Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Morning, Noon & Night’ by Claire-Louise Bennett

How can I recommend just one banger in a book that is absolutely chock-full of bangers?

I bought Pond on the strength of this interview, in which Claire-Louise Bennett seems like quite an extraordinary kind of human being – absolutely singular and perverse, exactly the kind of human who should be rendering consciousnesses on behalf of the rest of us.

But then ‘Morning, Noon & Night’ is the second story in, and as I started reading it I got a little bit concerned that we might be venturing into the territory of the lyrical or even the picturesque, and I wasn’t having any of that – but, no fear! That’s not what this story is at all.

From Pond, Stinging Fly/Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015, Riverhead, 2016. Read it online here

‘Living on the Box’ by Penelope Gilliatt

I sometimes wish I had half the icy-smooth scathing of a mid-century woman writer. Here, Gilliatt turns it on the pomposity of nature poets, and she’s absolutely lacerating. I love the way she scarcely bothers to finish the story, just whips the whole diorama away as if to say: come on now, don’t be daft.

First published in The New Yorker in 1964. Collected in What’s It Like Out? Virago Modern Classics, 1990

‘Red Rubber Gloves’ by Christine Brooke-Rose

I think I read somewhere that Brooke-Rose disowned the novels she wrote prior to Out (1964) on account of not having ‘read Saussure yet’ – which sounds like her, doesn’t it? Anyway, I hope she didn’t disown the short stories too – especially this queasy bit of domestic horror in which nothing much and something awful happen at the same time. It’s a bit Rear Window, this, and a bit Alain Robbe-Grillet, too.

Ali Smith described Muriel Spark as ‘blithe’ recently, and I think the word also applies to Brooke-Rose (and to Gilliatt too, in fact). Absolutely no messing about with ‘rounded’ characters and warm human hearts here.

From Go When You See The Green Man Walking, Michael Joseph, 1970

‘Mysterious Kôr’ by Elizabeth Bowen

It starts like this and then it goes on:
Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon’s capital – shallow, cratered, extinct. It was late, but not yet midnight; now the buses had stopped the polished roads and streets in this region sent for minutes together a ghostly unbroken reflection up. The soaring new flats and the crouching old shops and houses looked equally brittle under the moon, which blazed in windows that looked its way.
First published in 1942. Collected in The Demon Lover, Jonathan Cape, 1945, and Collected Stories, Vintage Classics, 1999

‘Cicisbeo’ by M. John Harrison

I moved to London almost a year ago, not far from where this story is set as it happens, and for a few months I was flattened every day by this city’s sheer preposterousness, so I in a way I was primed for this very sad and very strange fabulation.

M. John Harrison is a proper treasure and the collection this is taken from is a proper gift. As with so much of what I admire the most, I have little of any use I want to say about it. This reviewof the collection by Patrick Langley does right by it, I think.

From You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts, Comma Press, 2017

‘Conversations With Famous Artists’ by Deborah Levy

Beware Ingrid Meinz Syndrome:
So there I was, feet marinating in a puddle, bicycle turning to rust and I said WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THE SUMMER, ARE YOU GOING TO GET SOME SUN? and she said, No I’ll be working at home, I have six deadlines for articles I’m writing and twelve books on my shelves I haven’t glanced at and a major deadline for a peer reviewed journal so I guess I’ll have to open a tin of soup and spend the summer on an uncomfortable chair at my desk with my head down. And I thought, you know Ingrid Meinz THIS IS REALLY NOT VERY SEXY.
 Levy returns to the territory of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and finds that women can still only have either writing or living but never both. I took a photograph of a page of this on my phone, and for a while I had it set as my screensaver for courage.
From Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places, Dalkey Archive Press, 2004

‘Ma Vie en Bling: A Memoir’ by Anne Boyer

Now I’m being quite cheeky really, since I know full well Anne Boyer is a poet, but this is… a sort of tract in lyric prose? Maybe? Can that be a short story too?

Writer bios are a pretty gruesome genre all of their own, but Anne Boyer’s is one of the best I’ve ever read – the most generous, the funniest, the most furious:

I have always wanted, and want now, a radical reordering of the world for the benefit of all who live in it, or as one of my favorite poets, Louise Michel, would say—everything for everyone.
 How many other author bios end like this? (Why don’t they all?)

Anyway, this story is about writing, in as much as when Boyer is talking about writing, she’s talking about everything else too. Including what she calls ‘not-writing’ – which is the opposite of writing, but also exactly the same thing.

Explaining it like this, I’m making it sound like one of those stories in which “writing” is a very special and very singular activity – but it’s the opposite. The rest of us are often squeamish about making visible the invisible scaffold (economic, cultural) that’s necessary for writing. We’re squeamish too about admitting that writing is at the same time for everyone and no more or less inherently valuable than any other sublimation. Boyer isn’t at all, and she’s marvellous.

From Garments Against Women, Ahsahta Press, 2015

Introduction

One of my flatmates at college was a timid philosophy student. I never heard her enter a room or walk down the corridor, and was convinced she floated around in ballet slippers, yet when I consulted her footwear, it comprised of the typical student menu of Doc Martens and Converse. Every few weeks, we’d have a party in the flat, invariably with a theme, and whilst she never expressed a wish to attend, she didn’t indicate a desire to forego it either. Although I guess it was hard not to attend a party that was taking place five metres away from your bedroom.

