Short takes

December 20, 2009|Barbara Fisher, Globe Correspondent

PRIZES: THE SELECTED SHORT
STORIES OF JANET FRAME
By Janet Frame
Counterpoint, 396 pp., $26

Collected here are stories from the start of Frame’s brilliant writing career in 1952 through her most productive years, which ended in the 1980s. The earliest stories from “The Lagoon and Other Stories’’ were written while Frame was confined to a mental hospital in her native New Zealand. Many of them present the world through the limited boundaries and false securities of childhood. In “The Reservoir,’’ the children believe in their own safety despite the dire warnings of adults. “Life is hell, but at least there are prizes,’’ thinks the young winner at the beginning of the title story. But her pleasure is invaded by envy and suspicion. Her victories fade; her accomplishments sour; prizes are no longer her fortress. In “The Bull Calf,’’ the mysteries of life, death, and sex are delicately revealed to a young farm girl.

Desire and despair move in tandem through the later stories featuring hopeful spinsters, disappointed widows, and desperate couples. Many vignettes poignantly reveal Frame’s fragile state of mind. At the end of “One Must Give Up,’’ she writes, “There comes a time when one must . . . stand alone in the dark listening to the worm knocking three times, the rose resisting, and the inhabited forest of the heart accomplishing its own private moments of growth.’’

THE CAVE MAN
By Xiaoda Xiao
Two Dollar Radio, 174 pp., $15.50

Arrested for belonging to a counterrevolutionary organization, Ja Feng is imprisoned for seven years. For further crimes committed in prison, Ja Feng is confined for nine months to a dark, damp cave so small he must remain coiled like a fetus. Miraculously, he survives.

When he is released, he begins a long, strange, and event-filled ordeal. He stays first with his sister, but his screams in the night disturb her family. He builds himself a tiny cabin away from the family, where the cramped space comforts him and where his shouts cannot be heard. He contacts the widow of one of his prison mates, immediately falls in love with her, and tries to make a life with her. But this is impossible for him. He seeks and finds work of various kinds, moving from place to place, hearing the stories of many men and women. Their stories are almost as terrible as his own. Eventually he comes to America, where he earns a doctorate degree. Returning to Shanghai as a college professor, he finds himself back with his sister, still hoping to marry the widow. But more bad luck befalls him, and he dies alone in the small cabin.

Ja Feng’s story is told in such generic terms, with so many unlikely twists and turns that it is difficult to read it except as a parable. But as a parable of modern China, it is chilling.