Tove Jansson’s much-loved Moomins hibernate all winter but the characters in A Winter Book, a collection of the Finnish polymath’s selected stories, are very much awake. None more so than the narrator of ‘The Iceberg’, a little girl whose family has just moved to the country, who creeps out of their house in the dark of the night to spy on her iceberg, with its oval-shaped, girl-sized grotto on one side. The iceberg had floated into the bay, all green and white and sparkling, and very early for the time of year. In just four pages, Jansson weaves a magical, miniature tale of adventure and hope and the harsh realities of life. Somehow, especially now, I feel we are all that little girl, standing on the edge of the shore, berating herself for not being brave enough to jump aboard and sail away on a floating island.
First published in Bildhuggarens dotter (Sculptor’s Daughter), 1968. Republished in The Winter Book, Sort of Books, 2006
Chosen by Susie Mesure. Susie is a freelance journalist. She specialises in not specialising in anything at all. That, and reading quite a lot considering she should probably be doing something else. She interviews authors and writes features and columns for newspapers including the i paper, the FT, and most of the others. One day she might write a book.
“A sad tale’s best for winter” decides Mamillius, the ill-fated child in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
To which I would add, a ghost story’s best for Christmas.
The wartime stories of Elizabeth Bowen have a schizophrenic element to them; on the one hand, they are about the psychological betrayals and breakages that are part of war’s unforgiving sweep, on the other, the literal annihilation of cities, streets, people. They are dystopian in that the present and past seem to exist simultaneously, often as a simulacrum of the other. The year 2020 has seen much comparison with war, and with World War Two in particular – it has been suggested that the population invokes a “Blitz spirit” without ever really understanding the horrors of the actual Blitz itself.
Elizabeth Bowen lived through the war, and the Blitz, and carried out classified and still mysterious war work. Her own home in London was mostly destroyed in a bomb blast. The supernatural stories she wrote at this time often focus on everyday objects which are strangely askew in a world out of kilter. Frequently she uses the natural world as a symbol of menace. In ‘Green Holly’ a trio of intelligence workers – a woman and two men, both of whom the woman has previously been involved with – are awkwardly billeted together with other colleagues in a requisitioned house, once a grand mansion, over Christmas. The three seem to have dropped out of normal existence : “on the whole they had dropped out of human memory. Their reappearances in their former circles were infrequent, ghostly and unsuccessful; their friends could hardly disguise their pity, and for their own part they had not a word to say.”
Bickering and just a touch self-pitying, it is no surprise that they become prey to the attentions of the house’s resident ghost, a young, coquettish and adulterous lady dressed up for a festive ball which had taken place a couple of centuries before, and which had ended in disaster. “The tiles of the hall floor were as pretty as ever, as cold as ever, and bore, as always on Christmas Eve, the trickling pattern of dark blood.” The ghost is bored, as she had been in life, and latches on to the nearest available man to amuse her – no matter that he is alive, and she is not. The story is funny, in a cruel sort of way, vivid with spiky dialogue and the insistent undertow of disappointment and denial – both of the ghost and the three who must resist any contemporary re-enactment of that long ago, fatal Christmas Eve.
First published in The Listener, November 1941. Available in the Collected Stories, Vintage, 1999
Chosen byCatherine Taylor. Catherine is a critic, editor and writer. A former publisher and deputy director of English PEN, she has been a judge on prizes including the Guardian First Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate and Republic of Consciousness. She is part of the team behind the Brixton Review of Books. She is writing a non-fiction book, The Stirrings, (potential subtitle: The Sobranie Years) about the dark side of South Yorkshire in the 1970s and 80s. If there was a light side, she’d love to hear about it. Read Catherine’s full Personal Anthology and other seasonal contributions here.
