Something that I have read recently sparked my interest (I’m on holidays and I’m reading things that I find entertaining); that something was written by one of my favourite authors, Neil Gaiman. He had written an introduction to his children’s book, “M is for Magic” (a Hugo award winner for The Graveyard Book ). Here is what he said, “Stories you read when you are the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you will forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit”. This is the short story that impacted me the most since I read it at a young age, possibly 8 or 9 years of age. We lived in Mount Apica, a Canadian radar base in Quebec. It was a crappy three-roomed school but I found a book of short stories in the school library. I can still recall what I believe to be the right name of the story, “The Lady or the Tiger?” What I liked best about it was the fact that the reader is the one who must make the decision. Which ending is the one? Why do we think that one ending will prevail over any other probable ending? I guess that is one of the reasons why I like endings of the novels I read to be unexpected. That rarely happens, I am often disappointed. However, there was one other book where I was delighted that I could not for some unknown reason figure out the ending; the book was called, The Seville Communion by Arturo Perez-Reverte (a Spanish journalist and novelist). He is not an author who would be read among my peers but this is a novel that has stuck with me due to the surprise I received on the last page. The next was a book about a mentally ill man called, The Confederacy of Dunces. It certainly was not a “gripping” novel. Again, the ending was not quite what I had anticipated although in the face of mental illness it is often highly accurate.
I have since completed a Google search and find that Frank R Stockton wrote The Lady or the Tiger and it was first published for a magazine in 1882. Here is a link whereby you can read the story for yourself; it is worth the short time it takes to read it!!
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/LadyTige.shtml
In many respects I am loath to read it as an adult, because I don’t want to change the way it has resonated with me for so many years.
