The title of the story apparently comes from a late Victorian/Edwardian love poem set in India --

"Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, / Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell? / Whom do you lead on Rapture's roadway, far, / Before you agonise them in farewell?

Pale hands, pink-tipped, like lotus-buds that float / On those cool waters where we used to dwell, / I would have rather felt you round my throat / Crushing out life than waving me farewell! ..."

The frailty (paleness) and passion (possession), even danger, are in this poem too.

The narrator's feelings for and about Fintan are complicated, but I think the reader ends up knowing first how attached she is to him, has always been to him --

"It reminds me of the time when I nearly loved him, back in college when it rained all the time, and no one had any heating, and the first thing you did with a man was stick your schnozz into his jumper and inhale."

Young, close, constantly drizzly, damp, wet wool, a beloved -- she nailed that image right home.

Her new husband notwithstanding, she ends up seeing Fintan again, having "sex sweet as rainwater".

Lots of frailty and passion interwoven in this story.

Well, "grainy texture" is right indeed. The first story, "Pale Hands I Loved, Beside The Shalamar", is remarkable for a forthright use of language -- regular words not often heard, regular images not often described.

The narrator visits her roommate (a friend from college), Fintan, at a hospital when he'd gone off his meds --

"I had never been there before: it was a joke of an asylum, looming and Victorian, people muttering and whining in the bare wards, and a smell everywhere of bleach and sperm that was like your own madness, not theirs."

The reader is left not only aghast at the report, but ashamed, too.

I found this on our library's upfront browsing shelves and some short stories seemed in order during these hectic days.

The front flap says, "The stories in Taking Pictures" are snapshots of the body in trouble: in denial, in extremis, in love. Mapping the messy connections between people -- and their failures to connect -- the characters are captured in the grainy texture of real life ..."

Jonah Lehrer is an editor at the very hip science magazine, Seed. He's a prolific and talented writer with a focus on neuroscience. I like how he writes, smoothly setting the stage for what I hope will be a very informative and enlightening adventure.

I don't think there are any news flashes in the snippets I've posted from the book's Introduction, but we're being led to a deeper understanding of how the brain works.

I think if I was a college freshman again today, this is what I would find myself studying -- brain and cognitive sciences. There's such a rich intersection among the disciplines of biology, neuroscience, psychology, education, language, mathematics, and so much more. Endless opportunities for discovery.

"Whenever someone makes a decision, the brain is awash in feeling, driven by its inexplicable passions. Even when a person tries to be reasonable and restrained, these emotional impulses secretly influence judgment. ... [but] Sometimes feelings can lead us astray and cause us to make all sorts of predictable mistakes. ...

The simple truth of the matter is that making good decisions requires us to use both sides of the mind. ... There is no universal solution to the problem of decision-making. The real world is just too complex. ..."

"As long as people have made decisions, they've thought about how they make decisions. ... Ever since the ancient Greeks, these assumptions have revolved around a single theme: humans are rational ... deliberate and logical creatures ... [whose] rationality came to define us. It was, simply put, what made us human."

Along those lines, he mentions Plato, Descartes, and the field of modern economics, going on to note, however:

"There's only one problem with this assumption of human rationality: it's wrong. It's not how the brain works."

From the Introduction --

"This book is about how we make decisions. ... From the perspective of the brain, there's a thin line between a good decision and a bad decision .. This book is about that line."

And early on, there's a marvelous exchange between Miss Bohun (the grim chatelaine and Felix's non-relative) and her resentful servant, Frau Leszno, a Jewish refugee from Germany.

"... Miss Bohun called peevishly from the stairs: 'Oh, dear Frau Leszno, what have you broken now?'

The German voice, twanging like a flat string, more peevish than Miss Bohun's, replied: 'Just such a little plate. It is nosing. In Jastrow we had a hundred such.'

'Well, there aren't a hundred such here.'

'No,' agreed Frau Leszno with sombre contempt. ..."

You absolutely know these two women; you may be related to them. You certainly don't want to get in between them.

Poor Felix! I wonder how he'll survive it all.

Olivia Manning knew how to set a scene and signal a wealth of information about her characters --

"... A single yellowish bulb of light hung over her head. He had felt sorry for her as she sat there, a little, worried old lady with her hand to her brow; he thought how silly he had been to distrust her, but now he could see her face, he was disturbed again. Her face was so narrow there seemed scarcely room between the cheeks for the long, bone-thin nose and the compressed mouth. It looked to Felix like the face of some sort of large insect. Her hair, fairish and greyish, was bound in thin plaits round her head. Her eyelids, thick and pale, hid her eyes. ..."

