PART SIX, as continued from here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/26965-2/
100 OF THE FINEST SHORT STORIES EVER WRITTEN chosen by David Miller
My previous reviews of older or classic fictions: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I review this book, my thoughts on each story will appear in the comment stream below…
THE DYING ROOM: Georgina Hammick
A whole lifetime is lived through with recrimination, involving the generation gap and the social differences and the changing fashions and, finally, the dying of people, and sausages or bangers as a man’s last wish, all evolving from a petty (towards bitterly heartfelt) argument betwen a mother and son about the words they use, a dialogue without using quote marks, intrinsic to both of them and his two sisters whom we never meet, and his late father struck down by cancer, I infer, and his grandfather still living as an invalid in the house, so I won’t use quote marks for drawing room or lounge or parlour or sitting room or living room or even wireless or especially the unremarked-upon fucking expletive that the son used at one point, a whole stream of dialogue with interpolations that becomes a wordgame changing letter by letter in stages from living to its opposite. Except one has one more letter than the other.
“Could you move your elbow please, I’m trying to lay the table. I want to give you a knife and fork.”
My previous review of this author: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/06/04/georgina-hammick-grist/
LIZZIE’S TIGER by Angela Carter
“Outside the parlour window were nothing but rows of counterfeit houses that sometimes used to scream.”
Read for the first time, this story with its glimpse of truth is unquestionably Angela Carter’s masterpiece. But what do I know? Merely my instinct to go on, and only three previous reviews by me about her work over the years: HERE, HERE and HERE.
This one is the most shocking.
Lizzie is only 4 and looked after by her 13 year old sister Emma, living with a father who is this New England town’s funeral undertaker, trying to make the coffin-ends meet with the next hoped-for plague A genius loci that is full of people and their downtrodden lives and then a sensory-ripe circus comes to town, enticing Lizzie to escape the house by her sight of a poster advertising it on their fence and depicting a tiger. Lizzie is as feisty as de La Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget that I am currently reviewing. And, via cider vat, a friendly piglet, and a caring gang of children, and later a palimpsest of scars, she mindlessly pleasures an old man at his explicit request. More than just “Kissy, kissy from Missy?” And then she encounters the tiger, burning bright like Blake, and she has an outstaring balanced spirituality with it, and then a young tamer with a ‘secret frog’ in his trousers, as she watches him conduct a wondrously magical ballet battle with this tiger. But the most shocking item is an elbow trigger in the story’s climax (“The baby in the lace bonnet had slept peacefully through all this, but now began to stir and mumble. Its mother nudged her husband with her elbow.”) preceding an unexpected revelation of Lizzie’s future identity!
“Her pale-blue Calvinist eyes of New England encountered with a shock the flat, mineral eyes of the tiger. It seemed to Lizzie that they exchanged this cool regard for an endless time, the tiger and herself.”
Cross-referenced with MEMOIRS OF A MIDGET here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/02/memoirs-of-a-midget-by-walter-de-la-mare/#comment-25943
AT THE BEACH: Bernard MacLaverty
“We give birth astride the grave.”
A work of seven(!) plot-important ELBOW moments as well as CRANES that are sometimes invisible if it were not for the moon in the sky. And a climactic firework carnival that brings me back to MIRÓ here. Mixed with KKK figures.
Another of those self-perfecting stories giving more than one glimpse of truth, as we follow a middle-aged married couple, talking about their grown-up daughters, on a “God, it’s hot” beach and drinks holiday in Spain, he, Jimmy, suddenly with an obsession to give the Spanish Inquisition, I guess, to his wife of 25 years, Maureen, about her pre-him backstory, such as her first orgasm. As their apartment is infested by ants and he watches younger women on the beach undressing, the first elbow moment. I include them all below as they give a structure of the pattern to the work’s telling gestalt alongside the ants and the three Irishman (priests) whom the couple watch and culminating in the elderly octogenarian couple they spot at the end of their holiday, as they see the old man teaching the woman to swim. Not forgetting Jimmy earlier asking for “La cuenta” from the waiter after Maureen refused to answer his questions about her pre-Jimmy history. And his squinting at pubic hair, a sort of “status quo” of ants? Blackened round the honey poison. Gone for the ‘conjugular’ there?
