A disappointment and a surprise

I had been looking forward to reading Yiyun Li's story in BASS, because I'd been following all the hype about her, and so many respected authors had praised her so highly. I suppose I was really being set up to be disappointed; it's hard to live up to media-generated hype. But I was expecting something a little more breathtaking than what I got in "After a Life."

The prose was skilled, but not magical; the characters strong, but not overly sympathetic. In fact, I didn't really care about the plight of Mrs. Su or the confusion of Mr. Fong. I did like the ending, but so much of the middlejust sort of sat there placidly that as a whole, the story was less than impressive. It was kind of like eating a good roast chicken. It fills you up, and can be very contenting, but you will not still be tasting it at random moments of the day a week later.

By contrast, Aleksandar Hemon's story, "The Conductor," completely blew me away. I love the way he uses words; perhaps it is the mark of someone for whom English is a second language, that they can cherish words the way a native speaker cannot. His story completely sucked me into its world, refusing to release me conveniently at the end. After finishing the story, I simply wanted to read it over again. And then I went to Hemon's website and read all about him and his other works, and I have every intention of reading his novels.

I particularly liked the way "The Conductor" was able to weave 9/11 into the fabric of its narrative, without making it a focal point or even an important moment, but simply letting it hang there in the background, lending undertones to the story the way a framed picture can change the atmosphere of a room. This paragraph is the only one in which he talks about the attacks:

... As it was on the cloudless morning of September 11, 2001, when I was on a plane to D.C. The flight attendant was virginally blond. The man sitting next to me ad a ring of biblical proportions on his pinkie. The woman on my right was immensely pregnant, squeezed into a tight red dress. I, of course, had no idea what was going on - the plane simply landed in Detroit and we disembarked. The Twin Towers were going down simultaneously on every screen at the unreal airport; maintenance personnel wept, leaning on their brooms; teenaged girls screamed into their cell phones; forlorn pilots sat at closed gates. I wandered around the airport, recalling one of Dedo's poems: "I will be alive, when everybody's dead. / But there will be no joy in that, for all those undone / by death need to pass through me, to get to hell."

I don't think there's much that needs to be said about that, except that I love it.