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Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee (view source)
Revision as of 15:16, 4 December 2014
, 15:16, 4 December 2014no edit summary
The story gets its title from Susan, another of the party guests, who had a peculiar experience on a mountain pass in Nepal. A bobcat mauled her arm (now amputated), but before it struck, Susan remembers it 'placing his paw on her shoulder as if to say, politely, ''Hello''?' She describes it almost like a spiritual communion. The bobcat is a symbol of everything that's lying in wait for us; some of these shocks may be blessings in disguise, but to start with they will be painful – and that is certainly true of the dying marriages at the story's core.
It's an almost impossibly rich story and kept reminding me of various precedents: ''Larry's Party'' by Carol Shields, a novel that centres on a disastrous dinner party; ''Between a Rock and a Hard Place (later renamed '''128 Hours'' after the film), Aron Ralston's memoir of having to cut off his own arm when stuck in a rock crevice; and ''The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down'', [[:Category:Anne Fadiman|Anne Fadiman]]'s non-fiction account of a Laotian Hmong family's beliefs and how they intersect with Western medicine (the narrator is defending a Hmong man who denied his wife medical treatment based on his religion).
In 'The Banks of the Vistula', Margaret, a student at a Lutheran college in Minnesota, plagiarizes her first linguistics essay and inadvertently convinces her Polish professor that she's a Soviet propagandist. The next story, 'Slatland', reuses multiple elements: the Scandinavian Midwestern milieu (Saskatchewan this time), the Eastern European references, and the key relationship with a professor. The narrator is even named Margit, all too similar. Margit meets with a psychiatrist at her father's college twice, once to help her deal with her parents' divorce when she falls into depression at age 11, and then 20 years later to help her figure out whether her Romanian fiancé is cheating on her.