Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Ariadne’ by Anton Chekhov, trans. David Magarshack

‘Ariadne’ is a story about other people’s stories. It’s about Shamokhin, who corners the narrator aboard a Crimean steamer and proceeds to tell the tale of a love affair (“When Germans or Englishmen meet, they talk about the price of wool, the crops, or their personal affairs,” he says, by way of prelude, “but for some reason when Russians come together they only discuss women or sublime truths, but women most of all.”) Shamokhin, with his “little round beard” and embittered misogyny, is an intriguingly recognisable figure in the ‘Cat Person’ era, but I love ‘Ariadne’ for more than its sexual politics; I love how how the story unfolds at one remove or more, coming across, in fact, less as a story than as a study (of Russians, of men, and indeed of stories); I love the narrator’s poised indifference, his splendidly bored detachment. “The day after this meeting I left Yalta,” he ends, with a shrug, “and how Shamokhin’s love affair ended I don’t know.”

First published 1895, collected in Lady With Lapdog And Other Stories, Penguin, 1986

‘In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain’ by Margaret Atwood

The narrator’s father takes the family out into the woods search of the rattlesnake plantain, an unprepossessing bog orchid. “He doesn’t want one of these plants for anything; if he found a rattlesnake plantain, all he would do is look at it. But it would be reassuring, something else that is still with us. So I keep my eyes on the ground.” This story is about vanishing worlds: memories – the narrator’s, and the narrator’s ailing father’s – that slip away; species that are driven to extinction. ‘My father has a list in his head of things that are disappearing,’ she writes. ‘Leopard frogs, certain species of wild orchid, loons, possibly. These are just the things around here.’ Atwood writes about wild things with measured introspection: “With dead birches, the skin outlasts the centre, which is the opposite from the way we do it. There is no moment of death for anything, really; only a slow fade, like a candle or an icicle.”

First published in Harper’s Magazine, 1986, and available online here. Collected in Bluebeard’s Egg, Vintage, 1996

‘The Travellers’ by Carys Davies

Very little in modern fiction lives up to its hype. This of course says more about the hype than about the fiction. One recent collection that did was Eley Williams’ Attrib.; another was Carys Davies’ The Redemption of Galen Pike, which has very little in common with Attrib. other than an air of complete competence, an improbable sure-footedness on what ought to be uncertain ground. ‘The Travellers’ translates a suburban sitcom motif – a middle-aged couple arguing in a car – into a stark Siberia, all samovars and balalaikas and vodka-bottles and lubki prints. Anger and estrangement, love and loss, are shown stripped to their bare bones. It’s funny and extraordinary and it has a seriousness, too, that catches you off balance.

Collected in The Redemption Of Galen Pike, Salt, 2014

‘Ten Forints’ Bridegroom’ by Endre Ady, trans. Judith Sollosy

Here’s another city of dreams: Budapest. It’s a bruised and beautiful place that for much of its modern history has led a twin existence, persisting in reality and being re-imagined again and again in the memories of its exiles. There’s a sad romance to the Budapest of Endre Ady, the Budapest of before the first world war (because we know what came after). Ady’s was a world of raffish journalists and kávéházintellectuals, and ‘Ten Forints’ Bridegroom’ – one piece from a vast sheaf of hackwork that Ady turned out for the Budapest newspapers in those pre-war years – encapsulates the city’s Grub Street scene (the ‘ten forints’ bridegroom’ of the title is a worn-out journo in desperate pursuit of his next freelance fee: “By noon he’d have to throw another one of his stories down the insatiable gullet of the Journal. Yes, another story…”). It’s a short piece but we see a lot: the writer’s tussle with the demands of commerce and art (how can he squander his great inspiration Zenobia (“what a novel she would make some day!”) on a mere newspaper piece?); the weary misery of the hand-to-mouth worker’s life; his loathing of the “lively fellows” who consume his work: “It was for their edification that tales had to be told for ten forints so that when they came again the next day, they could discover another tale in the Journal, and conclude how devilishly clever these strange story-telling chaps were.”

