SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: December 4, 2021] “The State of Grace”
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.
This story was funny but also had a moral.
Set in 1939, we meet the best Christian in all of Rue Gabrielle and indeed all Montmartre. Monsieur Duperrier was “a man of such piety, uprightness and charity that God, without awaiting his death… crowned his head with never left it by day or by night.”
He was grateful, of course, but his modesty did not allow him to show it off in public. However, his wife did have to look at it and she was filled with resentment and exasperation. She was afraid of what others would think of him if they saw him like that, so she encouraged him to sin a little but to lose the halo. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 