“Act your age, Jimmy. They’re young enough to be your daughters.”
“The girl elbowed her way out of the shoulder straps of her bathing suit and rolled it down, baring her breasts.”
“‘Don’t look now but I hear Irish voices.’
‘Jesus – where?’ Jimmy, with his elbows on the table, arched both hands over his brows and pretended to hide.”
“I hate all the th’s – like everybody’s got a lisp.”
“There’s no point in killing one or two. The whole thing is the organism.”
“They lay there roasting for about thirty minutes, Maureen flat out, Jimmy resting on his elbows taking in the view.”
“Things that had to be broken open and scraped, recognisable creatures which had to have them backs snapped and their contents sucked.”
“Millions coming, millions going. He unscrewed the lid and aimed the oily liquid into the crack they were pouring in and out of.”
“They’re like eyelashes round an eye,”
“The façade of a church appeared as she came round a corner. It seemed to grow out of a terrace of houses…”
“Maureen stood up and climbed the steps to the font. She leaned her elbows on the rim and looked at the round hole or shaft in the middle of it.” “Spluck!”
“The cloister was a well for light – the cloister was a well for water. The word Omphalos came into her head. She connected the word to a poem of Heaney’s she’d read somewhere. The stone that marked the centre of the world. The navel.”
“Her soul was the way she treated the world – ants and all.”
“By the time she got to the beach Jimmy was already there. He was lying flat out on a sun-bed with his back to the sun. Maureen went up and nudged his elbow with her shin.”
“…whenever Maureen or Jimmy had occasion to look up the cranes would be in different positions and at different angles to each other.”
“They ran, Jimmy elbowing his way through the crowd away from the dancers, pulling Maureen after him by the hand.”
“The danger brings pleasure. It involves the audience totally.”
“The status quo. People stayed together because it was the best arrangement.”
“Hang-over horn”
“…dead ants still blackened the margins of the honey-poison.”
“The old man was taking the woman by the elbow and speaking loudly to her in Spanish, scolding her almost.”
The status quo of us millions?
REPORT ON THE SHADOW INDUSTRY: by Peter Carey
A glimpse of truth indeed. A short episodic story of mixed emotions regarding the Shadow Industry in our world. Borrows much from — and lends much to — the Thomas Ligotti industry and whatever else that informs literature of both the horror genre and the mainstream. I should know.
My reviews of Ligotti:
THE TEACHER’S STORY: Gita Mehta
“Hearing the clear notes pierce the night, Master Mohan knew he had been made guardian of something rare, as if his own life until now had only been a purification to ready him for the task of tending this voice for the world.”
The often wondrously music-mystic story of this MM who teaches music but is berated by his wife and children for his lack of earning power, so when he finds this child prodigy with a singing voice, a miraculous voice that one can even hear through the silent words on the page describing it, and so he takes him to a public place to teach him, away from MM’s family. Financial potentials open up surrounding the child, but he is eventually stolen away by various forces in what I can only see as a devastating ending that depletes us all. Yet, I somehow sense various unwritten endings of this story that remain even more silent than its words on the page, words that seem otherwise to scream and scream.
“…pulling at her elbow.”
RADIO GANNET: Shena Mackay
‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha Ha’.
I once owned that pop record by Napoleon XIII when it first came out, and the name of Green Shield Stamps also date-stamps this story for me. A hilariously absurd but strangely real dichotomy between two sides of a seaside resort, one of which I still live in, depleting one sister Dolly who is running a radio station with jingles and competitions from her caravan featuring her pets and husband, and the more upmarket Norma on the other side of town with their mutual brother Walter running a Sponge Museum. Crammed with glimpses of truth.
MARRIAGE LINES: Julian Barnes
“Zigzags.”