First published 1905. Collected in Neighbours Of The Night, Corvina, 1994

‘Sell Out’ by Simon Rich

I love it when a writer has a brilliant idea and is able to carry it a long way without once fumbling it. That’s what Simon Rich is doing here. It’s a high-concept comic piece about Herschel, a Jewish immigrant to Brooklyn who is pickled in a brine barrel in 1912 and revived in the modern day to find the borough crawling with hipsters: “They tell me they are ‘conceptual artists’ and are ‘reclaiming the abandoned pickle factory for a performance space’. I realize something bad has happened in Brooklyn.” Rich puts himself in the story, as Herschel’s great-great-grandson, looking on bitterly as Herschel’s artisanal pickle business takes off (a Williamsburg blog reviews the product: “The pungent taste is not for everyone. And the floating salt scum takes some getting used to. But guess what? This is what pickles are supposed to taste like. If it’s too much for you to handle, head to Walmart, I guess.”). The clash of values than ensues is less predictable than you might expect. This isn’t a one-joke story, or if it is it’s the most brilliant and drawn-out one joke I’ve ever heard. The fish-out-of-water stuff and Borat lingo would soon pall were it not for Rich’s ability to push the concept forward on each page, testing its elasticity, cranking out new sub-ideas, showing off a staggering capacity for invention.

Collected in Spoilt Brats, Serpent’s Tail, 2014

‘In A Strange Town’ by Sherwood Anderson

There’s something about Sherwood Anderson’s writing that makes me reach for the term ‘neurasthenia’, used by Robert Graves to describe his own deadened nervous state in the years after the first world war. Anderson in fact underwent a mental breakdown of some kind in 1912 – what effect this might have had on his prose I can’t say (and would sooner not guess). There’s no sense in Anderson’s work of the deliberate and disciplined austerity of later writers like Hemingway; tonally, he has more in common with poets like Vachel Lindsay and Edwin Arlington Robinson. His voice has an unaffected melancholy, a natural minor key. ‘In A Strange Town’ is reflective and sombre (more sombre, actually, than much of his other work). A philosopher takes a trip to a strange town: “Often I do things like this, come off alone to a strange place like this. ‘Where are you going?’ my wife says to me… ‘I am going to bathe myself in the lives of people about whom I know nothing.’” In the course of a broken narrative – the pauses in the prose do a lot of work – we learn why the man retreats like this. It’s do with numbness and feeling, awareness and the business of being alive. I’d understand if someone told me they wanted to slap the narrator of this story, and Anderson, too, while they were at it, but I’m very fond of it anyway.

First published in 1929. Collected in The Egg And Other Stories, Penguin, 1998

‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ by Katherine Mansfield

When I first read this on my MA I couldn’t understand why our tutor (the poet, Michael Hulse) thought it was so good. As with all Katherine Mansfield’s stories, this is about subtle human interplay rather than dramatic events, although, in fact, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ has more plot than many of her others. It took several re-readings to realise this story’s subtle brilliance. Two unmarried sisters contemplate the past, future and immediate present in the aftermath of their domineering father’s death and almost, but don’t quite, admit to themselves and each other how much they have missed out on in life. A quietly tragic story about the stifling grip of convention and timidity but with flashes of humour. I now press this story on my own students and they generally fail to understand its brilliance.

(from The Garden Party, Penguin Modern Classics, 1977, first published 1922 or it can be read here)

‘The Erl-King’ by Angela Carter

The Bloody Chamber is one of my favourite collections, and plays a key part in what I hope will be my next published novel. All the stories are deliciously rich in symbolism, sensual language and allusions to fairy tales. ‘The Erl-King’, a retelling of a Scandinavian legend about a sinister forest spirit who lures a young woman into his woodland dwelling, is my favourite. Carter’s descriptions are as lush and detailed as mediaeval tapestries: “There was a little tangled mist in the thickets, mimicking the tufts of old man’s beard that flossed the lower branches of the trees and bushes, heavy branches of red berries as ripe and delicious as goblin or enchanted fruit hung on the hawthorns… One by one, the ferns have curled up their hundred eyes and curled back into the earth. The trees threaded a cat’s cradle of half-stripped branches over me…”

The Erl-King is both frightening and alluring, and there are some wonderfully spooky passages, including this, which has, for me, the chill of infinity: ‘I walked through the wood until all its perspectives converged upon a darkening clearing; as soon as I saw them, I knew at once that all its occupants had been waiting for me from the moment I first stepped into the wood, with the endless patience of wild things, who have all the time in the world’. That ‘endless patience’ is so sinister.

