Herman Marmaduke is my personal favorite from Small Stories. Hovering somewhere in the realm between short story and novella, it is a simple yet resonant story about two men - one who cannot remember, and another who wishes he could forget. The title character is a past-his-prime celebrity adventurer type (think Jacques Cousteau or the Crocodile Hunter) who’s long since faded into obscurity and is haunted by a painful past. What I found most satisfying about the story is the way it plays with identity; how I some ways our sense of identity can be so illusory and mercurial, and in other ways unyielding and inescapable. In the end, it’s about wish-fulfillment, about a man who wants to become someone else – anyone else, it doesn’t matter who, just as long as it isn’t him.
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on Nov 22, 2009 at 05:16
Herman Marmaduke is my personal favorite from Small Stories. Hovering somewhere in the realm between short story and novella, it is a simple yet resonant story about two men - one who cannot remember, and another who wishes he could forget. The title character is a past-his-prime celebrity adventurer type (think Jacques Cousteau or the Crocodile Hunter) who’s long since faded into obscurity and is haunted by a painful past. What I found most satisfying about the story is the way it plays with identity; how I some ways our sense of identity can be so illusory and mercurial, and in other ways unyielding and inescapable. In the end, it’s about wish-fulfillment, about a man who wants to become someone else – anyone else, it doesn’t matter who, just as long as it isn’t him.
on Feb 04, 2009 at 22:38
I can't stop tweaking them! I think I have OCD for book cover design. Lol!