‘The Necklace’ by Guy de Maupassant, translated by Joachim Neugroschel

It’s depressing how human behaviour doesn’t evolve. Well at least that’s what it feels like after reading the desolate short story, ‘The Necklace’. This plot has the flavour of a Kanye & Kim vignette (but not April 2018 moral philosopher Kanye). Not least because it involves jewellery in Paris. Whilst I did not grow up poor, I grew up in a materially precarious environment. Nothing was taken for granted and luxuries were speculative and mostly realised through bank loans. The longest relationship I’ve ever had is with debt. Why? Because I also wanted what I didn’t have. I wanted to live in a city I was not born in and then in a country I was not born in. I had an idea of the life I should be living, and whilst it didn’t involve jewellery or designer handbags, I had a sharp sense of entitlement. ‘The Necklace’ highlights how odious an trait entitlement is and how recklessly we can mistake imprisonment for escape.

Collected in The Necklace & Other Tales, 2003. Can be read online here

‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov

I worked in mental health for nine years. For double that time I’ve had a mental illness that I felt was best managed by working in mental health settings. It is not hyperbolic to say that no encounter with a therapist, as a patient, nor with a patient, as a practitioner, helped me understand mental illness so much as ‘Signs and Symbols’ by Vladimir Nabokov. I recently read a relative’s psychiatric records from the 1950s and the main symptom the doctor was concerned about was the patient’s bibliophilia. They recommended that he read less. Nabokov knew acutely the experiences of plenitude and penury. It was key that plentitude came first. Had Nabokov just kept his associations in his head, and not on the page, then his life experience would have been markedly different. There’s a type of mania called apophenia, which involves the sufferer making incessant spontaneous connections between unrelated phenomena. Nabokov takes a brand of this, and describes the condition more solipsistically as ‘referential mania’. This story reminds me again of how obsessed we are with functionality. I once stood in a boardroom where graphic designers discussed for hours the shape of a bird’s tail that was due to appear on a book cover. Transplant that conversation to a bus stop, give it no outcome and witness how it’s interpreted. The world puts us in our boxes and in our little jars. The boy that the parents visit at the asylum in ‘Symbols & Signs’, who has made several attempts on his life, wants to ‘tear a hole in his world and escape’. But for me, the fissures are already there. Human beings are the tears in the world. And it is the categorisations that make this story heartbreaking. A tear can be seen from both sides of the surface. There is a confluence to it but Nabokov shows us how looking out from the tear and looking into it are essentially two different languages.

First published in The New Yorker, 1948 [as ‘Symbols and Signs’], and collected in Nabokov’s Dozen, 1958 and Collected Short Stories, 1995.

‘Foes’ by Lorrie Moore

In her collection Bark, you can also read ‘Referential’, a beautiful modulation of Nabokov’s ‘Symbols & Signs’ with some accidentals thrown in. Remember when we used to do our barking in real life and not on Twitter? Moore captures the dinner-party barking perfectly in another story from the same collection, ‘Foes’, which was originally printed on the eve of the 2008 US election. Like all the stories I’ve listed, the author draws attention to the irresistibility of hierarchisation. It’s as if we shouldn’t just be born with a ribcage and skin, but also a me-shaped box, labelled to save time. This story is also reminiscent of the lethargy that sets in at around 35 when you simply don’t want to talk to anyone you don’t know anymore in social settings. Age does not bring clarity to either interlocutor. ‘Foes’ is one of the most vivid portrayals of how artists and creative types are generally treated at public functions, which is to say that they are usually invited there to be performing monkeys. I guess the thought being that if you earn very little money, the least you could do is be very interesting. This story is also fantastic at capturing what it was like to live during the George W. Bush era, where trauma didn’t seem to be an opportunity for transformation, rather cementation.

First published in The Guardian, 2008. Collected in Bark, 2014

‘Vitalie Meets an Officer’ by Gunnhild Øyehaug translated by Kari Dickson

She loved the sentences in them. The way the sentences presented themselves as if what they said had actually happened.

Anna Bae the Younger is reading a biography of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud didn’t give a fuck and that really appeals to Anna. It’s hard to separate the generosity with which Anna treats her objective world, from how she considers the life of Rimbaud. They bleed into one another. The ‘Vitalie’ of the story is Rimbaud’s mother and the narrative circles around precarity and chance. How Vitalie somehow managed to encounter a French soldier in 1852 fascinates Anna because the biography acts as evidence: yes, a counter-biography is possible. One can sit at home, adhering to routine and yet be interrupted by the unexpected. A companion story is crafted by Anna on her sofa while reading the biography and thinking about a Nick Cave song. Anna, like Ryabovich and Madame Loisel in ‘The Necklace’, is busy preparing for a life alternative to the one she’s living.

