SOUNDTRACK:
[READ: December 8, 2020] “Parnassus on Wheels” [excerpt]
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my fifth time reading the Calendar. I didn’t know about the first one until it was long out of print (sigh), but each year since has been very enjoyable. Here’s what they say this year
Like we always do at this time: the Short Story Advent Calendar is back for 2022. We had such a great time last year working with our first-ever guest editor, the one and only Alberto Manguel. This year, however, we’re bringing things back to basics. No overarching theme or format, just 25 top-class short stories, selected in-house, by some of the best writers in North America and beyond. It’s December 8. Christopher Morley, author of The Haunted Bookshop and Parnassus on Wheels (from which this story is drawn), died in 1957 and was unavailable for comment.
As I started this story I thought, why do people write stories in an old-fashioned dialect? It seems weird and out of character with contemporary writers. I didn’t realize until a bit of the way through the story that was, indeed, an old story (over 100 years old!).
It is also an excerpt from what I expect is a long book, so it was frustrating to have it build up and then just end. However, it does end in a strangely satisfying way as well.
The narrator, Helen, is a woman whose brother, Andrew and she had moved to a farm to be closer to the land. They had lived in the city and Andrew had been a successful business man. But when his health failed they both moved to the country.
Things were great until their uncle passed on and left all of his books to them. Andrew stayed up all night reading. This wasn’t a problem for Helen as long as he kept up his end of the chores, which he did. Until a package arrived and Andrew showed her: Paradise Regained by Andrew McGill. Andrew had written a book
She knew it was folly and that hit would never sell. But the city publishers made a big deal of it as a “gospel of health and sanity” and suddenly Andrew was a celebrity. And he was gone much of the time now. Which didn’t sit well with Helen.
Then one day up drove a rattling truck. R. Mifflin’s Travelling Paranssus. Good Books for Sale. Mr Mifflin had been travelling the breadth of the land with his horse-drawn caravan of hundreds of books. He had made a good living bringing books to the hinterlands and he was looking to retire. He imagined that Andrew would like to buy it. Helen wanted him to get lost–the last thing she needed was for Andrew to spend his money on this thing. And then she thought about it and decided that she would buy it herself.
Helen had money put aside and decided that if Andrew could have adventures, well, so could she.
I’m very curious what happens next and will have to look for this novel.
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