Not a Christmas story, and it starts in spring, but it ends in winter, as retired City financier ‘Buzz’ (we never find out his real name) finds himself the victim of a strange old apple tree in his garden orchard, that seems to have taken on the vindictive personality of his dead wife, the equally long-suffering and insufferable Midge. It’s a fine predictable ghost story of sorts, and prickly and sad about a painfully stuck marriage, but it’s the later pages, with deep snowfall and freezing temperatures, that make this a perfect curl-up-by-the-fire winter’s story – if they didn’t show up quite how historical such things are. I remember whited-out fields and knee-deep drifts in the southern England of my childhood, but my own children only really know snow as something far less bountiful, rarely producing more than a few scraped-together snowballs. They’ve tobogganed, yes, but they’ve had to pick where to steer so as not to go straight through the snow to grass. So yes, a sad story is best for winter, but the saddest story of all is the story of how winter has changed in this country, in a single lifetime.
First collected in The Apple Tree, Gollancz, 1952, which collection is now available as a Virago Modern Classic, retitled The Birds and Other Stories
Chosen by Jonathan Gibbs. Jonathan is the author of two novels, Randall and The Large Door, and a book-length poem written under lockdown in 2020 – and modelled on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal – called Spring Journal (CB Editions). He teaches Creative Writing at City, University of London, and curates the A Personal Anthology project. You can read his full Personal Anthology and other seasonal contributions here..
Balzac didn’t really write a Christmas story when he wrote his ‘Jesus Christ in Flanders’… but it stood in for one, once, most of a hundred years ago, when the tale itself was almost a hundred years old, for a couple hundred people on the Christmas card list of Bessie and Allen Lewis, Mary and George Grady, and Lydia and Warren Chappell.
In 1928, Allen Lewis—an interesting artist associated with Stieglitz—made a woodcut of Balzac’s ship of storm-tossed sinners, and the three couples had the book privately printed. This wasn’t unheard of—if you watch for them, small private commemorative editions turn up. My wife has a copy of a Thomas Mann essay, ‘Sleep, Sweet Sleep’ printed for the friends of George Fleetwood Bromley in Christmas 1934. That isn’t a Christmas story, either.
Balzac’s story is simple: a group of pre-modern folks are taking the ferry back from the island of Cadzant to Ostend late in the day. The skies and sea are not propitious. They are a classic cross-section: a bishop, a soldier, a fine lady and her mother, a merchant, an old woman, a young mother, a feckless gallant, a sharp-eyed ship’s pilot who’s almost just a match for the storm that will engulf them all…as well as a stranger who boards at the last minute and disguised, but is, of course, Christ himself. The hijinks of sinners at judgment ensue…and are curiously moving, as such stories often are, whether or not we hold with the terms or cosmology of the judgments.
It’s curious to realize that the story reads more like a Christmas tale today and in 1928 than it could’ve in 1831, as Dickens hadn’t yet rewired the Christmas tale to be a tale of worth and judgment. But that must’ve been in the minds of some or all of the members of the three couples who chose this story.
Moreover, although Balzac is temperamentally unsuited to writing about humility, he tries hard. He’s tripped up by the fact that he’s claiming for his tale a notable distinction: this is the story of the last manifestation of Christ on earth down to the present day. Why here? Why then? Why not there? Why not then? The answer is the same in any case: because Balzac.
This is not the Balzac you hear about via discussions of Benjamin and modernity, not the Balzac who is the jewel-in-the-crown of our idea of 19th century Paris, but instead the Balzac who was once as popular (in many editions) for his faux 16th century confections, his Droll Stories. We seem to have very little taste for them now. But to put them on like period clothes is to be shaped a little by them: I think of Maggie Cheung speaking about the cheongsams she wore in her incredible turn in In the Mood for Love, the way the dresses held her as part of the performance. That’s a bit of what I mean.
But wait…now my story of a story has a twist I didn’t foresee: I’ve trusted those three couples: the Lewises, the Gradys, and the Chappells to present the tale in full. They did not. Balzac wrote a tale that breaks neatly in half and they privately printed the first half, the last appearance of Christ on Earth, walking on water, rescuing the worthy and leaving footprints on a beach (footprints that were relics until, as Balzac has it, the French Revolution spilled across the border to Ostend and effaced them as just another piece of popery.)