(from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories,Vintage Books, 2006, first published 1979)

‘Julia K’ by May-Lan Tan

The dark sexy glitter of May-Lan Tan’s writing blew me away when I first read this debut collection. Like Angela Carter, she’s excellent on atmospheric surface detail and, by that, I don’t mean she’s shallow; surface detail is what grounds a story. It was hard to choose my favourite from this collection as they work as a whole, but ‘Julia K’, about a mysterious alluring woman who lives upstairs from the narrator, is full of Tan’s characteristic hard-edged, occasionally hallucinatory imagery: “Kissing Julia was like kissing language. Her tongue was a flame, licking phoneme and diphthong. She swallowed me like a sword and her eyes were doves, her mouth a lake of fire.”

(from Things To Make and Break, CB Editions, 2014)

‘Future Digital’ by Anna Maconochie

Like May-Lan Tan’s collection, this debut was one of my favourite books of recent years. Maconochie’s writing is cool, pristine and observant, with surreal flashes. I totally identified with the narrator in ‘Future Digital’, who works in admin in a big corporation, while trying to pursue her writing ambitions on the side. It took back to me the angst of my late twenties and early thirties – internet dating, trying to find time to write, fearing that nothing is ever going to work out and envying colleagues who aren’t flaying themselves with creative dreams: ‘Oh, to be Sue and not have a creative care in the world. To chat about a million nothings, and not have a melancholy that flares up at will like eczema, unresponsive to any help.’

(from Only the Visible Can Vanish, Cultured Llama, 2016)

‘Notes on a Love Story’ by Philip Langeskov

The bulk of this incredibly clever and satisfyingly circular short story is written in footnotes, some of which are true and some of which are fiction. It’s a story within a story about another story, which also references other stories. It’s about art versus love/life, the nature of stories, and also about how the narrator, who is a writer, foretells how his relationship with his girlfriend will end right at the moment he meets her. He writes it down in a story entitled ‘How It Will End’, which, ironically, causes the end of his relationship when his girlfriend reads it. According to one of the footnotes, “In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes proposes that falling in love involves telling ourselves stories about falling in love…All stories are love stories…”. The final footnote ends with these words disappearing into nothingness: “Unlike love, the story never ends. It never ends. It never ends. It never ends. It never ends. It never ends. It never ends. It never ends.”

(from The Best British Short Stories 2011, edited by Nicholas Royle, Salt, 2011. First published in Five Dials Issue No. 9)

‘Monte Verità’ by Daphne du Maurier

A newly-wed couple go on a mountaineering holiday in a remote region of an unnamed European country. They are warned by the locals not to climb Monte Verità as the wife will be inextricably drawn into the mysterious monastery at the summit of the mountain. Many of the young women of the village have been lost to the monastery, never to be seen again. Of course, the wife, who already has the strange light of the ‘called’ in her eyes, disappears in the middle of the night, before her husband can stop her. This story is reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of my favourite films, and is equally creepy and memorable.

(from The Birds and Other Stories)

‘Lavin’ by John McGahern

Lavin, an elderly blacksmith, ‘close to the poorhouse’, in a rural Irish backwater, where most of McGahern’s brilliant stories are set, is the local paedophile. He is taunted by the village kids, who are both frightened and fascinated by him. What’s most clever and disturbing about this story is that McGahern makes you sympathise with Lavin, who was once young and handsome but who had ‘taken no interest in girls though he could have had his pick’. You sympathise with a life wasted in hard work; as the narrator remembers ‘…hardly a day passes but a picture of Lavin comes to trouble me: it is of him when he was young, and, they said, handsome, gathering the scattered tools at nightfall in a clean wheatfield after the others had gone drinking or to change for the dances’.

(from The Collected Stories, Faber, 1992)