Last night's read was John Steinback's "The Chrysanthemum". This short story was richly descriptive and will really stir you on imagining how the plot really looks like. Characters are a farmer, his wife, and a tinker who repairs pots and sharpens knives. I can easily recollect the passion that the wife exerts on growing her 10 inch chrysanthemums, tenderly planting new shoots with strong hands. Chrysanthemums are beautifully colored flowers with a bitter scent. The Asian varieties sold in floral shops are most commonly the Malaysian mums. They come in yellow, brown, orange, white and maroon shades.

Wikipedia summarizes:

"Elisa Allen and her husband Henry live peacefully on their farm in the Salinas Valley; he is busy with his orchard and steers and she with her housekeeping and flower garden. While tending to her garden, Elisa encounters a tinker who passes by their farm, first asking for work fixing cutlery and pans, and then inquiring about chrysanthemums in her garden. He asks for some shoots to take to another lady who asked him for some once. Elisa is happy to give young shoots to the tinker, and in fact goes to the extent of taking some of her new shoots and planting them with great care and skill in a nice large pot for him to give to the woman. Elisa goes into great detail when she explains how to care for them. She goes inside and gets dressed up to go out with Henry later on. However, in the car on the way to town, she sees the chrysanthemum shoots she'd given the tinker thrown carelessly on the road. She realizes that the tinker had lied to her just to flatter her into giving him some business (before the tinker left, Elisa let him fix a few old, dented pans which Elisa was more than capable of repairing on her own), and also that he had kept the pot, throwing away only the plants. She is dismayed, cries, and is shaken and deeply disappointed, even wounded by the sight of her chrysanthemum shoots lying on the side of the road. When the car her husband is driving passes the tinker's wagon, Elisa turns away from the tinker, facing her husband, so her husband will not see the cast off shoots on the road or the tinker."

There are some opinions that the husband was gay, because there's something that keeps Elisa sexually unsatisfied. Having separate bedrooms on their house is another story.

"Earhtly possessions" (book by Anne Tyler), a movie starring Susan Sarandon, sharing a similar character with Elisa - as she grows tired of becoming the wife and mother of her family. But Susan did something to get out of her situation. She withdraws all her savings and plans on getting away to a far place and start a new life. But fate changes when a young bank robber holds her a a hostage, and the adventure of being a cougar continues.

I read The Lady with the Dog last night. Anton Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog is the book that 15-year-old Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes ) reads to the illiterate Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) on “The Reader”. He reads this to her on the bathtub and on the bed-during their affair while Hanna was advised to stay home due to scarlet fever. The Lady with the Dog is a love affair story between Dmitri Gurov- married to a shrewd and intelligent woman who calls her Dimitri, and a woman with a Pomeranian dog vacationing at Yalta. The lady’s name is Anna Sergeyevna - married to a travelling businessman but no deeper detail why she’s not happy with her marriage. Her sober character and exuberant naivete animates him as they watch the sunset at Yalta every evening from a vantage point. Dmitri described their affair in the end as “only just beginning”- the beginning of more complicated things to come. This book was chosen probably by the author because of the comparative intensity of the affair they had before when Michael was younger and Hanna still was a tram conductor, even before she was jailed for a Nazi war crime.

It’s just saddening that at the end of The Reader, the elderly Kate Winslet hanged herself on the room of the correctional facility during her time of release. I’m not sure if “The Lady with the Dog” was one of those books she piled on the table when she was reaching for the rope from the ceiling before she hanged herself. That jail was where she stayed most of her adult years and where she has been receiving cassette tapes of Ralph’s narration of the books he has read for her.

The ending was really depressing not only because an elderly Hanna hangs herself at that time her sentence ended, but also because how Michael had been indifferent and cold to her during their first meeting after so many years. Michael’s behavior at that day he sees Hanna was just ironic to the sleepless nights he spent passionately voice-recording the books he has read to her during their short affair when he was still a young student.