Sunday, April 04, 2010
adultery
read a funny short story in an old the new yorker issue several days back. it's called 'love story with secondaries' . nothing extraordinary , not exactly one of those great masterpiece of literature centered on people bonking other people's wives and vice versa like emile zola's tharese raquin or anna karenina or madame bovary or effi briest and the rest. just a garden variety short story about adultery.but unlike all these great literature which in this sms and tweeter era seems decidedly overly ponderous plodding too dark and finally boring this little short story is crisp and funny.just right for our current era of short attention span and quick gratification.
here's one thing i note about adultery. it is almost always messy and in all cases , without exception it is always sad but the interesting thing is there is always elements of dark comedy in all of them. in the above story the adulteress was whacked on the face with an umbrella handle by the wife of the adulterer. and that's the beginning.
a measure of a good writer is to make you believe that he had expert knowledge of what he writes about and in this case i think the writer must have probably written about or based on his own experience. i know this because the ending is so typical of what so many guys that i know have done all along.
here's one thing i note about adultery. it is almost always messy and in all cases , without exception it is always sad but the interesting thing is there is always elements of dark comedy in all of them. in the above story the adulteress was whacked on the face with an umbrella handle by the wife of the adulterer. and that's the beginning.
a measure of a good writer is to make you believe that he had expert knowledge of what he writes about and in this case i think the writer must have probably written about or based on his own experience. i know this because the ending is so typical of what so many guys that i know have done all along.
