SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: December 7, 2021] “The Complete Gentleman”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my seventh time reading the Calendar. The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.
Manguel has this to say about Amos Tutuola:
He was educated in an English school but never quite abandoned his native Yoruba. Instead, he began to write stories and novels drawn from the collective imagination of his people in an English that is certainly not that of English schoolbooks, but is enriched by strange turns of phrase and an idiosyncratic grammar and spelling that the reader can follow easily.
That’s pretty interesting.
As is this story which is, indeed, pretty unusual.
Each small section has a heading which outlines the action. First we meet the “complete” gentleman. He was perfect in every way. So much so that a woman decided to follow him.
They left the beaten path and headed into the woods. And suddenly the complete gentleman started to “return the hired parts of his body to the owners.” He started with his foot, then his leg, then his chest. Then his arms and his neck. Eventually he was only just a skull.
She was horrified but didn’t know how to get back, so she continued to follow him until she got back to his house. The house was full of skulls and they soon trapped her, makin her unable to talk.
Soon we find out that the narrator the story is “Father of the gods who could do anything in this world.”
The lady’s father called upon the narrator to rescue her.
The narrator used magic (since he could do anything) to follow the complete gentleman and find the lady. Will he be able to rescue her from the skulls? With a story writer like this, anything is possible.
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