‘The Marquise of O… ’ by Heinrich von Kleist, trans. David Constantine

Kleist is surely due to be (re)discovered. His stories, this one especially, frequently explore the callous violence that men perpetrate against women. Scholars argue about whether the Marquise in Kleist’s story is raped while unconscious; Kleist deals with the matter ambiguously with an infamous dash, which Susan Winnett called “most delicately accomplished rape in our literature”. With its scenes of elided rape and possible incest, it is a troubling story that deserves careful reading and will continue to provoke heated debate amongst its readers.

Included in Selected Writings, J. M. Dent, 1997, and widely collected.

‘The Glass Essay’ by Anne Carson

I have an ambivalent relationship with Anne Carson’s writing, finding much of it uneven (there is quite a lot of it), but the best, which is this hybrid work, is assured and disturbing. Carson uses free verse to explore the inner weather of a woman recovering from the ending of a serious relationship. She visits her mother accompanied by the books and spirit of her favourite author, Emily Brontë. Reflections on Brontë are interwoven with elucidation of the narrator’s mental state and evocations of the “moor in the north”. The melancholy of the monologue is relieved by Carson’s trademark wit.

From Glass, Irony, and God, New Directions, 1995. It is also online here

‘In Praise of Shadows’ by Junichiro Tanizaki, trans. Gregory Starr

Admittedly, including Tanizaki’s nostalgic essay stretches beyond breaking point any definition of a short story, but the line between memoir and fiction is no longer viable. We don’t need these distinctions in literature, which is ultimately just different ways of exposing the ‘I’. Tanizaki argues that the East is yielding to the West’s obsession with illumination, that we should learn to understand and appreciate shadows rather than seeking their destruction. He equates shadow with mystery and the feminine, and the quest to eradicate shadows with masculine domination. What Tanizaki’s essay shares with the best of fictional narrative is to offer access of a kind to the reality of time.

First published in Japanese in 1933. First English publication, 1977. In Praise of Shadows, Sora Books, 2017

‘Morning, 1908’ by Claire-Louise Bennett

The title refers to an image by photographer Clarence H. White, in which a solitary woman walks through a misty landscape carrying a glass globe. There is a kind of constraint, evocative of the repression which haunts all Bennett’s interlinked stories. It is an exquisite story, tense and banal in equal measure. This book holds a record for me, for the amount of times I abandoned it part-read, only to be haunted by its voice, to return to it and abandon it time and time again. It still has the force to irritate me, yet has become a book I return to almost monthly. The notion of self as alienating and enigmatic rather than familiar is ever-present. It calls into question recognition and perception.

Included in Pond, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015

‘Like a Burning House’ by László Krasznahorkai, trans. George Szirtes

I must declare my disinterest in Krasznahorkai’s unbearably gravid prose, the questions he addresses are of little interest to me. That said, in both The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War, he has written opening chapters that I’ve been unable to forget. Every morning on my way to work, I must cross a railway footbridge. I never do so without recalling the unbearably tense atmosphere that Krasznahorkai described as a ‘single moment of fright’, those moments that arrive and depart for no explicable reason, but leave a scar that never fades.

From War and War, Tuskar Rock Press, 2016. It is available online here

‘Susan Sontag’ by Kate Zambreno

No aspect of Zambreno’s prose is more uniquely singular than its narrative voice. Her voice fills every page. Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/The world would split open.” The truth that Zambreno seeks to represent is not authorial but personal. There is something of Dorothy Richardson in Zambreno’s writing, that sensation that this is the closest it is possible to get to another’s mind.

From Two Stories at bombmagazine.org, 2016, available here

‘Lisboa’ by John Berger

Sometimes described as a novel, Here Is Where We Meet is a collection of stories, with no distinction between the autobiographical and the fiction. Towards the end of the book, Berger writes, ‘The number of lives that enter our own are incalculable.” In the collection, Berger takes stock of the incalculable; the first story is Lisboa, in which he has a lengthy, digressive conversation with his long-dead mother who reappears on a park bench. Berger is such a tender writer with, like Zambreno, an instantly recognisable and unique voice.

