Skip to main content

North Country, Roxane Gay #32

North Country
Roxane Gay
From Best American Short Stories, 2012
Originally printed in Hobart
#32 in the I will read and take brief notes on 300 short stories project

A faculty engineer named Kate embarks on a sad cruise of Lake Superior with a less than desirable set of colleagues. She is African-American, and must endure questions like, "Are you from Detroit?" She tells us, "Shortly after that, I will begin telling people I have recently arrived from Africa. They will nod and exhale excitedly and ask about my tribe. I don't know that in this moment, so there is little to comfort me." She meets Magnus as she comes to the deck for air.

Loneliness is pervasive in North Country. Kate despairs the life of the town. She tells her mother more than once that she might not survive. She has a one-night encounter with Magnus; he seems very interested in her but she pushes him away.

Kate remembers being with a liar, her dissertation advisor, the father of their stillborn baby.

She finds her way to Magnus and he is persistent and ignores her reluctance. He teaches her to milk a cow. There is separation, hurt feelings, an igloo. It's beautiful.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2016 Reading Notes

My reading came to a screeching halt after the election and I've been having trouble resuming it since. But I did have a good reading year before that day. White Noise by Don DeLillo. First read in 1998, re-read in 2016. I remembered that White Noise is about supermarkets and Hitler studies. I remember loving it in 1998, but little else. What I rediscovered is that this novel is full of anxiety, dread, distrust of systems and data, environmental waste, precocious children, familial and romantic loves, and the repression of our fundamental fear of death. It's satirical but also mildly terrifying. I am happy to say that it's still a five-star read. I also read DeLillo's Zero K, which was fine but unexceptional and probably very close to the future as elites hoard all the money and try to preserve themselves past death, waiting out the demise of most of mankind. I was happy to discover three Louise Erdrich novels: Love Medicine; The Round House; and LaRose . Loved the...
2 comments
Read more

October Book Haul

I bought these books today at the Tattered Cover - Aspen Grove. I'm about 3/4 done with Alias Grace from the kindle version and wanted a paperback I could annotate someday. There are so many references to hair, mostly on women in peril or as corpses. And the edition of the Count is gorgeous. Some other time I'll do a post about it. Books purchased:  What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
Post a Comment
Read more

Mini-rant: Why keep telling the "same" stories?

I recently had occasion to discuss a newish novel about the African slave trade in the 1700s and how that terrible practice affected generations of both African people and the slaves that were brought to America. I liked the book, but not everyone in the group felt the same. In the discussion, it was remarked that we already knew the stories of slavery and what was the purpose of reading about it yet again? I didn't know what to say to that in the moment because who wants to be the know it all in a friendly gathering? But what I thought to say later and will say here is that writing a novel and then finding a company willing to publish and support a novel (or any book, really) is political, and to keep publishing new stories about old topics, especially topics that reverberate in insidious ways and just won't be easily or peacefully resolved is an especially brave act of resistance. We all know that publishers want to make a profit; they choose what to produce with the bottom...
Post a Comment
Read more