The Man With the Heart in the Highlands and Other Stories

I found this one at an auction-style and vast thrift store in Redlands on their overstuffed paperback carousel. I’m always a sucker for collections of short stories from writers I’ve never heard of, and thus I took it home. Curious, and considering the shortness of the paperback, I decided to read it almost immediately. The opening story did not fill me with hope, as a blurb on the first page equates the author, William Saroyan, with O.Henry and the first story uses some racial categorization. However, most of the stories do not, at least not in a mean-spirited way, and after reading the story, The Filipino and the Drunkard, he most definitely is not a racist shit like O.Henry. I’ll get to my review of this story later. The author show more was an Armenian immigrant and seemed more ethnically aware than expressing bigotry.
“Stay now,” he said in Armenian. “It is not long till summer. Stay, swift and lovely.” [pg.27]
My favorite stories (in order of reading) are: The Hummingbird that lived through Winter (I really cherish the little buggers that frequent the flowering bushes around our home), The Stolen Bicycle (I just generally enjoyed it), The Parsley Garden (I didn’t like the little egotistical main character, but rather enjoyed the moment of the garden supper), The Oranges (this one connected with me as how the main character kid feels is how I felt a lot as a kid just without the smiling thing), The Peasant (liked it although the protagonist is a pill), The Death of Children (in my reading notebook I wrote (yes, I still use pen and paper, it helps things to stick in my mind) – Damnnn! – the story starts with a “haunted” school, moves to a series of old memories of classmates, to a tragic best friend who survived the Armenian genocide – very, very good story), The Filipino and the Drunkard (In my notes – Wow! – This is a very intense and fast-paced anecdotal tale about how comfortable Americans (U.S.) are with outright bigotry. Sadly, the same as it ever was, but now the Drunkard is embodied in I.C.E., and the silent bigots in the story are the modern-day Republicans. This might be my favorite story out of them all), The World (really liked the story and feels prescient concerning the billionaire situation), and The Declaration of War (another story that feels unfortunately prescient, MAGA’s like the barber denying actual events and foolishly declaring them as propaganda).
Some quotes of note (definite favorites of mine, but I’ll let them float with no other context or commentary):
There was so little time for friendliness that Carson, doubtless confused and suspicious, automatically performed the swiftest and safest sort of gesture he knew, and it is only to be regretted that there is no gesture among boys so simple and direct as thumbing the nose to indicate understanding and goodwill. [pg.76]
And if you haven’t known these things, your poverty has been wasted and the world has never been discovered. And if you’ve never been poor and never been alone and never been in danger, well, brother, you’ve never been born, you’ve never breathed, never lived, and of course when you die, brother, you will not be dying, it will be nothing, earth to earth and dust to dust and all the rest of it, but you will not be dying because a thing which has never been anything cannot cease being anything: and your dying will be nothing being nothing some more, another variety of nothing. [pg.190]
He stopped coming to school suddenly and I began to wonder where he was and if he ever got a pair of shoes. He became in time the vague sort of identity I sometimes met in dreams and in remembering him it would seem that he had never really lived and that I had actually known him only in the secrecy of my pity for man and for life. But I could never forget the defiance of his pinched face and the loneliness that stood with him, shivering. [pg.74]
There are some stories I only appreciated bits of, such as The Insurance Salesman (a meh story for a cutesy-ending payoff), The Genius (the same as the previous mention, but I enjoyed the preface more than the story itself), and The Shepherd’s Daughter (I liked the preface more than the fable). The other stories I really didn’t care for, or they simply did not stick in my brain, even a bit.
Would I recommend this book? Oh yeah! If you can find a copy, get it and read it, especially the stories I’ve picked out.
Before my first book was published I was not a drinker, but soon after it came out I discovered the wisdom of drinking[.][pg.216] show less