One sentence. And a man returning to a Scottish Island where the otter plane landed on a cockle beach. He had secretly honeymooned there with his wife years before, now she was dead from long drawn-out cancer. But grief seems more difficult to negotiate than a catharsis of return and farewell. Grief needs to mature, I guess, like one of the island’s ‘lazy beds’ slowly cooking peat potatoes. Or the bed on their island honeymoon showing the locally needed humility of sex by squeaking loudly. And she never cut a flower for fear of hurting it. And he got caught by her effectively breaking such a rule. Fulmars, razor clams, slaughtered bullocks and quaint island habits, but those eponymous knitted patterns? What of them?
“It must have been like walking around dressed in your own postcode, he thought.”
My previous reviews of Julian Barnes: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/?s=julian+barnes&submit=Search
SOLID GEOMETRY: Ian McEwan
“By the time I remembered the tea Maisie had left by my elbow it was cold. An important stage in the deterioration of our marriage was reached…”
That starts the unfolding of marital discord between the narrator and Maisie, where they hit each other with a shoe outside the bathroom and she smashed the glass jar of the pickled penis of his great grandfather. This is arguably the finest story in this ‘That Glimpse of Truth’ volume of the equally arguable finest 100 short stories ever. Meantime, as one of two stories so different and unique they cancel each other out into potential nothingness, this story has, from elbow moment to elbow moment, a counterbalancing synergy with THE FOLDING MAN (read synchronously a preternatural day or so ago HERE) by which synergy we are again allowed to combine dimensionality and consciousness, origami and history, mathematics and sex, sheets of paper and bodily parts, as the great grandfather and a friend called M reached a figurative orgasm of what? Nothingness. (“…Maisie voluptuous and drowsy after her bath and stretched full out, and I propped up on my elbow.”) And, yes, today the modern narrator and his version of M, too, arising from one formula of writing in memoirs of the past to the new narrator’s formula, the latter couched in the miraculous prose of the singular author who wrote one formula within the other. And this becomes the fiction-real Tarot of the many sexual-congress positions (here involving, inter alia, ‘arms linked’ when walking outside earlier and now, in bed, ‘arms looped’ to form an empty hoop), positions involuted thus toward a version of the story gestalt that is uniquely able to grant the perfect literary nirvana as bespoke to me. That singular glimpse of truth.
My previous reviews of Ian McEwan: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/?s=Ian+McEwan&submit=Search
I reviewed the next story here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/1372-2/#comment-1694, as follows…
=========================================
EMERGENCY: Denis Johnson
“…I just started wandering around, over to the coronary-care unit, down to the cafeteria, et cetera,…”
This is so off the wall it is neither inside nor outside, a story that one needs to pluck out of the mind’s eye like a mote, if not a knife, as a clerk and an orderly in the Emergency Room of a hospital chum up and are so blindsided by the blood and guts they take some of the pills in the medicine cupboards and go to a funfair that is so utterly funfairish beyond Ligotti that they end up at a military graveyard which turns into a drive-in cinema — in the deep snow! And they effectively let eight little bunny rabbits die. A story that makes me philosophical about never being able to be philosophical. Untouchable by death.
“There’s so much goop inside of us, man,” he said, “and it all wants to get out.”
July 11, 2022
Cross-referenced here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/11/ronald-ross-the-vivisector-vivisected-1882/
LET ME COUNT THE TIMES: Martin Amis
“The time after that, she had her elbows hooked round the back of her knee-caps as a 15 stone Chinaman feasted at his leisure on her imploring sobs.”
Following SOLID GEOMETRY (above yesterday) and PEELING (here yesterday), this human-blowing story contains the mathematics of sex as averages or rogue medians, as we watch Vernon progressing and/or regressing into a mōbius section of truly rampant rutting to the power of the nth degree, a process, through streaming words both amiss and apposite, alongside alogarithmic ecstasy — initially doing it multiply with his wife, then with himself alone, later, by projecting onanistic fantasising to produce the finest penile kicks, he does it with named figures from literature, and eventually with cataclysmic rôle-visionary SF creatures and scenarios… But I think his downward retroactive spiral (if that was what it was) towards a renewed but now bloodily ‘moist uxoriousness’ was arguably triggered by an earlier ‘débacle’ of doing it it within ‘The Rainbow’… the intentional fallacy’s apotheosis? If so, a veritable glimpse of truth, indeed, a major Quimcunx.
