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The magic window short story3/18/2023 ![]() How is it so powerful? It’s partly the psychological acuity – Karen’s obsession with red shoes is of manifold origin and convincingly drawn – and partly imagery: the shoe shop, the various shoes themselves, the coffins, the graveyard, the spiteful and perhaps jealous old soldier (spiteful and jealous old world, even). The Red Shoes by Hans Christian AndersenĪs with so many of Andersen’s tales, there’s almost nothing to this – a few pages, and even the telling is simple. Something anarchic and alarming – possibly evil – erupts into the delightfully ordered and middle-class world of this story, in which every street is known and money is ready for the granting of wishes, and birthdays are counted down to exactly and well in advance. But not so heavily – as people suppose …” And then – surely the most horrifying thing about going to stay with people: “Every Sunday evening, Clarinda understood, Mr Carstairs read aloud from about half past six until they had supper at eight.” Understandably, Clarinda has to escape. She goes to spend a weekend with his family “in one of the remote parts of a county where the remote parts are surprisingly many and extensive”, and where a rather eccentric soiree guest seizes on her as a kindred spirit. Poor old Clarinda has found herself engaged to Dudley, who has never missed a train in his life. The Standard of Living by Dorothy ParkerĪnother shop-based redemption narrative featuring two modern-day Match Girls. There ensues a quest in the wilderness, redemption and a cure.ĥ. With echoes of Senior, this story follows a stranger who arrives in the narrator’s close-knit community during a time of sickness, sets up house with one of the women and has a child with her. Ross is such a subtle writer, and I love the mordancy found in his work. I love everything about it, from the affirmation of the title to the final image. Probably my favourite contemporary short story. The narrator attempts to reclaim a source of power that has been stolen, while we enjoy a running gag about mental arithmetic. What You Pawn I Will Redeem by Sherman Alexie And then we have sentences such as this: “The other kept munching scented pastilles, which he took with an affected gesture out of an oval box of lilac enamel.” Delicious.ģ. The cutting-off of the immortal part – by moonlight, with a green-handled knife on wet sand – is particularly arresting, as is the shivery final paragraph. I couldn’t have understood it fully but I loved it for its language and imagery and for its genuine spookiness. This strange and metaphysical story, inspired by Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and The Shadow, was my favourite as a child (I owned the beautiful edition illustrated by Harold Jones). ![]() More pricing-up of the soul, albeit for different motives. The Fisherman and His Soul by Oscar Wilde And the help these incomers offer is very much conditional.Ģ. There’s much fun to be had in watching the islanders’ diplomatic handling of the missionaries, who are fine as far as education and healthcare and food parcels go, but “no use at all” when it comes to spiritual ills. This story is full of delicate irony and of all kinds of surprising magic. ![]() “She was enchanted when I took an Atlas I had borrowed from Parson and showed her first the world where our tiny island and India were located so far apart and then a map of India itself, like our island colored red.” Arrival of the Snake-Woman by Olive Senior ![]() Magic is a resort of the dispossessed as much as of the powerful, a rival to the established orthodoxy, and some of these stories also show that precept in action.ġ. Witches, healers and sorcerers feature in the stories I’ve chosen, but in a few of my Top 10 the enchantment comes from elsewhere – as it often does in my own stories – ineffable and mysterious. So The Little Match Girl (the heartwarming story of an abused child-labourer hallucinating as she dies of hypothermia – Merry Christmas one and all!) might become, down the generations, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess. I think they still exist, in stories that don’t announce themselves as fantasy or even as magical realism, but they have become better at camouflaging themselves amid ordinary life, especially when the magic is the legacy of an older culture that has been suppressed but not quite extinguished. ![]()
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