Collected in Knots, FSG, 2017

‘In the Penal Colony’ by Franz Kafka

As ‘Symbols and Signs’ helped me understand the paradoxes of mental illness, ‘In the Penal Colony’ clarified for me the hypocritical nature of the law. I first read it in a college German Literature class, and because I had quite ropy German, I was sure that I’d misunderstood most of the vocabulary and plot. I bought an English translation and was completely shocked to have my reading of the story affirmed. This story actually made me change my academic track and I dropped German to focus on criminology and penology, eventually going on to work in prisons and forensic hospitals. I learnt from this story that identity seems to be forged more strongly through differentiation rather than association. That discipline is spoken and written before it is acted upon. That we are complicit in our spectator role in society, especially how we desire that lawbreakers be physically removed from our daily life. We value the opinion of an acceptable person over an unacceptable one, and this perpetuates our obsession with categorising human beings and their behaviour.

First published in 1919. First translation, by Eugene Jolas, published Partisan Review, 1941. Collected in The Complete Short Stories and elsewhere in various translations. Can be read online here

‘Stanville’ by Rachel Kushner

Kushner offers us a bifocal view of a female prison. The first perspective is given by Gordon Hauser, a creative writing teacher at the Stanville facility. The secondary viewpoint comes from Romy L. Hall, a female inmate. It documents the naivety of the well-intentioned and how they feel they somehow irrevocably transform those who encounter them. I’ve seen it a lot in my previous work, and used to cringe when I heard writers who occasionally teach in prisons speak of how ‘powerful’ or ‘vital’ the creative work of prisoners is. They take on the role of a host there to discover the validity of the prisoner’s existence, as if it couldn’t be activated until this alchemical teacher-student exchange. I’ve occupied the position of a non-security staff member in a prison, which is a liminal zone where you carry keys but spend your time emphasising your exceptionalism with both your body and your voice. Depending on the individual circumstances of the prisoner, they usually don’t occupy a materially rich existence. The only thing they truly own are the stories that happened to them before prison and how they choose to tell them. It’s common to receive redacted biographies and to be told versions of the truth. A prisoner once told me that he was convicted of motor offences, when he was serving a sentence for rape. But it was true: he had also committed driving offences. Orientation of the truth is not something that happens to other people and Kushner expertly presents us with two characters that struggle with this navigation. She paraphrases Nietzsche towards the story’s conclusion, to highlight our varying capacities for verity: “The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”

In The New Yorker, 2018

‘Wandering-Standing’ by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet

When I first read ‘Wandering-Standing’ by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, I wanted to throw the book against my living room wall. I wanted nothing to do with such astounding writing. The strongest association with the collection I could tolerate would be the dent the book left on the wall before I had removed it from my life altogether. I’ve since revised my opinion and let it move back in. Krasznahorkai lives (and no doubt thinks) in a different time signature to the rest of the planet. If he gives you music, it will always be a deceptive cadence. He labours over not just the remoteness and propinquity of experiences, but over the space-shaped spaces in between each moment. He describes desire as ‘the yearning of a person not only to be transported to the greatest distance from his present position, but to the place of great promise’. He focuses not on general streets but the shape the street makes on your shoe. There is so much security to be found in Krasznahorkai precarious methods… you can trust him and you really should.

Collected in The World Goes On, New Directions, 2017. Can be read online here

‘The Fur Coat’ by Hjalmar Söderberg, translated by C. W. Storck

Until I was 12 years old, I lived in Sweden and read exclusively in Swedish. It wasn’t until we moved to France in 1993 that I became starved for books in a language I understood (it took a while to get the hang of French), and so began frequenting the many fantastic English bookstores in Paris. One of the stories I read before the move was this short, bittersweet, story of a borrowed coat.

I was never much for the canonical Swedish authors, their parochial concerns and preoccupations seeming completely alien to me. But Söderberg (1869 – 1941) is altogether excellent: grappling with genuine moral issues, his flaneurs wander around early 20th Century Stockholm trying to figure out how to live a good life while their author cynically gazes down on them. This was the first time I encountered a twist ending that did not seem cheap, but rather gave depth to all that had come before.

Collected in Modern Swedish Masterpieces, E.P. Button & Company, 1923. Read it online, in a PDF of the whole collection, here

‘The Library Policeman’ by Stephen King

Other than books assigned by teachers, most of what I read as a teenager was horror (I dabbled ever so slightly in fantasy and sci-fi), and until Stephen King’s collaboration with Peter Straub Black House in 2002, which I just could not get through, I had read every single thing King ever published. The way others can discuss Pynchon for hours making obscure paranoid connections between various characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, I can talk for days about the influence of drugs and alcohol on King’s early novels and the effect that getting sober had on his prose. And as much as some of his novels tend to sag and bloat, his short fiction has always been exemplarily pared down to the bones. David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’ owes a clear debt to King’s shorter fiction (I’m thinking especially of the Bradbury-riff ‘Suffer the Little Children’). But it is this novella that I remember most clearly, perhaps because it has a premise so preposterous that there is no way that it should ever be scary — a man forgets to return a book to the library and suffers the wrath of the supernatural Library Policeman — and yet, this was the first time I stayed up all night, too scared to sleep, terrified of what might be lurking in my closet, or under my bed.