“He waited several minutes, propped up on an elbow, glazedly eternalized in the potent moment.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/06/08/career-move/ and https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/26/the-penguin-book-of-the-contemporary-british-short-story/#comment-24433
Forever to be known as VERNONanism?
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CUN: Nguyen Huy Thiep
K’s father, a male version of Walter de La Mare’s Midget (currently being reviewed here) or something called CUN from the womb of woman called DIEU, i.e. something (a word used advisedly) far more deformed and inhuman, or rather un-human, not inhuman at all? So someone writes a story based on that character CUN who became the father of K, and CUN’s old guardian called HA. A story that is its own truth or something far more rarefied that exists in an un-human world that only such fiction can reach?
“‘Cun, you’ve grown up. I’m about to die. You are about to lose me, your main support in life,’ old Ha whispered weakly. ‘Actually, I’m not your main support. You and I live together … like earthworms, crickets, bees, ants.’ The old man had a fit of coughing, then cried: ‘Human beings don’t live like us. Good heavens, why do they persecute us like this? We only want to live like everyone else, but are not able to.’”
HA left CUN gold rings, real gold. Only in a story can this un-human own gold and entice DIEU with it… DIEU who said to CUN: “Hey, Blob-with-the-Beautiful-Face, you are about to have a child! I couldn’t have believed that anything as strange as this would have happened either.”
So, CUN died, somehow giving birth to this fiction as a glimpse of truth or something far more rarefied than truth but even truer! HA! (But who was K?)
UNSEEN TRANSLATION: Kate Atkinson
“Missy herself was a twin and had made sure she’d elbowed her way out first, ahead of her brother.”
Missy is a sort of stoical Mary Poppins, and this is a hilariously satirical tale on a separated couple of ‘Hello’ celebrities (including the husband who is part of a band called Scottish Sick who perform in gas masks) whose precocious eight year old son Arthur needs a new Nanny. Don’t go there! The mother has just had a baby girl, but who’s the father? And indeed Missy and Arthur have to go to Germany to join his touring father whose access turn it is for Arthur, but Missy is let down by the hotel arrangements arranged for her. And Missy and Arthur, whose strong characters we now know well, they do go there! Translated together to Rome and its many museums and galleries, such things that Arthur loves. And whoever heard of Christian names that are world countries? Don’t ask! And Missy SPOILER becomes the Artemis telegraphed by the translated Greek verse at the beginning, now with a quiver of silver arrows etc. etc. — not a Poppins umbrella.
D’ACCORD, BABY: Hanif Kureishi
“Determined to swallow the thickest pills of understanding, he would lie there muttering phrases he wanted to retain.”
That is what I have done all along with my crazy obsession of gestalt real-time book-reviewing, enjoying the hidden complexities of fiction, writing marginalia around the texts and scrying synchronicities and cross-references within each work and to other authors’ works, and my blurting out these findings to all of you, and pretending every work with which I am graced to read by preternatural serendipity is another Proust. Including this romcom of a man who gets his own back on a man who f’d his wife by f’ing that man’s daughter, and bashing her about a bit because we’re told she asked him to do so. So many depths in this work, so many of my pencil marks to help find them. D’accord, baby? A glimpse of truth.
My previous gestalt real-time reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/hanif-kureishi/
THE TANGLING POINT: Tim Parks
“I mean, if one has to choose between dog rapists and dog rescuers, one plumps for the rescuers. On the other hand we’d all be happier not to think about such disturbing things at all.”
This is an entangling, compelling story that deals with a man, by profession a ‘shrink’, a man in a failing but still affectionate childless marriage, and so the shrink wants his wife to spread her wings and she’s indeed working for a man in a promising job but the latter’s daughter is obsessed with rescuing dogs Europe wide and bringing them to the parents’ home, and her mother is in a wheelchair, and these parents invite the shrink along with his wife (the latter as employee of the dog-rescuer’s father) to the house to help sort out the daughter’s obsession with dogs and their dogshit, amidst her campaigns against sexuality with dogs but amidst her parents’ undercurrent of Catholic strictness against birth control, while their business sells condoms or birth pills, I think! Don’t go there!
