What a chore it was wading through this dismal collection of short stories and short novels. For the most part the stories are pretty depressing. I read fiction to be entertained. I was not entertained by any of these often grim stories. When it comes to grim reality, I have enough of that in real life. I don't need it in fiction too. I was not moved or touched or inspired or anything except relieved when I finally waded through the last depressing page. The only thing positive that I can say is that Porter paints a vivid scene.
I did come across a couple words I didn't know. One word was "pawky" as in "He went on in his pawky way trying to make clear to her his mystical faith..." According to what I found online, pawky means cunning, tricky. Another word was "quid" as in "He sat on the steps, shot his quid into the grass..." Quid means a chew of tobacco.
I also found a couple of interesting ideas in the stories, one in which she says, "And she brought it on herself by drinking lemon and salt to stop her periods when she wanted to go to dances." I had never heard of this before and I could find nothing online about using lemon and salt to stop menses.
The other strange idea is this one, "At Easter we ate only pork in contempt of the Jews..." Is this where the tradition of eating ham at Easter came from, to spite the non-pork-eating Jews? I had never heard this before and I couldn't find anything online to verify it.
If you enjoy wallowing in human misery, then you'll probably like the stories of Katherine Anne Porter.
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