reader the world through his eyes. As it is, there is a certain safety in the omniscient perspective—similar to that of a historical narrative—that insulates the reader from the suspense and prevents full identification with the characters.

McCann's mastery of the technical aspects of the flight is impressive, and there are some fine historical details that add a quaint feeling to the narrative ("Some day soon it may be possible to read the daily edition of the San Francisco Examiner in Edinburgh or Salzburg or Sydney.") Unfortunately, the story never feels like much more than an historical account of the voyage.

Weak.