But it all works and makes sense towards the story’s tangling point, its toying yank against yank of each character’s dog-lead, but the reader questions whose purposes are being served amidst these five characters — the inscrutable biting-point that teeters upon clinching the work’s gestalt. In fact there are six characters, because a Doberman called Kenny should not be forgotten as arch catalyst in creating the biting point…
THE COLD OUTSIDE: John Burnside
“To be honest, I like hauling treacle more than anything else.”
I turned the pages of this work easily, page-turningly, but it also felt like hauling treacle. The empathisable story of a man, still young enough, after 30 years marriage to Sall with a daughter across the other side of the globe in Montreal, all of them, past and future, with their own stolen silences by small talk, a man young enough, yes, to be working at a paid job with what he called molasses, but also old enough to be dying of cancer, and just recently told how soon. He picks up, after a treacle trip, a hitchhiker in the almost-snow of sleet amidst Scottish distances, a 18ish year old boy in the dress of drag after a party that he didn’t seem to have enjoyed, with mysterious bruises, and a gash. The driver and the passenger, too, survived each other with silences stolen by small talk. Yet it was good we were there to infer what was going on in their respective worlds, but did each of us infer the same things? After all, we are all dying alone in our own ways and speeds. Only the demarcated distances on childhood’s maps have the safety of forever. And, now, maybe even they can be unsafe — because not only are frontiers, as ever, liable to change, but also so is the intrinsic globe itself upon which such frontiers sit? And now, because of his condition, too late to travel far enough to visit his daughter…
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/best-british-short-stories-2011/#comment-11854
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SUMMER OF ’38: Colm Tóibín
“He talked to her about the dam, explaining its strategic importance and how old some of the systems were, which meant that only someone experienced could deal with the levers, someone who knew that a few of them would not respond if pulled too fast, and also that if one of them was pulled halfway it would have the same effect as pulling it the whole way.”
…Paco, a neuro-diverse man and his dam routines! This passage seems to encapsulate allthe forces working in this perhaps ever-resonating story, till it bursts into its own gush of gestalt? 1938, Spanish Civil War, a woman’s dalliance with one of Franco’s soldiers, by whom she fell pregnant and thus she induced her marriage to Paco, to obviate the shame of it, and the politics? Her now ancient photos show her first daughter, a child who was not Paco’s, but her erstwhile lover’s, one photo revealing the latter in a later grandson! Fifty years later, the woman now a widow, and the erstwhile lover, now an old man, returns to the area of the dam, and she is told by an intermediary that he wishes to meet her. She diverts this meeting of daughter and father, precariously, on the same day, with ever-diverging trains. Ever-divergence of all her photos, too.
“She tolerated him [Paco], and then grew fond of him. Slowly, too, as she realized that her parents and her sisters were still laughing at him, she saw less of them. She began to feel a loyalty toward Paco, a loyalty that lasted for all the years of their marriage.”
TWO BOYS: Lorrie Moore
“…she dressed all in white: white blouses, white skirts, white anklets, shoes flat and white as boat sails.”
A woman protagonist called Mary with ‘two boys’, thus a love life juggled. One boy a politician, for whom she stuck up posters with emotional staples, the other boy, well, Imgot confused but no matter, one of them has two boys himself as sons, I gather. An algebra of relations leading to her concocting another boy as a shadowy third…
“Sometimes in her mind she concocted a third one, Boy Number Three. He was composed of the best features of each. He was composed of the best features of each. It was Boy Number Three, she realized, she desired. Alone, Number One was rich and mean. Number Two was sighing, repetitive, tall, going on forever; you just wanted him to sit down. It was inevitable that she splice and add. One plus two.”
