A few years ago I bought the 900 page book The Selected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant. I was struck by the last paragraph in the author’s preface to the collection. It’s advice I recall when ever I find myself struggling to get though a epic collection – like the collected Nabokov stories I started a while back…

“There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I may never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.”

I enjoyed this book enormously! I’m not sure if the first part will resonate with everyone, but the semioticians are a rich source of humor.

I recalled this quote this morning, and was pleased to find it in it’s entirety on Google Books. From Waters’ 1987 book Crackpot – which I recommend picking up. I was telling someone about the scene is Pink Flamingos where a drive-in had a Marguerite Duras triple feature….

“The Films of Marguerite Duras. Miss Duras makes the kind of films that get you punched in the mouth for recommending them to even your closest friends. If there is such a thing as good avant garde cinema, this is it. Even though I believe pretension is the ultimate sin, Marguerite Duras has taken pretension one level ahead of itself and turned it into a style. She is the ultimate eccentric. Her films are maddeningly boring but really quite beautiful. After seeing her work, I think I know what it must feel like to be hypnotized.”

“Perhaps her most impossible opus to date is The Truck. The entire film consists of the director sitting in a nondescript room with Gérard Depardieu as they read the script of the film while every ten minutes or so the monotony is replaced by yet another monotonous shot of a blue truck, endlessly but serenely driving through the French countryside. If Warhol did it for the Empire State Building, why can’t Marguerite Duras do it for French trucks? All I know is that on my first trip to Cannes, in the cab from the Nice airport, I saw Marguerite’s “trucks” a hundred times on the highway and felt hypnotized all over again. That’s more than I can say for The Car or Car Wash.”

Johnson’s have the dual affect of making me want to read more, while making want to avert my gaze to the impending tragedies in his characters sad lives. Told with a comic touch to soften the inevitable blows.

I highly recommend Johnson’s books, though they’re not for the feint of heart.