She always appeared at these gatherings, but I could never calculate how long she stayed, nor discern precisely when she had entered or exited the room. She left little trace; neither ate nor drank, but she observed intensely, and occasionally made an insightful remark. She removed one of the most trying characteristics from friendship: expectation. Whilst most of us spend our mid-twenties drunk on people-pleasing, she’d no desire to participate in it, nor to offer others a complete picture of how she carried herself in the world. We can often mistake this behaviour for evasiveness, hostility or even failure on our part. When another flatmate complained that she was difficult to get to know and asked me to describe her personality, I said that she was like a short story.

‘Forever Overhead’ by David Foster Wallace

When David Foster Wallace writes in the imperative, you stop and listen. You accept his personal as universal in the story ‘Forever Overhead’ because he’s gifted it to you in such an airtight condition, that you don’t feel a single draught when you read it. It’s spiked with the usual DFW arrangements, which are filtered through the punch of the present tense. While the focus is on a boy about to dive into a pool, it’s the process rather than the result that’s tested out here. It’s a disservice to pathologise every bit of text that DFW wrote, and to relate this piece directly to his mental health. The process of thinking and its consequences need not always be understood in a clinical context; it can be more interesting to reach for an alternative. Thinking is both a gift and a curse in ‘Forever Overhead’. One of the most impressive things in this story is how the narrator’s thoughts order and manipulate time. You can see that this was achieved through utter graft and witness the energy it must have taken to capture anticipation so accurately: “There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”

In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999. Can be read online here

‘The Thirtieth Year’ by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Michael Bullock

I read that our brains (see Robert Sapolsky’s Behave) don’t fully develop the capacity to tolerate strong divergences from our opinions until around the late-twenties. With this in mind, I recommend you wait until you’re over thirty to read this story. It has the similar effect on one’s morale as Philip Larkin’s poem ‘On Being Twenty-Six’ although Larkin’s ‘source-encrusting doubt’ has hardened to a mouldy loaf by Bachmann’s ‘The Thirtieth Year’. Like ‘Forever Overhead’, this story takes place almost entirely in the mind of the narrator, with some cameos from the outside world. The speaker surveys his life as he enters his thirtieth year, and begins to regard the previous years as probationary. Expectations are lamented upon, as is the wodge of irritations manufactured simply through the passage of time. The most objectionable of irritants is touched upon too, that of unsolicited advice. “The Thirtieth Year” reads like a throat-clearing, not without some significant coughs, but it stresses the comfort we might find in self-clarity.

Collected in The Thirtieth Year, 1987

‘Funes the Memorious’ by Jorge Luis Borges

We zoom out from the apertures of lens ‘13’ and ‘30’ and consider a lifetime. The life of Funes is recalled through the narrator’s memory in an insecure way, and the infrequency of their encounters is stressed (‘I never saw him more than three times.’). Frequency does not necessarily inform intensity. Some of the people I love most in my life I’ve have met no more than ten times face-to-face. Borges knew that you can see someone three hundred times in your mind. Perhaps the architecture of them that you’re building in your head is erroneous, and incomplete, but does that make it worthless? Funes is chronometrical and can tell the time without consulting a clock (a method later adapted and adopted by the character, Crocodile Dundee). It’s easy to feel shame when reading this story as it highlights human negligence and ignorance. It shows how complicit we are in the hierarchisation of life. Simone Weil described attention as the ‘purest and rarest form of generosity’ and the story of Funes extends the hand of kindness to memory and leaves us to contemplate its destructive and creative nature.

First published in La Nación in 1942. Collected in Fictions, various editions. Can be read online here

‘The Encyclopaedia of the Dead’ by Danilo Kiš

Strangely, I read Danilo Kiš before I ever read Borges. I have no defence. Kiš, like his literary hero, is a masterful archivist of experiences. The story opens with a reference to the Vasa warship, itself a repository of many lives and objects lived, and subsequently preserved. Kiš was a remarkable stylist and literary critic and deplored identity-literature as he felt it made the single story somehow acceptable to the reader. Kiš shows us that there’s more than one way to present and re-present a life; there’s a curriculum vitae or a biography, but there’s also the wine stain we leave on a carpet or the fact that we may clandestinely listen to Drake on repeat. And for a little while, we are the containers for these things. They are in us because wherever we go, we ‘bear our grief within ourselves’.

Collected in Encyclopaedia of the Dead, FSG, 1997, translated by Michael Henry Heim, republished by Penguin Modern Classics, 2015, translated by Mark Thompson. Can be read online here

‘The Kiss’ by Anton Chekhov

James Wood’s description of ‘The Kiss’ in his book The Nearest Thing to Life is pitch-perfect. It relates to his theory of ‘serious noticing’ and he writes of how hypervigilance can transform our relationship to time and experience. The story exists also as an instruction of how to tell a story. Ryabovich becomes obsessed with a woman who erroneously kissed him in the darkness. He did not see her, only sensed her. If someone made a film-short of ‘The Kiss’ now, I’d put my money on Richard Linklater for the role of director. Experience isn’t as faithful to time as we think. Certainly not after it’s been fed through our brain repeatedly. Ryabovich is masterful at synthesising the experience in his head, but not in his life, and this is a common theme in the stories that I admire. We can all relate to the comfort found in projected experiences rather than lived ones.

Read in Short Stories from the 19th Century, selected by David Stuart Davies, 2000 and widely collected. Can be read online here