A meat factory next door to the house (a house white, too, with any brown furniture now on the street outside), where she lives, a meat nightmare for vegetarians just like Walter de la Mare’s PIG story Verny recently reviewed, leading to a ‘phallic harangue of sausages’ that a 11 year of girl (who spits at our whitened heroine Mary who herself tried escaping to Canada), yes, the 11 year old equating these sausages to all their boy friends! — but is she really 11 years old, or a Midget woman called M(ary) (with bones working in her back and her fruit of worry in her belly) unequally equivalent to the Midget woman in Walter de La Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget (currently being reviewed)? The ‘squeegee kids’ are matching WDLM’s ‘squeeching’ pigs, but any concomitant ‘Boombox Monteverdi’, notwithstanding.
BONER MCPHARLIN’S MOLL: Tim Winton
“In his Levi’s and thongs he had that truckin stride, like a skater’s wade, swaying hip to hip with his elbows flung and his chest out.”
This is a story that somehow encompasses the most believable portrait of a person encompassing the most believable portrait of a woman narrator portraying him from their age 13 onward, contemporaries at school, with her even filling in some of his words in such a striking manner when his taciturn nature became verbose just one time, filling them in because what he otherwise said was beyond her to understand!
These two characters really LIVE off this novelette’s pages. No way I can do justice to it all. The sadnesses, poignancies, roughness, the unreal pornographic collage upon paper, the down to earth meat chainsaws implied by the previous story above. The parents of both these two people, they LIVE, too, off the pages. Everything LIVES. But specially the eponymous HIM, who boned meats and had a boner the narrator arguably visualised and never experienced, even though I infer they were in sporadic LOVE.
To nail this work in a short review would be like harpooning a shark. Arguably, the strongest story as a STORY in this whole book so far. Full of many Glimpses of Truth. Earning every single necessary permit to build fiction characters as realities just like or unlike her father’s “building code was a branch of Calvinism perfected by the omission of divine mercy.” Just like she said she owned the rumours about herself. Fictions as truth. Or vice versa?
Another George Saunders review – Sticks: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/1372-2/#comment-1703
THE WAVEMAKER FALTERS: George Saunders
A story that does not deserve to exist let alone be iconised here. But it feels as it does more than any other story can do. A story of guilt and madness, a man who stares at girls when he should be making sure the wavemaker he tends is safe. It kills someone’s son, through his lack of diligence, and there is a definite feel of a story that lives through its nonsense and becomes as big as truth, a nun who comes, and his wife who doesn’t. The boy he kills becomes a walking zombie. Not an undead as such but someone who sort of settles in with…
and
Without each other none of these stories would exist. Signed, Gestaltmaker.
….seems appropriately to segue Joe Lycett-wise with the next day’s review below…
A REAL DOLL: A.M. Homes
“…I popped Barbie’s head into my mouth, like lion and tamer, God and Godzilla.”
This is disgusting, horrible, doing things to his sister’s Barbie doll, and the doll reacting. And likewise with the playmate doll Ken. It is beyond a joke or any pretension towards art. Not even subtly didactic about blatant gender issues. How can this possibly be a cult work? It is real. It is iconically awful. Full of gnawing of toes and desecration of toys. However well it’s written, it is the lowest literature can reach, and I am not being ironic. Soft porn only because there are no bones involved, except the human character’s own boner? There are merely erotic plastic bumps. It is worse than you could possibly imagine. The dolls actually reciprocate, well, the way Barbie does, if not Ken. And thank Heaven to Godzilla for having ensured preternaturally that — purely by chance — I am currently in the middle of Walter de la Mare’s Midget HERE. Memoirs of a girl as small as Barbie. My latest real-time review episode of it was only about an hour ago. Seriously. Check it out.
“I wondered if black Ken was really white Ken sprayed over with a thick coating of ironed raisin plastic.”
THE TOYMAKER AND HIS WIFE: Joanne Harris
The story that reaches its reading optimum after you have reMadE each word one by one. The defiant beauty of a reversed gestalt. That glimpse of truth.
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/01/05/dead-letters/#comment-8900
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MARCHING SONGS (2012): Keith Ridgway
“When nothing is happening we want something to happen, and when something is happening we want it to stop. There is always something happening on the Internet.”