From Here Is Where We Meet, Bloomsbury, 2014

‘Hygiene’ by Julian Barnes

It is curious what remains after we close the pages of a book. Julian Barnes is one of those writers I once liked and grew away from as I discovered writers that spoke more directly to me. Though I am sure I couldn’t bear to reread Hygiene, it has stayed with me, an odd and discomfiting story about an old retired major that comes to London once a year for a regimental dinner and to visit a retired prostitute. I no longer have the book, but looked it up the other day while in a bookshop and was shocked by the paucity of the story. I think the story stays with me because it evokes my father’s depression and insecurity, though he would never have hidden behind the fruity military language.

From The Lemon Table, Cape, 2004

Opening and Closing

Somewhere in his lengthy memoir, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about the experience of reading German poetry. He describes how some poems ‘open up’ to him immediately while others remain ‘closed’, even those works by Great Poets he is expected to appreciate. I think short stories are like that too. Some unfold on first reading while others seem distant, unreachable. This often depends on when you read the story. I remember being given William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’ in my first year at university and having absolutely no idea what to do with it. I thought it had been set just to baffle me and remind me of how much I didn’t know – which was, admittedly, a lot. The best reading experiences I’ve had are when a work delicately reflects or comments on an aspect of my own life at that time, causing me to think differently about the world, or myself in the world. I find I carry these ‘opened’ stories around with me after that, and I go back to them, again and again.

Here are some of those stories:

‘Funes the Memorious’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby

I read this on my teenage bed, whiling away the hours between a school day and another school day, and being amazed at the upside-down universe Borges creates in just a few short paragraphs. It completely changed the way I thought about ‘literature’ (i.e. realist, difficult, old). Suddenly, I realised that ‘literature’ could be a way of defying ordinary life. Borges showed me that it was possible to experiment, to write anything I wanted, to any word-limit. Whenever I need to memorise anything, I think of Funes, struggling with the terrible gift of being able to remember everything that ever happened.

First published in La Nación, June 1942. First published in English in Avon Modern Writing 2, 1954. Collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1964/Penguin, 1970 and in Fictions and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998/Penguin, 2000, where it is translated by Andrew Hurley as ‘Funes, His Memory’

‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’ by Evelyn Waugh

Oh dear. The Waugh phase. I read everything by him – Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies,etc. Waugh is really very good for fifteen-year-old girls. I understood his world of dark glamour and sardonic humour (sarcasm was my thing), and I loved the way he quietly laughs at everyone and invites you to join him. This story shocked me with its horribly brutal, funny ending. I read it again recently, and although I didn’t find it quite as amazing as I did then, I still love the innocent description of the girl on the bike and Mr Loveday’s naïve yet secretive smile.

First published 1935. Collected in Mr Loveday’s Little Outing and Other Early Stories, Penguin Classics, 2011 and The Penguin Book of English Short Stories, Penguin, 1967

‘Sword’ by Yukio Mishima, translated by John Bester

Mishima was my hero for a while. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Confessions of a Mask. It was only when I moved to Japan for a couple of years that I discovered his short fiction. ‘Sword’ centres on a group of young men taking part in a training camp for Kendo (Japanese fencing). After my own unsuccessful attempts at Kendo, I admired the world Mishima portrays even more: one of self-discipline, togetherness, striving for spiritual and physical perfection through martial arts. Yet these ideals lead to a tragic conclusion, not unlike the narrative Mishima ended up following in his own life.

First published in Japanese as ‘Ken’ in 1963. First published in English in Acts of Worship, Kodansha, 1989, also available from Flamingo, 1991

‘Radio Baby’ by Deborah Kay Davies

This is one of best collections of short stories I’ve come across. (Despite the fact that the publisher tried to market it as a novel). At its heart is the dark sibling rivalry between the eponymous characters. There’s one story in the collection called ‘The Point’ where something horrifying happens with a thorn… I don’t want to reveal too much about ‘Radio Baby’ either, only that it concerns a woman bringing her third newborn home from the hospital a few days earlier than expected. Davies’ writing seems simple and concise, but at the same time it vibrates with violence and power.

From Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, Parthian, 2008

‘Butterflies’ by Ian McEwan

I obviously have a thing for macabre stories. Here’s another one. It’s from McEwan’s first published collection. The protagonist is one of those disturbed young men that often feature in his early work (see The Cement Garden): a character you’re constantly watching to see if he is as disturbed as you think he might be. I love the way the story is constructed, with information being revealed and withheld at the right moments, creating an unstable, eerie atmosphere. ‘Eeriness’ is exactly the kind of feeling that a story is able to evoke where a novel or a poem struggles.

From First Love, Last Rites, Jonathan Cape, 1975