What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

This week's short story collection is What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah.  I heard the titular story of this collection on LeVar Burton Reads, along with an interview with the author, and I was impressed so onto the to-read pile it went!

This collection revolves around Nigerian women or Nigerian ex-pats, which is a super refreshing theme and setting.  It also deals heavily with the relationship between mothers and daughters, and it comes at that theme from a lot of different angles.  The titular story is about a post-apocolyptic word where Europe and North America have been flooded and people have fled to Africa.  There's an additional speculative element where mathematicians have found a formula that describes the universe, making it possible for mathematicians to allow people to fly or take away people's grief, which is a skill in high demand in a country overwhelmed with refugees.  In another, women make babies out of objects, their mothers bless life into them, and then they keep the yarn/clay/whicker/whatever baby safe for a year until it becomes flesh, a process made difficult when you don't have a mother to bless your baby.  But most of them are slice of life stories with no speculative elements.  The one I love most is "Light" about a man who rises his daughter through her teenage years when his wife goes to study in America.  It's about how distance affects relationships and how hard it is to parent when you're not on the ground, how hard it is to relate to your parents when they're not an active part of your life.  There is one of the most perfect examples of what a short story can be in "The Future Looks Good," which I'm going to talk about later, and I'm tearing up just thinking about it now (with emotion for the characters and a stunned sense at the story's beauty and maybe a little bit of envy at how well it's executed).  No matter how high-concept these stories are, the focus stays on the people and relationships that are relatable.  The characters are colorful and flawed and engaging.

There's a technique that I heard about at the writer's conference I went to a month ago, that I will write a full blog post about later.  After some round-aboutness, it basically boils down to how you can create an emotional moment by setting up sensory details that puts the reader there with the character, and then the last sentence in your paragraph (or the last sentence of your story or whatever) tells something emotional that gives the character a feeling and the reader is there with them, feeling that feeling.  I was thinking about how it would be really great if I could do this, and then I read the first story of this collection and had to lie down because it was such an exquisitely well executed example of this concept.  The story tells about a family's backstory through a handful of vivid moments, so when the turn hits at the end, it doesn't have to be much, but I'm terrified for the main character.  And then the story ends.  And, like I said, I had to lie down.  But that one's going to be hard to show you, so let me give a different example.  This is the first paragraph of "Second Chances."

Ignore for a moment that two years out of grad school I'm old enough to buy my own bed and shouldn't ask my father to chip in on a mattress, so that he shows up with my mother, who looks like she's stepped out of a photograph, and she tries to charm the salesman, something she was never good at, but it somehow works this time and he takes off 20 percent.  Ignore for a moment that she is wearing an outfit I haven't seen in eighteen years, not since Nigeria, when she was pregnant with my sister, though not yet showing, and fell down the concrete steps to our house, ripping the dress from hem to thigh.  Ignore that she flits from bed to bed, bouncing on each one like she hasn't sat on a mattress in a while, and the salesman follows her around like he'd like to crawl in with her.  Ignore all this because my mother has been dead for eight years.

Whoa!  That deceptively simple sentence hits because we've got this vivid, solid idea of her mother.  In a very short time, I've grown to like her mom as a resilient woman who's outgoing and joyful about mattress shopping.   But this person I've come to like is dead.  And that sentence blows open the whole paragraph that came before, hints that she's an image from a past time that I didn't catch on first read.

This collection is so good, y'all.  Check it out.

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Next week: Sourdough, a novel by Robin Sloan