Has Tony Blair read this story? If not, he should. It is about him, by explicit name. In its own famous person implicating way, this is an even more shocking story than the earlier most shocking stories above. The narrative by a man beset by illness in a community he describes so vividly, beset with self-unworth, paranoia, apophenia, and a conspiracy theory syndrome the major one of which being that Blair once surreptitiously pricked him with a hidden device to create all these symptoms when they shook hands at an official event and made small talk about Formula One racing. Towards today’s scrambled egg small talk in a cafe. And studying Grand Prix crashes that are all now housed in real or slow motion detail on the Internet. Particularly one with the crashed driver singing a death song before he died.
I spent much of my early life in the town of Purley. This is a story with its own ‘occult agenda’ engendering bespoke such agenda in each reader, as it has done for me. I empathise with this man and what light he throws on the inevitable repercussions in today’s world “…perverted by malign and morally vacant politicians who are not even clever enough to be operating to anyone’s advantage, not even their own, who are merely drunk on narrative and who see themselves as part of something bigger, such as the delusion of History, and who are impressive only in the scope and depth and profundity of their stupidity.”
The rattling doors and shutters in the middle of the night, the fact that “the world was separate from the things in it”, amidst the lessons to be learnt from man’s investigated cruelties or misadministrations or sheer madnesses, and alongside the death that one may as well accept readily. Each of our post-crash songs eventually marching as one…
“…no more than a blur between his house and his car;”
MIXED BREEDING: Nicola Barker
“Lenny felt like he was driving through treacle. Everything seemed so slow and so sticky.”
The next one, in chronological line, of the 100 world’s finest stories is indeed finely, traditionally prose-written, but bulging out through dog hair and cat fur, with more than just hints of bestiality and oedipal yearnings; this book’s stories, in general trend, seem to be getting more and more outlandish as if the flow of history itself follows that of literature, not vice versa, here involving orgasm just by breathing, and a woman called Cass who does not love cats but neutered dogs, on the way to Noisy Reading. And the taciturn taxi driver whose dog Pike Cass seems to yearn for is at last talkative! I prefer Silent Reading…it helps the absorption process, each word an intake of breath. “Woof!”: a single sentence in this Barker.
BEAUTY’S SISTER: James Bradley
“This is what stories do, after all: go out into the world, become real. We think we tell them, but more often they tell us, make us theirs. So much so, I sometimes think, that the truth lies less in what actually happened than in the ways we tell ourselves about what happened, the things we need to hold on to.”
This is not one of my favourite stories in this book which itself is one of my favourite books. Narrated in amenable plainness by Juniper the younger sister of Rapunzel, couching it as her (Juniper’s) life story from age 4 till the day she tells us about it all at the end. We learn of her once pregnant mother’s craving for rapunzel and Jinka’s Sapphic love for Rapunzel, Jinka who also called herself Rapunzel’s mother, and Juniper’s love for a man called Will but did he love Rapunzel more? And whose daughter is whose at the end? Who the witch? I can still recall enjoying the early parts when we hear the story of Juniper with her parents in the forest. But worth reading just for the above quoted passage which makes this review the biggest plot spoiler in history. Or does it? Is it a retelling of the original fairy story? Or a theme and variations upon it? One of the 100 finest stories ever written? Or an indifferent plodding one with a single glimpse of truth worth a million others?
NOTHING VISIBLE: Siddhartha Deb
“Those books can tell you nothing of how things really are, just as sitting in the office won’t help you understand how the colliery operates. The truth hides underground here, invisible unless you look for it.”
A callow accountant is sent the Gajatiland mine to look at its books, and he creates fiction from them to hide his own inexperience — his fiction accounting for this narration, or vice versa! Full of post-British colonial politics, believable management characters and low-key acceptance of bent rules, false lists of those working there, belief in spirits down there, and then an accident by rain and overflowing river. Fiction as truth, indeed. Surrounding or underpinned by an old man called ‘Ammonia’ or Mauniya whom our accountant narrator created as the missing link?
“The head office had sent me to create order, to work out a system for the business carried on here, but every attempt I made so far had ended in failure. Numbers and figures tell you a story, even if in a specialised, symbolic language, but in Gajalitand they only revealed a blankness, as if every transaction carried out had resulted in a void.”
