Outsiders
"Doctor Brodie's Report" by Jorge Luis Borges (as translated by Norman Thomas DiGiovanni and Borges, originally <<El informe de Brodie>>), The Atlantic Monthly, January 1971, edited by Robert Manning; perhaps more easily read in the collection Doctor Brodie's Report, the Bantam paperback edition, posted for student use
"The Hen" and "The Smallest Woman in the World" by Clarice Lispector (as translated by Elizabeth Bishop), as first published, with "Marmosets" in Kenyon Review, Summer 1964, edited by Robie Macauley (and all three can be read at the KR site with a free registration, or paid subscription)
"The Last Worders" by Karen Joy Fowler, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, June 2007 (issue 20), edited by Gavin Grant and Kelly Link; also can be read in the June 2019 issue of Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams (and in Rich Horton's and also in Ellen Datlow and Grant and Link's best fantasy-fiction of the year annuals for 2008)
"Cannonball: Love Sinks" by Thom Jones, The Washington Post Magazine, 11 July 2004, edited by Leonard Downie, Jr.
Writers do tend to be outsiders to at least some degree, of course, observers of the lives of others and themselves, sometimes even accurately. I read this essay from Vulture recently, Lili Anolik's take on her relation to Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, whom she wrote a book about, and Donna Tartt and her fellow students in the Class of '86 at Bennington College, most famously Jonathan Lethem and B. E. Ellis, whom she'd produced a podcast series about. As usual with Vulture, a mix of gossipy biographical details and useful insights on how all these women she admires have made their way through the world. Anolik seeks, she notes, to get at the truth about these folks even if her subjects aren't so fond of what she discusses. Also, that sells.
So it can go with fiction-writers as well...Jorge Luis Borges was raised in relatively comfortable circumstances in and around Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his major life challenge running to his eyesight beginning to fail him at an early age...a grim fate for such a lover of the written word. Clarice Lispector was born in a Ukrainian shtetl, and her parents moved the family to Brazil to escape the Soviet pogroms; she would eventually marry a diplomat, and be posted with him in the U.S. and elsewhere, but got no joy out of being a diplo-spouse, and moved back to Brazil with the kids. They both were highly regarded at home and abroad for their work, but life at home wasn't always so easy (dictatorships tend to do that). I know (even) less about Karen Joy Fowler's personal life, though it's interesting that despite most of her work being fantastica, the novel she's best known for is The Jane Austen Book Club, a contemporary mimetic best-seller. And Thom Jones is best remembered for his collection The Pugilist at Rest, which was his best-selling book...his period of literary celebrity being sadly short. As with Robert F. Young, a published writer whose day-job for some time was as a janitor...not the happiest of conditions; his account, from the Washington Post Magazine, might actually be a straightforward memoir...however much shaped by time and reflection.
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| *a variant title for this issue |
Both "Doctor Brodie's Report" and "The Smallest Woman in the World" double-down on outsidership, and I wonder if Borges was sparked by Lispector, in part or altogether, to conceive of his story, though they are by no means carbon-copies...both involve Westerners making their way and mark elsewhere, in the Borges a missionary, in the Lispector an explorer, investigating among outposts African (Lispector) or Brazilian (Borges--and another reason I suspect a nod to the younger writer and her slightly earlier work...along with a nod to Swift, as the nation Brodie is investigating is dubbed the Yahoos) of isolated hunter/gatherer societies of exotic custom and alternate approaches to language, under threat from somewhat more fierce neighbors. (Another reason to consider reading the Borges at the collection link, if it's still available, or seeking out the book otherwise, aside from not having a footnote blurb interpolated into the text as it is at The Atlantic link, is for Borges and DiGiovanni's notes on the texts...and the other stories.)
Lispector's "Marmoset" (available only at the Ploughshares site online, I believe) also echoes much of the shape of her anthropology story, only involving the title monkey in a somewhat similar role, even as a pet vs. a human "discovery"...while "The Hen" deals with a similar mix of tragedy and comedy, as a hen meant by the household for a meal is "rescued" by semi-irrelevant circumstance. Lispector's "tragic sense of life" (to cop from Unamuno) is, if anything, even more omnipresent in her examples of fiction here than is Borges's similar somewhat satirical stance. By contrast, Karen Joy Fowler is more willing to indulge in a sort of small-scale version of cosmic laughter, as she unwinds her account of nearly dauntless twin sisters making their way though the enigmatic small Latin American city-state of San Margais, essentially in search of a lost chance at love, and what they find there.
And Thom Jones's account of his summer as a corn-country public swimming pool lifeguard, and the not quite love he finds through that task and what it all shows him, as he feels his way through his young life in a town lost in a sea of tall corn, with a polluted river running through it, and not much else to do there but eventually escape.
So, short accounts of varying degrees of alienation and yearning, all deftly told, all funny in part but sobering.
You can do worse.
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