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Esther Stories
by Peter Orner
Mariner Books
2001, Paperback
First collection
Awards: winner, Samuel Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, New York Times Notable Book,
finalist PEN/ Hemingway
Award
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Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and the story collection, Esther Stories. A book of oral histories, edited by Orner, Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, was published in 2008 by McSweeneys for the Voice of Witness Series.
Read
an interview
with Peter Orner
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"But
their sleep will not be peaceful, because in it they will leave each
other. And before dawn they will wake up tired in the flood of
lamplight, and for too many moments they will be wretched and wonder
why silently, without telling the other, because they won't understand,
because they're too young to understand, because it takes years to
understand... why the mornings will always be harder than the nights."
Reviewed by Tania Hershman
It
might seem as though, having reviewed so many collections now, (see the
lengthy list at the bottom of the page) I would have a clear idea of
what I like to read. However, reading
this collection, it struck me that I can no longer describe
my taste simply and concisely. I have read so many
excellent story collections - and this is simply the latest to delight
me - that I no longer know
how to quantify what I like. My eyes have been opened to all that a
short story can be. All I can say is: this I love and this is also love.
To risk alienating those of you who don't watch British TV, Peter Orner's sharp and glowing Esther Stories
are Tardis-like: just as Doctor Who's police-box spacecraft appears
small from the outside and is cavernous within, so these stories, often
only several pages, contain depths and layers far larger than the sum
of their words. While all great "flash fiction" conveys far more than
its brevity implies, Orner does something different, something quieter
and more resonant. How he does it may remain as great a mystery as the
inner workings of the Doctor's time machine.
The thirty-four stories are divided into four sections: "What Remains",
"The Famous", "Fall River Marriage" and "The Waters". The final
two sections contain linked stories about two sets of Jewish families.
The first story, Initials Etched on a Dining-Room Table, Lockeport, Nova Scotia is an excellent choice,
a showcase for all Orner's particular talents. Very short, two and a
half pages, yet it encompasses a far, far longer story. With a strong
sense of time and history, illustrating precisely why it begins the
"What Remains" section, it moves smoothly from one person's story into
another, and ties everything together powerfully and unexpectedly with
a pitch-perfect ending. This is what Peter Orner's stories do.
"The girl was young when she did it, and didn't live there." An
enigmatic first line to draw you into the story - and, in fact, the
whole book. An opening line
which carries on from the title, as if the two were not separated. So,
the first paragraph is the girl, and what she did, and when and how:
"1962. She was eighteen. She had been hired to tidy the place". But it
is not the girl we focus on, because then we move to: "when they put
two and two together and figured out it was she who did it..." . Who
are "they"?
The next paragraph, the second of only five in the whole story,
introduces the cod fisherman "a captain, lived in the house with his
wife". There are details which paint the broader picture and plant
clues: the girl had a reputation, the couple have no children. The
captain and his wife understand that the girl "wanted to leave her mark
on the world".
There is a revelation at the end of the second paragraph; in the third
the years go by, and only in the fourth paragraph do we hear the
couple's voices, remembering the girl from so many years before. In the
final paragraph, it all comes together, so surprisingly, and yet, on
re-read, everything is there, beautifully and economically expressed:
"They both think of her. Sleep comes slowly. Now the captain coughs and
twists. Age and too much time on land have made him restless, a man who
was never restless, a man who had always slept the unmovable sleep of
beached whales, now tossing and muttering, waking with sweat-wet hands,
afraid".
I won't give away the ending, but just say that Orner captures human
needs and fears, the difficulties of life with
others and without them. He evokes such a strong sense of legacy and
memory, both particular and universal. And all in two pages.
The other stories in this section similarly take you on a journey,
beginning with one scenario and then seeing it from a different
perspective, with years and relationships reverberating between the
lines of Orner's quiet, precise prose. There are shocking incidents
here - murder, rape, war, the death of a child, a husband - but none
are looked at head-on. The
landlord who does not know what to do with the clothes belonging to the
now-deceased elderly tenant living above him who had been almost
invisible; the lover who carries all the rooms she has ever
stayed in around with her ("those rooms were, in a sense, her past");
the ex-soldier who remembers remembering seeing a girl swimming in a
river.
The second set of stories, "The Famous", are more linearly told than
the first set. Orner's writing
might be called "traditional" in that he doesn't use flashy language,
no quirky wordplay. And yet he is not a writer who plays it safe. Orner
takes risks in every story because he demands - as all excellent
writers do - that you accept a lack of information, that you read on
without knowing exactly where, why, what and who. This is a risk
because many readers won't
read on, won't flow with the not-knowing. But to aim your stories at
Everyreader will in most cases result in something less than the
extremely high standard Orner sets here.
Some of these stories have quirkier concepts: the one-eyed pool player,
the two Edgar Allen Poe impersonators in one small town, the woman
convicted of trying to "off her husband" who falls in love with her
female lawyer. While I enjoyed them, for the most part these stories impressed me less; I prefer those where
the circumstances are apparently ordinary but under Orner's magnifying
glass become devastating.
The final two sections of the book are mostly about these sorts of
moments. The stories in "Fall River Marriage" dip into Sarah
and Walter Kaplan's marriage at various points, from their courtship to
Walter's death, not necessarily in that order. My favourite of these
stories, Melba Kuperschmid Returns, which
won Orner a Pushcart Prize, so deftly captures small town America of
the 1950s (or so I assume, not having been there): Sarah's friend
Melba, "the beautiful one" who had escaped the town, returns alone
twenty-three years later. The local gossips conjure scenarious about
her disgrace, but all is not so simple, of course:
"And Sarah stands mesmerized by the back of Melba's head. Her hair is
pulled back tight in a plait; its end rests on her shoulder. Sarah
looks at the exquisite column that forms that familiar neck. if she
could freeze a moment in time, she'd freeze this one, the one before
Melba turns round and sees her, because it isn't the new Melba she
wants, it's the old one, the one who left here looking for something
better."
Orner seems to be introducing the final set of stories, "The Waters",
as semi-autobiographical, with the first line of the first story
talking about "my grandfather and my father looking out at Lake
Michigan". Whether this is entirely from Orner's imagination or from
his family lore doesn't really matter, what matters is that they are
snapshots which stand alone but which together form a moving portrait
of family pain.
What Orner does here is perform a magic trick: the narrator is somehow
able to be present in situations which predate his birth. He is there
at his father's first sexual experience, and, in the brilliant two-page
story My Father in an Elevator with
Anita Fanska, August 1976 - which we doubt the narrator may even
have been told about - watches his father make a critical choice. He moves into
his grandfather's mind, where, in his later years, the war is still
raging. And he tries to understand the story of his aunt, the Esther of
the book's title: how and why did her tragedy shape the family?
In my opinion, Orner's stories could be used as near-perfect examples of how much a few
words can convey. He is also a master at endings, never closing the
story shut but wrapping up just enough to leave you satisfied. There is so much more here to talk about, but by far the best thing is to get hold of this book and experience it for yourself.
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