I love this time on a Sunday! So cold outside but my old boiler is burbling away sending heat through the draughts and the dogs have now camped out on the landing near a double radiator. In the week this would be a time of washing, uniform, hasty words and reminders on all sides. This morning however, I have been rereading slices of Amy Bloom’s stories trying out paragraphs for tomorrow’s GIR training session- seeing if this one sounds better, more moving than others. And then I find one piece I once talked about and know I cannot read this even though it fills me with a resounding tenderness, a ‘yes’ which casts most reading into the shade. So, I wil stick to a small paragraph from her story ‘Song of Solomon’ which is acute, emotive, yet grounded too.
‘They squinted at each other in the September light, smiling and wondering what the other person saw. Dr Sheldon thought that Kate saw a pallid. overweight man sweating in an old navy blue suit, black-rimmed glasses sliding halfway down his big nose and wild gray curls floating around his bald spot. She didn’t; she saw God…..’
All our relationships are potentially fraught through our differing perceptions. So many books testify to ‘broken listenings’ ( Wuthering Heights, King Lear) where characters have ‘heard’ things which detrimentally affect the future of their relationships with others and themselves. Here Bloom playfully, yet touchingly too, captures the negativity of emotional fatigue, and then allows a healing to take place , where such misreadings are assuaged by tenderness and sudden, ecstatic love. The delicacy of the situation is perfectly represented through the verb ‘squinted’. It yields up their tentativeness, their respectfulness and their desire to know each other without harm.
Superb!! AND I have found out that Amy Bloom’s new book of short stories- is out in January 2010. I am DELIGHTED as apart from William Trevor, there is no better short story writer alive! And unlike Trevor, Bloom manages to find reconciliation and healing in situations ‘beyond’ convention., through the resourceful of her characters capacity to reimagine themselves.
