“Three days before my daughter died she comes running into the kitchen, Mummy, Mummy, you have to listen to this piece of music.”
It’s hard to find words for this story because it explores the limits of language, its inability to convey the inexpressible. Narrated by a bereaved mother, ‘Inextinguishable’ orbits around a piece of classical music loved by her daughter. Through the music, her child lives on and the mother searches for the words to tell us how that feels.
“We weren’t a classical-music sort of family,” she says. “Her daddy’s tone-deaf, and as for me, I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it.” Despite this, the classical piece breeds a sense of communion.
The tone of ‘Inextinguishable’ is perfectly pitched, the mother’s voice colloquial and movingly authentic. Caldwell’s story rings true because it tries and fails to put words to grief. This is the true magic of art, in all its various forms, to give expression to things that are unspeakable.
In an interview, Caldwell said: “A short story has almost nothing to do with a novel: don’t be deceived by the fact that they’re both prose forms. A short story has much more in common with a poem or a play. For me, even more than either of those things, it is a spell: a series of rhythms, of images, to conjure a feeling, an emotion, an atmosphere…” Like many of Caldwell’s stories, ‘Inextinguishable’ has that spell-like quality, a story that envelops you with all of its power.
First commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio 3, February 2013. Collected in Multitudes, Faber, 2016
A Personal Anthology 