Writing my A Personal Anthology I did actually scour GRANTA to see what was in there at the moment, which I probs don’t pay enough religious attention to normally. A short story I came upon of special interest was ‘He Cleans’ by Valeria Gordeev translated by Imogen Taylor. Yes, it is an extract from a future novel, but as ‘He Cleans’ has won awards in its own right I thought hey it’s okay to include here? ‘He Cleans’ is about a man who cleans obsessively. Once upon a time I developed terrible Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, suffering warped notions re how to secure sanity part-manifesting as an isolating drive to control bacterial surroundings. Thank GOD this is no longer so it’s such a distressing neurosis I admire those who write about it (swear there was a Shakespeare & Co. podcast with poet on OCD but can’t find it here’s something else!). ‘He Cleans’ begins with the two-word sentence “He cleans”, and continues “Cleans the sink, cleans the plughole, takes out the sink strainer and cleans the underside”. This minutiae activity description extends for some duration. It’s about prevention of harm, seeking safety amid problematic chaos that becomes perceptually multiplied (“the place is crawling with spiders and grease and dust”), which can be difficult to emphathise and be patient with ~ a reaction, for example, is “you exaggerate, she says, ты преувеличиваешь”. There’s talk of cleaning ears ~ the man doesn’t like earbuds which he thinks look like swastikas: “Nazis out!”. The prose’s suitably monotonous, with few paragraph breaks and a claustrophobic ambience. Can a whole novel go on this relentlessly? Intrigued.
First published at GRANTAonline here in 2023, included in forthcoming novel with S. Fischer, 2025
A Personal Anthology 