Dear bibliopathologist,
maybe I’m an atypical reader, but I love short stories. Indeed, I would say that for me they are an obsession. Why are readers interested almost exclusively in novels and not in pills of stories? Yet, telling a good plot in a small space is much more difficult than having pages and pages for an entire novel (I say this as a writer, out of passion). You help me to give a little peace to my soul eager for stories.
– Antonella
Cara Antonella,
load on your shoulders a backpack in which you will have put the essentials (and only that: the climb is long and steep) because I am about to take you to a Shaolin temple. Do you remember the cruel teachings of Pai Mei, the martial arts master with the white beard and winged eyebrows to whom the bride turns in Kill Bill: volume 2? Well, among these teachings there was one that is right for you.
At the beginning of the training, Pai Mei punches a massive wooden beam, and asks Beatrix if she can do the same. “Yes, but not so closely,” she replies (who is Uma Thurman anyway, not Arnold Schwarzenegger), but Pai Mei is not satisfied. “Then it means you can’t do it,” he tells her contemptuously. “What will you do if the enemy is five centimeters from you?”
Intermittent lives
Fictional literature isn’t quite a wooden beam, but it’s still a barrier that needs to be penetrated. We have to go beyond the two dimensions of the printed page to see, as in an optical illusion, a third imaginary dimension, that of the narrated world. Now, for many readers this process requires, as for Beatrix Kiddo, a certain distance, if not a run-up. They need pages and pages – dialogues, details, evocations of environments, descriptions of gestures and faces – for the miracle to take place: only then, they will say, have they “entered” the book. Sometimes they never get in, and they keep punching the wood in vain, covering their knuckles with wounds, as happens to the bride in Tarantino’s film.
For others, on the contrary, it takes much less: a couple of captivating paragraphs, and they are already sunk in history up to the elbow. It is because their imaginative muscles are better trained, and their ability to concentrate – since that’s what it is, in reading as well as martial arts – is far more developed. This explains a counterintuitive phenomenon that we happen to observe every day: our fragmentary and intermittent lives would seem, in theory, more congenial to the measure of the story, which does not pretend to capture our attention for too long; yet, the great bestsellers very often exceed five hundred pages.
In short, dear Antonella, you would be the ideal pupil of a Pai Mei of letters, but your case is quite rare. There is no wooden beam that can resist you. Many of us have to start from forty-six meters and then run like crazy to try to break down the doors of fiction, with the risk of breaking our heads like a coconut. It is our miserable condition. I just hope that, from the top of the Shaolin temple, you will continue to watch the efforts of us beginners without the contempt of Pai Mei.