Category Archives: Deal Me In 2023

Anthology: The Collected Stories of Willa Cather

Story: Neighbour Rosicky

I confess that I re-shuffled when the first card I pulled this week was a club – I wanted to read something out of the Willa Cather anthology, which was the only one that hadn’t yet come up for me. I won’t do it again, now that I’ve managed to read something out of each suit.

Reading this reminded me of why I love Willa Cather, and why I’ve made it a personal goal to read everything she ever published. No one writes the prairie immigrant experience like Cather. This story is told in third person, and focuses on Rosicky, a late-middle aged Czech immigrant who owns a farm somewhere in Nebraska. Rosicky is married to Mary, and they have five sons – he is contented, and even a little bit awestruck, by how his life has turned out. He owns his farms outright, is married to a fine woman he both loves and respects, and has five strapping, kindhearted and hard working boys, even if he doesn’t have much cash in the bank.

They were comfortable, they were out of debt, but they didn’t get much ahead. Maybe, Doctor Burleigh reflected, people as generous and warm-hearted and affectionate as the Rosickys never got ahead much; maybe you couldn’t enjoy your life and put it into the bank, too.

For a man who began his life extremely impoverished, nearly starving on the streets of London, he feels a great deal of gratitude for how it all worked out.

While he sewed, he let his mind run back over his life. He had a great deal to remember, really; life in three counries. The only part of his youth he didn’t like to remember was the two years he had spent in London, in Cheapside, working for a German tailor who was wretchedly poor. Those days, when he was nearly always hungry, when his clothes were dropping off him for dirt, and the sound of a strange language kept him in continual bewilderment, had left a sore spot in his mind that wouldn’t bear touching.

I was born in Nebraska, and have a soft spot for the prairie. So did Cather – she loved the wide open skies and the endless horizons of that part of the country, and, as well, shows a deep and abiding respect for the hardscrabble, warmhearted people who lived there. She doesn’t romanticize the hard work and austerity of their lives, but she also acknowledges that there was love, generosity and happiness there, too.

If Neighbour Rosicky is an example of what I have to look forward to in this collection, I am really looking forward to continue to read Cather’s short fiction.

So far, I’ve managed to pull a card for a different anthology each week, which has been lucky.

Anthology: The Persephone Book of Short Stories

Story: Dimanche by Irene Nemirovsky

Nemirovsky is most famous for her novel Suite Francaise, which was first published in 2004, 62 years after her death in Auschwitz in August, 1942. I heard of it when it was published, and it’s been on my mental TBR ever since, but this is the first thing by her that I have read.

It is a gem of story, set on a spring day in Paris. Nemirovsky was born in Ukraine, but this story feels entirely French. I have never been to Paris in the spring, but I have been there, and I can imagine that it is just like it is portrayed in this story. At the center of the story is Agnes, a middle-aged Frenchwoman who spends a Sunday alone with her 5 year old daughter,  Nanette, who is a little bit under the weather.

Guillaume, her husband, has plans to spend the day in the countryside, and invites Agnes along, knowing she will decline. He is meeting his current mistress, so the invitation is not sincere and Agnes briefly considers what he would do if she said yes.

It also concerns her twenty year old daughter, Nadine, who has also made plans to meet a man. The end of the story is quite insightful, with Agnes and Nadine both reflecting on each other; Nadine with the self-centered self-assuredness of youth and Agnes, who is not nearly so oblivious as Nadine believes.

I loved the writing in this one and will make it a point to move Suite Francaise up on my TBR.

This is a catch-up post from last Sunday, to be followed by this week’s story!

Anthology: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives edited by Sarah Weinman

Story: A Nice Place to Stay by Nedra Tyre

I’ve never heard of Nedra Tyre, who published 6 crime novels during the 1950’s through 1970’s.

This was a grim little tale, with the protagonist who lived in devastating poverty until she is convicted of a crime she didn’t commit and, for the first time in her life, she has a room of her own and three solid meals a day. The fact that it’s in a women’s prison doesn’t bother her at all, which sort of proves that abject poverty is its own sort of prison.

The story begins with the following lines:

All my life I’ve wanted a nice place to stay. I don’t mean anything grand, just a small room with the walls freshly painted and a few neat pieces of furniture and a window to catch the sun so that two or three pot plants could grow.

Things spiral badly when her lawyer manages to get her conviction overturned and causes her release. When he expects her to be grateful to him, well, she’s not. She just wants to go home.

I’ve been trying to decide how to handle this project on my blog – do I write a post for each story? Do I do a monthly wrap up post?

Anyway, at this point, I’ve decided to write up a post for each story, although I’m not sure I will continue as I have started.

A word about my incredible deck of cards – for anyone who is interested, the Etsy listing is here. Every image is a miniature work of art, related to a well known literary character or classic story and they are absolutely gorgeous. The fact that I pulled Sherlock as my first card was a pure coincidence, although also possibly a sign that fortune favors my enterprise!

Anthology: Deep Waters, edited by Martin Edwards

Story: Echo of a Mutiny by R. Austin Freeman

This story was new to me, and is a fairly long short story. It even has two chapters. It’s an inverted mystery – the first chapter sets up the mystery, so the reader knows everything. The second chapter brings in Dr. Thorndyke, a recurring detective character from Freeman’s work, and he figures out (more or less, and in this case rather less) what happened, with the help of a bitten pipe stem, some flake tobacco, a knife, and some barnacles. It was all very Sherlockian, making the card even more appropriate.

Inverted mysteries aren’t my favorite, but this was fun, and I think that they may work better as short stories. I’m not going to bother to try to rate the stories because I struggle with a star scale for books, much less short fiction.