Mowgli's Brothers and Two Friends

I'm trying to read some of the short story collections I have, and read two very different stories recently!

Mowgli's Brothers by Rudyard Kipling
The Jungle Book is one of my favorite Disney movies. My brother and I watched the heck out of that VHS tape when we were little. So, I’d always thought I’d enjoy reading the original story by Kipling. In encountering Mowgli’s Brothers, I realized I had thought that The Jungle Book was a novel – not a short story collection. And, it’s the same short story collection that contains Rikki Tikki Tavi, which TERRIFIED me as a child. I HATED that mongoose. What’s that you say? The mongoose is the hero? I refuse to believe it! It’s an evil, evil monster, and I was horrified to learn that mongooses (mongeese?) are real! I have absolutely no idea what caused my terror, especially since my mom enjoyed the story because she hates snakes, but I still get the shivers when I hear the name of the book. I actually don’t mind snakes and often held and played with grass snakes when I was younger, so maybe that’s part of it and I felt sorry for them or something. I also remember the evil mongoose having terrifying red eyes that still haunt me. I should probably check it out at the library to see what was so scary, but I’m scared to! :)

So by the time I actually read Mowgli’s Brothers, I was a little on edge having relived my nightmares about Rikki Tikki Tavi. I really did not enjoy Mowgli’s Brothers. I’m not sure how much of that to place on Rikki Tikki Tavi and how much to blame Disney. Disney’s version of The Jungle Book is awesome! There are singing animals, lovable Baloo, the cute little wolves, and Mowgli having fun. Mowgli’s Brothers was much darker and sadly, kind of boring. Kipling skips the interesting stuff about what it would be like to grow up in a wolf pack and skips from Mowgli’s initial appearance as a toddler to his becoming a man and being banished. As a result, there wasn’t much to this story. I know Mowgli continues to make appearances in many other short stories by Kipling, and some of those are used as part of the Disney movie as well, but this just didn’t make me want to go out and read more. There was something very stilted in the language and so many references to the Laws of the Jungle that I felt like I was reading a law text book instead of an adventure story.

Two Friends by Guy de Maupassant

What a sad, tragic little story! It starts off as this uplifting story of friendship and how even in dark times, friends are there and you sometimes just need to go fishing together, to do something familiar and enjoyable to forget the stress of life. And then BOOM! There is no escaping the stress! There is no escaping war! It will find you. I don’t want to spoil this for anyone, but encourage you to check it out. It’s very short, even for a short story!

Olive Kitteridge

I ended up enjoying Olive Kitteridge, but I must say it's not the best book to select for traveling across the country away from your husband for the week. Although it was more appropriate than The Pilot's Wife, which I also read on a plane traveling away from my husband.
Anyway, Olive Kitteridge is the Pulitzer Prize winner by Elizabeth Strout. It's a series of interconnected short stories. I must admit, my usual perception of short stories is that they are stories that aren't good enough to make into a whole novel or that the author is a bit lazy and just didn't feel like developing it. Clearly, there are exceptions, I enjoy reading Poe for example, and Shirley Jackson. So I realize I'm not being fair, but I still have a tendency to think that. I have an anthology of short stories that I don't even remember buying (I probably got it a library book sale) and have never read, so maybe I'll give them a try to beat down that perception for good.
Olive Kitteridge was a good selection for starting to change my mind about short stories. I enjoyed seeing different sides of certain characters and getting snapshots of life in this small town in Maine. And in reading the author interview in the back of my copy Strout points out that the reader needs breaks from Olive once and a while. The format was also nice for traveling because it was easy to stop at the end of a story during all the starts and stops you have while flying.
Why I say it was not the best choice for reading when I was traveling away from my husband is because it was rather depressing. You can't even count on your own family to be there for you when you're sick or dying. Olive worries about dying alone, and every time I see another statistic on how women live longer than men in the U.S. I worry about that too. And I felt like Strout cut down all of the solutions people turn to to avoid that fate. Olive's son moves away and never visits, friends die, volunteer work doesn't fulfill her the way it's supposed to. In all, I was left with a feeling that it's all hopeless and nothing matters. It just made me want to run to Ryan and give him a big hug and I couldn't do that because I was on a plane to San Diego. Fortunately, since I was on a place to San Diego, I at least had beautiful scenery to greet me and clear my mind instantly.
One last thing - Strout is a master at beautiful, lyrical language. That alone made it worth reading, and it reminded me a bit of Woolf in that sense. But, there were a few times where it was almost too much, and I would think, "Wow, she's really going for the Pulitzer with that paragraph!" Then it became a little distracting. But, overall I did think it was well written and I ended up really enjoying it.