“An engineer knows that there is a gap between numbers and reality. Between theory and practice. A gap in which the unexpected can occur.”
“The unexpected? Like what?”
“You’ll see when we go down,” he said, not very comfortingly.
“All I could see was the rain pouring over the chimneys and pipes of the main pit and changing colour as it hit the ground, as if the rain too was being processed by the Gajalitand machinery into some kind of viscous, potent fuel.”
“And how do you explain Mauniya? He wasn’t a fiction created by us.”
A reviewer, too, who created from this tantalising fiction, fictions of his own.
THE DEEP: Anthony Doerr
“Every day, all day, the salt finds its way in. It encrusts washbasins, settles on the rims of baseboards. It spills out of the boarders, too: from ears, boots, handkerchiefs. Furrows of glitter gather in the bedsheets: a daily lesson in insidiousness.”
Somehow, the ultimate answer to Ligottian Anti-Natalism, in a world as represented by some past aspects of the Detroit area, its salt mining to match the mining in the previous story above, its eventual decline as an industry and thus in its people. Their resurrection as a stoical belief in Zeno’s Paradox. Watch my gestalt reviews for this half and half eternity in the past few years! Ironically, as great as Thomas Ligotti’s tentacular and emotionally evocative prose, a Gothic-Baroqueness with decaying corporate factories here margined by salt and sea-deep life (in Ligotti margined, inter alia, by soft black stars, puppet children and monsters) here by dour and undour Doerr made modern and unhoaxed. A style that is imbued in this salt, in the ocean with dreams of humans as double-life amphibians, a plot centring around Tom born sickly and over-protected by his mother (“Sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky.”) — and Tom’s relationship with a Mr Weems (“How’s Mr. Weems? Oh, he’s made of salt, he’ll live forever.”) and slow-romantically relating with a girl, feisty Ruby, eager to ask a supposed frail undependable arm like Tom’s arm to pump her air down to her when she is diving in the deep. Are Tartarean oceans salty, too?
Tom, whom will he outlast against all the odds of potential life? What is the outcome?
The story reveals.
A story being like and unlike another one that gives potential healing from nightmare, another story by Sarah Walker as synchronously real-time reviewed yesterday here. That Zeno’s Paradox stoicism thus couched as a fiction-truth at last.
“World goes to hades but babies still get born,… […] And yet is there not goodness, too? Are people not helping one another in these derelict places?”
And from above to…
THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“…smelling the baby fish in the lake.”
From one figurative Detroit above to another. The Deep revealed. The relative shallowness of America in an era when there was still a bald president on the stamp? Ike?
A ‘western world’ even more shallow today!
A young Nigerian woman wins some sort of lottery to go work in America and to send money, that she earns, home to her parents. Here she is couched as YOU.
“You wanted to write that rich Americans were thin and poor Americans were fat and that many did not have a big house and car; you still were not sure about the guns, though, because they might have them inside their pockets.”
The uncle, already in America, who had arranged the lottery tries it on with you, so you escape, find a menial job with a chap called Juan. And you also meet a white man from Africa, an academic who knows about your heritage, with whom slow-romantically you get to know. The optics of a white and a black as an item. But what is that around your neck! If not your past. “You looked at him in the bright light and noticed that his eyes were the color of extra-virgin olive oil, a greenish gold. Extra-virgin olive oil was the only thing, you loved, truly loved, in America.”
Memories of your father and his past car crash life leads to news by letter he is now dead…
“Perhaps your father died on the day your whole body had been covered in goosebumps, hard as uncooked rice, that you could not explain,…”
…this story as gift is what it is for its own sake: “A fist-size glass ball that you shook to watch a tiny shapely doll in pink spin around.”
… like that glimpse of truth as a whole from this now completed book. But all that glitters is not gestalt. So, with a hopeful nod towards Zeno’s Paradox, you hug this book “for a long, long moment”: and you will soon return whence you came — but the book is now inevitably part of you whether your memory is capable of returning to it or not.
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