Penstalker

Since College, I have been a big fan of Fantasy and Science Fiction books but every so often I come across the works of realist fiction writers and I get hooked. John Updike is one of those realist writers whose works I have come to enjoy. They make me think about God, religion and the foibles of the human being whose spirit is willing but whose flesh is weak.

It’s just sad that John Updike died at the ripe age of 76 earlier this year. He will be best remembered as one of America’s greatest writers, poet and critic. But he is best known for his short stories. Thankfully, before he died, he completed one last collection of short stories–My Father’s Tears and Other Stories.

My Father’s Tears and Other Stories include eighteen stories arranged in the order of their writing as was Updike’s wont. These stories explore the own psyche of the writer as he comes toward the closing journey of his human life. They delve into the frailties of old age, the fear of old men and women, unfulfilled desires, frustrations, the demise of close friends and classmates, wrestling with Alzheimer’s disease and a whole lot more.

According to Ron Hansen of the Washington Post,

In general the characters are flush New Englanders with children and grandchildren, who have the wealth for exotic travel and the luxury of time for reminiscence or, as Updike calls it, “personal archaeology.” Hints of death and dying faintly tinge every story, but there is no pathos or urging to not go gently into that good night; there is just the realist’s ironic shrug over the way things are and a healthy appreciation for the largely unrecognized heroism of facing life’s decline, as when a character remembers that “for two years he had lain beside Irene feeling her disease growing like a child of theirs. He had stayed awake in the shadow of her silence, marvelling at the stark untouchable beauty of her stoicism. In the dark her pain had seemed an incandescence.”

The story “My Father’s Tears” begins with a narrator very much like Updike recalling how his father cried as his son left Pennsylvania for Harvard, having foreseen “that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. My life had come out of his, and now I was stealing away with it.” Contrasted with that memory are those of his first wife’s father, a serene Unitarian minister in St. Louis who vacationed in a Vermont farmhouse each summer and invited the newly married couple there.”

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RA Salvatore’s books remind me of my former officemate, Every, who keeps some of his Hardbound Drizzt Do’Urden books in his desk. Even if I was a Fantasy and Sci-Fi fan, I didn’t really pick up any of Drizzt books to read and follow. But all that changed when I chanced upon two Drizzt Do’Urden books: Exile, part two of the Dark Elf Trilogy and Streams of Silver, part two of The Icewind Dale Trilogy . Hahah. Too bad, I didn’t get the first book of these two trilogies. But I didn’t care. I read Exile and I was hooked!

Exile tells of the story of Drizzt Do’Urden after he forsook his own homeland the Drow society at Menzoberranzan. The story picks up years afte he walks out of the city’s gate and lived as a hunter in the Underdark. In this novel by RA Salvatore, he fights with himself against the encroaching of his hunter self.

I loved this quote from Drizzt Do’Urden:

“As I became a creature of the empty tunnels, survival became easier and more difficult at once… It did not take me lonog, however, to discover one nemesis that I could neither defeat nor flee. It followed me wherever I went–indeed, the farther I ran, the more it closed in around me. My enemy was solitude, the interminable, incessant silence of hushed corridors.”

This pretty much summed up what Exile is all about. Drizzt became a master of survival and of hunting the monster that foraged near his cave. But for a drow elf whose life has been dedicated to righteousness and goodness, survival simply wasn’t enough.

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