Rebecca Lee - Bobcat and other stories

So much did I like and admire this collection on my two previous passes-through that it's no surprise that it not only holds up, but maybe even improves, on a third read.

This time I noticed how much desire is a through-line in these stories, the way that landscapes and worlds tend to rise behind (and as if from) people when they're looked at, Lee's unafraidness of posing a poetic image or sharply-edged observation about people quite straightforwardly and explicitly, and perhaps similarly her willingness to plant what seems to be an obvious plot turn early in a story and later follow through with that exact development (in a way that nonetheless feels profound), and the humour in many of the little insightful asides:

"You can have both those thoughts at the same time," I said. "You can feel very critical of a man even as you're sleeping with him," I said. David Booth laughed a little at this, a gesture that was enough to keep me interested in him for another few years.

I was struck again by how wonderful her sentences are, for the most part in their simplicity (There was a tropical storm on its way that evening, and it was already quite windy, and the girls' hair, all curly and brown, was flying around in the shifty air.) and sometimes in extended, wending yet still unfailingly clean lines:

It's true there are large turning structures - Ferris wheels - that will carry people high into the air above the ocean, that is true, and then around the next corner there are funhouses, those are great, and then there are just ordinary playgrounds on every corner, and there are things not even for children that are for children, like church spires that look like weather vanes, and there is one downtown that actually spins, a little spinning cross, an image that would live in the child's mind maybe forever, gathering ideas to it, spinning madly but also stable there, and in tonight's wind it wouldn't even be a cross, it would be distorted into maybe a little question mark, and standing for all the children in town as a kind of fervent lasting joyful little thing they always know.

As of now, my favourites are the first two, "Bobcat" and "The Banks of the Vistula", which both seem to me like basically perfect short stories. And this time it seemed clearer in "Fialta" that when the narrator left Fialta, that was the end with Sands, not the beginning, and somehow, that even though that wasn't why he felt hardly any grief at all at the time, lying on the hay as the cows watched on, remembering human love, still, perhaps it never could have been any other way (how can I blame her, being what she was and Fialta being what it is?).

(first impression; second impression)