It isn’t always that book awards won in the US are of interest to readers in India. But break that rule for Adam Johnson’s book of short stories. Fortune Smiles, the winner of the National Award for fiction, is not so American as to be far removed culturally, nor so blandly universal as to have no rootedness. The book contains six exquisite stories which will take you straight into those areas of human life that we know exist but cannot always reach through literature.
Nirvana
The journey commences with the innocuously titled Nirvana, which philosophises about the end of life as another kind of freedom. It is a tale of a struggle for life, the ghostly tones of an assassinated President – reimagined digitally – and the connections between the past, the present, the future and, of course, Kurt Cobain. Charlotte is suffering from Guillain-Barré syndrome, and her husband’s fear that she will kill herself. Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana is her only relief. The amalgamation of suffering as mortals and postmortal freedom make a remarkable artistic statement.
Hurricanes Anonymous
As tales of single parents enter the mainstream, the narrative of a male single parent is still a rare one. Johnson accomplishes this complex task with flair in a story in which the named hurricanes are not only metaphorical. Besides dealing with two hurricanes – Katrina and Rita – a man in Lake Charles, Louisiana, is facing another hurricane which leaves him alone with a toddler, testing the limits of his strength as a parent. The story takes you through an unreal, though humane, kinship between a father and a son, forcing you to confront the same absurdities that you do in daily life – here, through a father, a son, and an unfinished love between them.
Interesting Facts
Here we follow the less-than-fictional narrative of a couple – both writers – where the woman, who is suffering from cancer (there is an autobiographical touch, for Johnson’s wife also suffered from cancer in real life), is afraid that her man will go to another woman after her death. On the other hand, the man is concerned with the worsening of her situation. On the face of it, the love they share and the life they lead is a dream to, pardon the pun, die for. But the cancer peels the layers off the anxiety we undergo when dealing with depression both named and unnamed.
George Orwell Was A Friend Of Mine
A former Stasi warden shares his experiences as a prison official and the inhuman ways in which the prisoners were tortured. But Hans Baker, the warden, is in denial of his own complicity – insisting that he was just performing his duties. We face what Arendt, in a different context, called the banality of evil. Now the prison has been converted into a museum commemorating a past which can not be replicated otherwise. Baker’s realisation of his guilt comes through a hymn.
Dark Meadow
This is one of the most extraordinary short stories that I have come across – a bleak encounter with a form of human existence that most would prefer to turn away from. A paedophile who feels solace in the darkness by watching young flowers in a fragmented form leads to a difficult understanding of how goodness can still overcome the dark side to oneself. In this case the paedophile uses his technological skill to expose others of his kind even as he struggles to curb his own desires.
Fortune Smiles
Current affairs have given a fresh shot of relevance to this chronicle of the cultural and financial shocks that immigrants face in a new land. The struggle of a motley group of characters against the political gulf between North and South Korea, and how they overcome those insurmountable difficulties with flying colours evokes a huge dose of empathy and identification. We all fight, often in our own land. We are all immigrants.
