I like this story because it dramatises the lives that we live in the 21st century while we do our isolated tasks and look at our screens, telling a story where there is plot and tension aplenty but perhaps not in an obvious sense. The story centres on a sound artist creating an installation for a Michelangelo exhibition. It’s written in a fragmented, tangential form that through the obsessively detailed repetition of almost comically specific actions begins to reveal a story behind the narrator, who is creating imaginary worlds in solitude. The tension is created by repetition, wordplay, sound, sensation, and an incredible focus on minutiae that ends up revealing a lot about the narrator. When I first read this collection I remember thinking that it expressed how it felt to be conscious in the opening decades of the 21st century. I have heard people describe this book as ‘experimental’, but I don’t really like that word, it implies a kind of failure, or a temporary, perhaps unconfident stylistic digression. Eley Williams work is not like that at all, so how to describe this book? Inventive, bold, adventurous, playful, it creates psychological landscapes of a spirit that are unique to Eley Williams.
Collected in Attrib. and Other Stories, Influx Press, 2017
A Personal Anthology 