I’ve just this minute discovered that in the full text, Balzac went on. He went into a second half of the story to have a narrator awaken in the in the light of the July Revolution of 1830. I have to stop typing this to read how the story I thought I knew… actually ends.
[Time passes. The snow outside the window remains blinding white, even in the absence of a visible sun. Our Christmas tree stands at attention. My coffee grows cold and then runs out entirely whilst I read, read a Balzac story on the screen of my phone in the strange December of 2020.]
In the second, broken-off half, the depressed narrator—depressed in the wake of the belated final fall of the Bourbon monarchy in the July Revolution of 1830—arrives at the church near Ostend, goes inside, treats us to an ekphrastic riff on church architecture and falls asleep. He dreams of an old woman who becomes a young woman: she leads him to a room in the church and delivers a stern message about the church. He responds strangely, and in kind. Then he’s back in the church, an old docent is locking up and kicks him out into the new world. He vows to defend the church in the world the Revolution, his revolution—whether he realizes it or not—has wrought.
In some ways, we have drifted into even greater shades of A Christmas Carol. Although I see no real threat from this bit of Balzac to that perpetual franchise.
Just the same: Merry Christmas!
First published – as ‘Jésus-Christ en Flandre’ – 1831
Chosen by Drew Johnson. Drew’s stories have appeared in Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Cupboard, Gulf Coast, New England Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere.
I’m going to keep my descriptions short, in the hope that you’ll all just go out and read some of these instead of listening to me waffle on. I’ve tried my hardest to pick things available to read online.
Note: Japanese names are given in their Japanese order as in SURNAME First name (e.g. MURAKAMI Haruki)
A twisted tattooist finds the perfect human canvas on which to tattoo a spider. The joke’s on him, of course…
First published in Japanese 1910. Collected in Modern Japanese Short Stories, Tuttle 2019. Read a different translation by Howard Hibbett under the title ‘The Tattooer’ available for PDF download here, or as ‘The Victim’ in the Paris Review here
Murakami Ryū is so compelling. This has an amazing premise, too – a writer gets a call from a hostess club where someone has been impersonating him, running up a massive drinks tab, and having an affair with one of the hostesses at the club.
First published in Japanese in the collection Run, Takahashi! in 1986.. Collected in Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories, Kurodahan Press 2016. I cannot find a version of this online, but apparently it’s available to subscribers of The New Yorker through online archives… I think…
It was literally impossible to pick one short story from Murakami Haruki. I thought about picking just 12 from him alone. Thinking about it, I should’ve picked ‘Silence’. But I didn’t. Whoops.
First published in Japanese 1986. Included in The Elephant Vanishes, Vintage 2003. Available to read online here
You might know her from Convenience Store Woman, but this was my first exposure to Murata Sayaka. An asexual man and woman get together with the understanding that there will be no sex in this marriage, thank you very much.
First published as part of the collection Satsujin shussan, Kodansha 2014. First published in English in Granta 127: Japan in 2014, and available to read online here
I love Matsuda Aoko’s writing. I wanted to choose The Girl Who Is Getting Married (part of the Keshiki series of chapbooks from Strangers Press), but I thought I’d pick something people can read online instead.
First published in Japanese in 2018. Included in Where the Wild Ladies Are, Tilted Axis 2020. Available to read online here
I read this story years and years ago when I first lived in Japan. I haven’t re-read it since, but I remember it blew my socks off. A guy finds a piece of magic chalk and draws a door to another universe on his apartment wall. A bit like that cartoon Penny Crayon.
First published in Japanese 1950. Collected in The Shōwa Anthology: Modern Japanese Short Stories, Kodansha 1992. Available to read online here
Hoshi Shin’ichi is awesome. I feel like he deserves to be translated into English more than he currently is. He writes these great Sci-Fi short, short stories. This one is a sort of morality tale about the environment (and an increasingly relevant one).
A Personal Anthology 