Included in Four Past Midnight, Viking, 1990

‘Through the Tunnel’ by Doris Lessing

I shouldn’t like this story: its metaphor (a boy swimming through an underwater tunnel as part of a dare and comes out on the other end a changed person, the coming-of-age trope personified) is too on-the-nose. But as soon as the “young English boy” in a foreign land jumps into the water at the end, the effect is overwhelming. Maybe it’s worth pointing out that ever since I nearly drowned as a child, water has terrified me, so this may not seem as anxiety-inducing to you all who enjoy swimming. But there is something about the short, clipped, sentences almost forcing the reader to take shallow breaths, making the panic experienced by the boy actually felt in the prose.

Originally published in The New Yorker, August 1955. Collected in The Habit of Loving, Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1957. Story can be found online here

‘Scenes from the Life No. 23: Parental Advice’, by Janice Galloway

Galloway’s novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing was the single most important book that I ever read. It was the novel that made me want to be a writer, and it was the novel that showed me the possibilities of the form beyond the rather staid 19th Century French stuff we were made to read in class. Les Rougon-Macquart and La Comédie Humaine, which I may appreciate now more than I ever did then, seemed outdated, indicative of a reality that was no longer. Galloway’s broken text and wild mix of literary (and non-literary) genres felt more real to me than anything I had ever read.

I immediately set out to read everything she’d written, and found a copy of her short story collection ‘Blood’ at the WH Smith’s on the Rue du Rivoli. Except, rather than finding it on the ‘literature’ shelf between Gaddis and Gass, the book was on a shelf labelled ‘women’s fiction’. Having spent years reading horror and only gradually making my way into the macho lit that was popular at the end of the 90s (your American Psychos and Fight Clubs) I was confused by the fact that the author I found more emotionally devastating than anything I’d read, was relegated to stand beside pulpy romance novels.

The story I remember most vividly is this short piece, written as a play, like the other “scenes from the life” that are scattered across the collection. Here, a (single) father named Sammy feels that he needs to make sure that his son, Wee Sammy, can stand up for himself, as he is about to start school. He makes the son sit on a mantelpiece, and tells him to jump off, that the father will catch him, and keeps telling him “would I let you fall?”, “don’t be feart, this is your da talking to you”. But of course, when the boy jumps, Sammy steps aside, letting the boy hurt himself.

“Let that be a lesson to you son: trust nae cunt,” is the story’s final line.

But what really stays with you is the detail that comes just before that: the father choking back a sob.

Included in Blood, Secker and Warburg, 1991

‘The Balloon’, by Donald Barthelme

A giant balloon appears in New York, inflated by our narrator, stretching from 14th Street to Central Park, although the narrator “cannot tell us the exact location” of its beginning point. A “spontaneous autobiographical disclosure”. I love the reactions to the balloon, the mixed reviews it gets in the press, the way that the people of New York begin to locate themselves in relation to it, how the lack of advertising seems perplexing.

I remember when I was reading this for the first time there were rumours that Coca-Cola were planning to project their logo on the moon for Y2K, a project ultimately scrapped because the lasers would need to be strong enough to “cut planes in half” for it to work. Somehow, that seemed perfectly logical to me, as though of course a brand would project itself on the moon. The balloon, however, has no visible purpose, and is all the more confounding to the story’s characters because of it.

First published in The New Yorker, April 1966, collected in Sixty Stories, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981. Can be read online here

‘Mister Squishy’, by David Foster Wallace

I am frequently confused by literature’s seeming lack of interest in corporate life. We work constantly, in the industrialised west, answering emails on our holidays, checking our phones just as we wake up, but so much fiction seems to be interested only in the stuff around work. ‘Mister Squishy’ shows how you do it, the entire story taking place in a focus group where they are testing reactions to a new chocolate snack, the narration switching between corporate jargon and acutely observed characters who are struggling to fit the moulds that capitalism requires them to fit.

Oblivion was the first time I really got David Foster Wallace, having tried (and failed) to read Infinite Jest and having thoroughly disliked Girl with Curious Hair. I found this at one of those bookstores that has more Moleskines on display than actual books, and since I saw very little else of interest, I thought I would give Wallace another try. I am glad I did: if there is one story I wished I had written, this would be it.

First published in McSweeney’s #5, 2000, as ‘Mr. Squishy’ under the pseudonym Elizabeth Klemm, collected in Oblivion, Little, Brown, 2004

‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby

(I could just as easily have chosen ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, to be honest.)

I was sitting on a Southern train in London, with this paperback edition of Labyrinths, one of the many books I’d spent my meagre salary on at Foyles, and the parafictional genius of Borges washed over me, making me want to reach out to my fellow passengers to discuss just what Borges was accomplishing, how mind-bending and wickedly funny it all was, coupled with the dizzying sense of unease at not knowing how much of what he is writing actually comes from real sources.

When I got back to my aunt’s house where I was staying I remember going on Twitter to see if anyone had tweeted about this weird boy on the Surrey train cackling to himself.

first published in Spanish in the Argentine journal Sur, May 1939. Collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962. Can be read online here