Grace Paley (1922–2007)

“Grace Paley, beni güldüren, ağlatan öyküler yazıyor. Paley, kimseye benzemeyen komik, enerjik, sade ve hüzünlü bir sese sahip bir yazar.” Susan Sontag

Genç bir askere tutulan işveli bir ergen, banliyölerdeki iki yüzlü babalar, arabada yaşayan bir iş bulma danışmanı, Noel piyesinde oynayan yahudi çocuklar, didişen aşık bir çift. Bu, gündelik hayatların kuytusunda kalan insanın küçük rahatsızlıklarını keşfe çıkan bir kitap. Paley insan olma halinin show more yalnızlığını, dokunaklı komikliğini usta bir kulakla ve ironik bir dille resmedebiliyor. show less

Notes on “Somewhere Else”

The narrator is virtually invisible, yet integral I providing a dry tone and unique first person point of view. There is no indication of gender, nor, surprisingly, does it matter. The narrator is part of a group and is an observer, like the reader, of events and action which gradually unravel to reveal the story. Because the narrator is a passive characater who does not impart judgment and feeling on her observations, we easily take up the job of judging, coming show more to conclusions and deciding for ourselves what to feel and what to make of the events that we see through her descriptions. And we do, but not without some hints.

Paley cleverly gives the narrator a dry, humorous and ironic tone, in perfect harmony with this story. Despite its self effacing invisibility, the tone is rich with imagery, ripe with similes. Paley wields powerful words with ease, and her command ranges from the complex, to the simple, to the biting, lovely, funny, and ironic commentary.

The story has two halves: the first shows the tourist group in China; the second occurs “about three months later” when the group member who shot more than 4,000 pictures until his camera “simply closed its eye, exhausted,” invites the others to a party and slide show at his house. It is at this event that the two half stories are joined by a single incident with a camera and one character in the distant past, joining an urban gangster theft of a camera with the theft of the photographs of Chinese people, raising the spectre of people’s racial beliefs and prejudices. This is a deep and dangerous subject, yet her joining of these two disparate halves of her story are perfectly suited to enlighten us on the subtlety of human nature, both stubborn and sublime. show less

Many of these stories were written more than fifty years ago, yet their humor, humanity and life still literally leap off the pages to make you chuckle, wince and empathize with the various characters that populate them. And the collection's subtitle is particularly apropo - "Stories of Women and Men at Love." Not "in" love, you should note, but "at" love. Because, after reading these sharply hewn tales, you begin to suspect that Grace Paley does not put all that much stock in romance, or show more the kind of love that the women and men here are engaged in. The title itself, THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN, might even indicate that man is not quite so important as he'd like to think. Indeed, that subtitle again: note that "women" come first.

Before I forget to say it: I loved these little stories. Grace Paley was not a prolific writer, producing only a few collections of stories. But she was good, damn good. She spent much of her life engaged as a political activist, marching, protesting and demonstrating. Married a couple times, with a couple of kids, writing was something she worked into the creases of her active and busy life. Perhaps the proof of this can be found here in "Two Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life."
The first, "1. The Used-Boy Raisers," introduces us to Faith, along with her current husband, 'Pallid,' and her ex-husband, 'Livid.' Who are both hanging out in her kitchen complaining about the food, but the husbands seem to get along, to understand each other - and their names fit well. Livid needles her about another "old boyfriend Clifford," who shows up int the second sad story, "2. A Subject of Childhood." Clifford comes across as a self-absorbed creep, who she throws out after he accuses her of doing "a rotten job" as a mother, "lousy," in fact. She beans him with an ashtray, then considers -

"For I have raised these kids, with one hand typing behind my back to earn a living. I have raised them all alone without a father ..."

Reading these lines, I strongly suspected, Yup. This is how Grace Paley lived her life. Raising her two kids alone, writing when she had to, to make a living. In the same story, the boyfriend gone, the kids sleeping, she continues -

"I organized comfort in the armchair, poured the coffee black into a white mug that said MAMA, tapped cigarette ash into a ceramic hand - hollowed by Richard. I looked into the square bright window of daylight to ask myself the sapping question: What is man that woman lies down to adore him?"

What is man indeed? In another story he might be "The Pale Pink Roast." In another a washed-up Yiddish actor who likes to keep a mistress on the side. In another, Charles C. Charley, an air conditioning guy in his late thirties who gets involved with a teenager ("An Irrevocable Diameter"), or a sleazy Army corporal who romances a thirteen year-old at the same time he's dating her aunt ("A Woman, Young and Old"). Bottom line: men are mostly cads and opportunists. And Grace Paley is a very discerning and FUNNY writer. Philip Roth called these stories "splendidly comic and unladylike." Bingo!

Grace Paley, I suspect, enjoyed the men in her life - until she didn't. And she was not above poking gentle fun at herself either. That's a great trait in a writer. I'll say it again. I loved these stories. Thank you, Ms. Paley, and R.I.P.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Paley evokes the postwar New York Jewish demographic with such pathos, intimacy and irony. She very unassumingly gets under your skin, burrowing deeper with each successive story, with surprising metaphors and turns of phrases that make you pause and reread.

What struck me the most about this collection was the messy earthiness of its characters, - its network of decidedly rough and unpolished lower/-middle class women, who are knowingly or unknowingly swept up by the feminist waves of their show more times -, whose collective motherhood turns out to be a source of social change. A compelling contrast, compounded by Paley's (occasionally-brutally) minimalist prose.

Contains three collections: The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Later the Same Day.

Further media: Click here to listen to Nell Freudenberger discusses Grace Paley's short story "Somewhere Else" with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. The podcast includes a reading of the story by Barbara Rosenblatt. "Somewhere Else" was published in The New Yorker on October 23, 1978. show less