Deal Me In – Week 16 Wrap Up

April 20, 2014 at 5:58 pm (Uncategorized)
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Happy Easter to all! I hope everyone is enjoying the weekend and maybe some nice spring weather like we had here in Indiana today. Below are links to the new posts I’ve found since the last update. Please take a moment if you can to visit your fellow Deal Me In-ers blogs and explore what stories they read this week – maybe you’ll find one you’ll want to add to your list. 🙂

Dale’s ten of spades was Graham Greene’s “The End of the Party” http://mirrorwithclouds.wordpress.com/2014/04/18/graham-greene-the-end-of-the-party/

James paired Haruki Murakami’s “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” with Christopher Barzak’s “We Do Not Come in Peace”
http://jamesreadsbooks.com/2014/04/15/haruki-murakami-visits-bordertown/

I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Mrs. Bullfrog” as prescribed by my six of spades https://bibliophilica.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/mrs-bullfrog-by-nathaniel-hawthorne/

It’s the jack of hearts and Robert Silverberg’s story “Crossing Into the Empire” for Katherine this week: http://katenread.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/deal-me-in-week-16-crossing-into-the-empire/

And, from Hanne, the queen of spades yielded Lorrie Moore’s “How to Talk to Your Mother” http://readingoncloud9.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/how-to-talk-to-your-mother-by-lorrie-moore/#more-1283

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“Mrs. Bullfrog” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

April 17, 2014 at 12:45 pm (Uncategorized)
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(I love African Bullfrogs)

For week 16 of the Deal Me In 2014 Short Story Reading Challenge, I drew the six of spades. Spades are my suit for “darker” stories and this one certainly qualified. For my complete roster of 2014 click here. Prior years’ rosters are accessible via the links on the left.

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(Six of spades image from theworldoftarot.wordpress.com)

The first sentences of this story certainly make you want to read on: “It makes me melancholy to see how like fools some very sensible people act in the matter of choosing wives. They perplex their judgments by a most undue attention to little niceties of personal appearance, habits, disposition, and other trifles which concern nobody but the lady herself.”

So this will be a story about a match that didn’t work out well? Maybe. The narrator, Mr. Bullfrog, actually admits that he could be counted among those fools: “For my own part I freely confess that, in my bachelorship, I was precisely such an over-curious simpleton as I now advise the reader not to be.”

Mr. Bullfrog, a fastidious shopkeeper, finds only somewhat late in life a woman who he feels to be the perfect match for him, and “within a fortnight” the two are wed. All is going well. At first. It is on their “matrimonial jaunt” in a carriage ride, that he discovers he has hitherto only seen one side of his bride. That would be her good side, naturally.

The careless driver, not mindful of a hazard in the road, allows the carriage to overturn, sending his passengers tumbling. Mr. Bullfrog says “What became of my wits I cannot imagine; they have always had a perverse trick of deserting me just when they are most needed.” Disoriented by the accident, he is amazed to see the coachman being chastised by a strange personage, one “of grisly aspect, with a head almost bald, and sunken cheeks, apparently of the feminine gender, though hardly to be classed in the gentler sex.” He also notices that his dear Mrs. Bullfrog is nowhere to be seen…

Not an overly long or particularly deep story, but I do enjoy Hawthorne’s deft command of the English language, and it is always a pleasure to revisit his work.

This story is available in the public domain and may be read online in many places, one of which is http://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/148/

What about YOU? Have you read this story? What about others by Hawthorne? Which are your favorites among his works?

 

 

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