Don’t usually read short story collections, but loved this one. A couple passages in one here. The first is from “Next Door.” The narrator is a husband who cares for his sick wife; they live next door to a couple which fights violently:
All the lights are off next door except the one in their bedroom window. I think about the life they have, and how it goes on and on, until it seems like the life they were meant to live. Everybody always says how great it is that human beings are adaptable, but I don’t know. In Istanbul, a friend of mine saw a man walking down the street with a grand piano on his back. Everyone just moved around him and kept going. It’s awful, what we get used to.
The next is a brief rant from a professor, an immigrant, on a smoking break, to an adult student of a similar age:
“Americans!” Professor Landsman was fumbling with the buttons of her coat. “Such faith in the future, where all shall be reconciled. Such compassion toward the past, where all shall be forgiven, once understood. Really, you have no comprehension of history. Of how done it is, how historical. One may not redeem a day of it, not a moment of it, with all these empathies and tender discernments. One may visit it only as one visits a graveyard, hat in hand. One may read the inscription on the stones. One may not rewrite them.”
3C Review 