Dec 202010
 

I’ve been reading James Salter’s book of stories Dusk and Other Stories on Mark Anthony Jarman’s recommendation. Gorgeous stories, disturbing stories. “American Express” is about two wealthy American investment bankers or dealers traveling in Italy. They pick up a very young girl and share her. At the end, one of the men gets out of bed and looks down out the hotel window at a young man on a motorbike.

He was part of that great, unchanging order of those who live by wages, whose world is unlit and who do not realize what is above.

Also “Twenty Minutes”—a story about a woman dying after a fall from her horse, being, as the story tells it, visited by the “demonic.” And “Akhnilo” about a man being drawn from his house in the night by some sound/vision, some mythic Other, which, when he returns to his house and wife, he cannot put words to. He had words at the moment, but as he nears home, the words disappear. Reminds me of an E. M. Forster story called “Pan”—humans meeting the old gods and not knowing.

dg