You can't help but shiver a bit on Felix's behalf.

I'm only 20 pages in, greatly appreciating the smooth writing and deft styling.

There's a Casablanca/Winds of War air about the story. The NYRB description on the back cover explains: "Jerusalem in 1945 is a city in flux: refugees from the war in Europe fill its streets and cafes, the British colonial mandate is coming to an end, and tensions are on the rise between the Arab and Jewish populations. ..." (and we know how well that turned out)

Into this mix, you toss a newly orphaned young teen, a quasi-relative of his, her fundie sect, grim boardinghouse, and (of course) a new tenant who "disrupts its dreary routine for good."

It all appeals.

I've only a few pages left, but my enjoyment of this has long since fled. I'm pressing forward, though, in hopes of finding some redemption by the end. I'm not at all hopeful.

But after a certain point, she suddenly and inexplicably appeared to be quite verbose at explaining (and not at all well) various arcane points of mathematica.

I'm not sure if this is the way the original reads or if it's a fault of the translation -- but these particular chunks of text remind me of that oft-scorned failing of some authors who Must Really Show you how much research they've done for a particular novel. Copy-and-paste, in these cases, is not a good thing.

If this were a TV sitcom, it would have been considered to have "jumped the shark" the moment the housekeeper began parroting whole paragraphs of math.

Well, of course, the boy and the professor take a shine to each other, especially over baseball.

And there are, of course, snakes in this paradise -- the professor's sister-in-law (his only benefactor) and the head of the housekeeping agency. They succeed only temporarily in thwarting the happy triumvirate of professor, housekeeper, and boy -- at least as far as I've read.

I was enjoying the mathematical banter between the professor and the housekeeper -- it's his way of handling any unfamiliar social situations which, with his time-limited memory, is every situation. The housekeeper delights in relating how little she knows of math and how much she appreciates learning from the professor.

I'm not exactly sure why I picked up this one. I think it was mentioned in the Forum and then perhaps showed up as an "also bought" on an Amazon page of mine. I had the idea that it was to have been a simple and intelligently-told story with just a hint of fable to it.

It is a simple enough story -- with a single-mother housekeeper caring, by turns, for her young son and for an elderly brain-damaged professor. He was a brilliant mathematician but an injury has left him with only eighty minutes of current memory. He clips notes to his suitcoat to remind himself of things, including the housekeeper who appears anew -- truly anew -- on his doorstep each morning.

I think I was misunderstanding, a little bit, Stockton's matter-of-fact (even cavalier) way of talking about moving back-and-forth across the country and the series of coincidences that led her to a particular cabin in a particular town in Wyoming and, of course, the arrival of the baby coyote.

But, as I continued to read, I realized that she was more grounded than I first assumed. And, much later on in the story, she offered some candid insights about those who assume too much about people they only know slightly -- over the internet, for example. I felt duly chastened.

She also has some excellent insights on the urban vs. rural ways of living.

(I want to go back to the book and type in some quotes here.)

Very early on, I found the author to be one of those people who have a reverence for coincidence and a relationship with the universe. I like to think I do too, but I don't think I live those connections nearly as deeply or as upfront-ly as she does.

Her faith in that way of life is deep and sincere because it truly carries her through this story, the first year or so of raising a baby coyote and continuing to live with him as he assumes his full adult coyote-ness.

In the beginning part of the book, I had a whiff of 'cosmic entitlement' (for lack of a better term) that some folks like this seem to have -- that the ordinary rules that bind the rest of us don't seem to apply to them.

I was out of work yesterday, feeling way under the weather, but not incapacitatingly ill. My agenda was to sleep and read. I had this on a bedside stack and picked it up first thing in the morning. Even amidst a succession of abundant and lengthy naps, I finished this at the very end of the day, just before midnight.

A thoroughly fascinating story and author.

Manny was getting under my skin with his constant circular obsessing about his departed abuelita, about the lost Jacquie, and about the nearly-extinct Lobster.

Until, that is, I realized that these three highly significant losses all happened to him in less than a year's time. It dawned on me that he was due his obsessing (at least for now) because he was still in mourning and actively grieving.

That was an embarrassing revelation to me; I felt I should have picked up on that sooner and been more compassionate for him. I find the 'around and around in the head' technique used by so (too) many authors that it pushes my buttons very early on in any narrative.

What a deeply poignant story.