New Yorker Fiction 2015

A WRITER'S WIT
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
Calvin Trillin
Born December 5, 1935

History We Should Repeat

December 7, 2015, Martin Amis, “Oktober”: The narrator, a character much like his own author, ends a reading tour in Munich, in October 2015, as Syrian refugees pour into Europe and are officially welcomed by the Germans. ¶  Sometimes there exists a serendipitous coincidence with regard to one’s reading. Earlier this week I posted a profile of Christopher Isherwood’s 1935 The Berlin Stories, in which he, too, creates a character much like himself, who must see how a city can be shaped by millions of refugees, at that time, Russians. In this narrative, Amis braids together several strands: another Englishman who speaks rather rudely on his cell phone (turns out to be the man’s mother, who has lost her house in a fire); a hotel lobby pianist providing sort of a soundtrack by way of Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody”; different generations of refugees fleeing oppression to find freedom, including Vladimir Nabokov, who flees Russia, Germany, and France in the 1930s. Of the Syrian wave the narrator notes: “Theirs was a journey with charts and graphs and updates (those cell phones) but with no destination" (67).
 
And why do the Germans feel compelled at this time to give safe harbor to the Syrians (an answer I’ve yet to see America media explore, if in actual fact they know)?

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“In the period from 1945 to ’47, there were ten million homeless supplicants on the periphery of what was once the Reich, all of them deported (in spasms of greater or lesser violence, with at least half a million deaths en route) from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. And they were all Germans" (67).

Amazing. In this very Isherwoodian story, the narrator’s Iranian-German friend asserts:

“Bernhardt said, 'You know, they won’t stop coming. They pay large sums of money to risk their lives crossing the sea and then they walk across Europe. They walk across Europe. A few policemen and a stretch of barbed wire can’t keep them out. And there are millions more where they came from. This is going to go on for years. And they won’t stop coming'” (65).

In the end, the narrator, like Amis, with more ease than one would think possible, returns to his home in Brooklyn, New York, where he has lived less than a decade, as an immigrant. This story may tell us more about so-called immigrants than we’ve heard from so-called experts, and the author has written, polished, and published it in a major magazine less than two months after observing it! Kudos to Amis on all counts. His most recent book, Money: A Suicide Note, came out in 2010.
Illustration, Golden Cosmos

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Date of Original Post:
11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"
02/05/15 — "Snarked"
02/12/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
02/19/15 — "The Age I Am Now"
02/26/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
03/12/15 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
03/26/15 — "The Best Mud"
04/02/15 — "Handy to Some"
04/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
04/16/15 — "Men at Sea"
04/23/15 — "My Long-Playing Records"
04/30/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
05/07/15 — "Snarked"
05/21/15 — "Killing Lorenzo"
05/28/15 — "Bathed in Pink"
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