Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"I thought the present was the safer bet. We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive."

Reasons to Live (1985) is the third collection of short stories by Amy Hempel that I have read, after At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom and Tumble Home. One of the reasons that I keep returning to her collections of short stories might be a coincidental similarity in our biographies. Not only was I born in the same year as Ms. Hempel, but also both of us relocated to California from a city where many people speak Polish (Chicago for her, Warsaw for me).

The term "short stories" is not really adequate, particularly when referring to stories from this collection. One should call the genre mastered by Ms. Hempel "very short stories." These literary miniatures, snapshots of life, are just a few pages long - their length ranges from one to 15 pages.

To me, the best thing about the majority of Ms. Hempel's miniatures is that the reader has to do a little work to interpret them, to understand their meaning, and to see the "message" they convey. More importantly, different readers may find different messages in individual stories. And that's how it should be - after all, this is literature, not just storytelling!

Sadness is the common mood evoked by most stories in this collection, and the common motifs are loss, grief, and death. The first micro-story, In a Tub, deals with fear of death and celebration of life and sets the tone for the entire collection of 15 stories. Some of my favorite miniatures are: In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried in which the narrator describes how she did not help her friend who was dying - she left her alone for the final hours. The poignant Going ends with a beautiful, bittersweet passage:

"[...] it makes me think of the night my mother died. Three states away, the smell in my room was the smell of the powder on her face when she kissed me good-night - the night she wasn't there."

In moving When It's Human Instead of When It's Dog, a cleaning woman is trying to remove a spot on the rug - that stain is all that is physically left of a once living, loving, and loved human being.

The final miniature, Today Will Be a Quiet Day, is the sweetest. It also justifies the title of the collection. With all this death, loss, grief, and sadness, are there any reasons to live? Yes! One of the most important reasons is being able to make one's children happy and feel loved:

"My kids are as right as this rain. He smiled at the exact spots he knew their heads were turned to his, and doubted he would ever feel -- not better but more than he did now.

Three-and-a-half stars.

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