‘The Juggler’ by Primo Levi

‘I often asked myself what kind of humanity was massed behind their symbol, and have regretted that none has told his story’

If stories are a vehicle for human connection and compassion, then few can be as important as Levi’s scenes presenting his time in Auschwitz. This moving series of vignettes and character studies, plainly and quietly told, infused with humour and humanity, often depict turning points where life could have changed. In ‘The Juggler’, former street thief and acrobat Eddy catches Levi with paper and pencil, risking his life to write a letter home. Eddy’s shrewd quick-thinking, along with his capacity to move on from Levi’s offence, saves the author’s life; although he receives a less positive ending himself. Levi’s succinctly rich illustrations of the tenacity of the human spirit provide compelling evidence for Frankl’s logotherapy theories and the human search for meaning.

In Moments of Reprieve (Penguin, 1986)

‘Extra’ by Yiyun Li

This is a quietly devastating story with an inevitable crescendo of consequences. When 51-year old Granny Lin is made redundant from the factory, her neighbour matchmakes her with an ill widower. Granny Lin ‘tends his body with motherly hands’, the blood away after insulin shots and repeats the myth, started by his children, that his dead wife will be home soon – only to be left penniless two months later when she is blamed for his death. She takes a job as a laundry maid in a boarding school where she strikes up a close bond with rejected six-year old Kang; she tells him stories and “tucks him in, the unfamiliar warmth swelling inside her. She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.” When Kang’s secret obsession with stealing girls’ socks is discovered, he is bullied, taking his shame out on Granny Lin and running away. Fired from her job, she walks into town where “All the people on the street seem to know where their legs are taking them. She wonders when she stopped being one of them.” Her bag is stolen and the story ends with her facing an uncertain future.

This human demise, full of logic but void of compassion or accountability, reminds me of Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls’ or Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘A Real Durwan’ – the descent of an elderly female servant against the backdrop of rising modernity, where clinging to the daily rituals of care and servitude cannot protect the vulnerable from the force of changing times.

In A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Fourth Estate, 2006)

“I Only Came To Use The Phone” by Gabriel García Márquez

‘Then she clung to her husband’s neck, screaming like a real madwoman.’

This is the first short story I ever read. I had an inspiring teacher at school who introduced me to Marquez. It felt like the first time I had read ‘in colour’. This story, however, is as dark as it gets. A woman is accidentally admitted to a sadistic psychiatric hospital where the consultant persuades her husband she is too dangerous to ever leave; something the woman herself begins to believe the longer she stays. Marquez is famed for his fantasies, but having worked a lot in mental health, the most terrifying thing about this story is its chilling proximity to the truth.

In Strange Pilgrims (Penguin, 1992)

‘Cathedral’ by Raymond Carver

‘My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.’

A prejudiced, bitter, stoned narrator is asked by his blind guest, a friend of his wife, to draw a cathedral. Their hands both holding the pen, the guest says: “‘Go ahead, bub, draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you.” It leads to an emotional moment of catharsis and transformation for the narrator ‘like nothing else in life up to now’; he keeps his eyes closed and keeps drawing even when he doesn’t have to. Early Carver includes stories I like a lot, including ‘Fat’ and ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’, but they always seem to be written outside of his own skin. I find the Carver brand of nihilism somewhat distancing. This story was the first Carver I read where it felt he was writing with real feeling – he had stopped drinking, had re-evaluated life and in his own words, “was in a period of generosity. The story affirms something” as a result.

In Cathedral (Vintage, 1983)

‘The New Accelerator’ by HG Wells

Faced with the challenge of selecting a dozen or so favourite short stories to share with you I have chosen just one. This is not simply because my choice happens to be the best short story ever written, but also because writing about it gives me (and you, my reader) the opportunity to collaborate in a modest literary experiment. This will take you about half an hour to complete, which will be half an hour well spent. Trust me. And thank you, in advance, for your time.

It’s just after 9pm on Friday January 12th 2018 (which we can, for a short period, think of as ‘last Friday’) and I’m sitting at my desk in front of my laptop, the screen of which is blank, apart from the sentence I am typing. Have just typed.

What time or day or month it is where you are I don’t know. But if you’re reading this then it must be for you as you read this, as it is for me as I type this, now. A reader and writer share a now, but it’s seldom the same now.

Earlier this evening I re-read ‘The New Accelerator’, a short story by H. G. Wells and it made me think, as it always makes me think, about time, and about literary time and how that works (when it works). Now I’m going to write – am writing – about that story and I want to do something both whimsical and serious that aligns with the spirit of the story. I want this to be an experiment in time with you, my reader. Are you ready?

Let’s go.

First of all, whether or not you’ve read ‘The New Accelerator’ please skip what follows – apart from this paragraph of course, which I (and you) have almost completed – and click on the link I’ve just given you. Then read or re-read the story, because otherwise much of what I’m about to write will amount to an extended spoiler. In any case I need you to be gainfully occupied elsewhere while I set about writing something for you to read when you rejoin me in – well, it’s a shade over 5,000 words in length, so shall we say . . . about twenty minutes?

I glance at my watch. It’s ten past nine. You’re still reading this.

Continue reading “‘The New Accelerator’ by HG Wells” →

Introduction

If you believe Ali Smith (I do; see ‘True Short Story’), for Cynthia Ozick, a short story acts like a talismanic gift, something that we carry with us, that has a mysterious power that might well be hard to fathom. While I have limited truck with the idea that stories — and by extension storytelling — have some kind of sacred moral purpose (what Tim Parks calls ‘the piety that they are somehow necessary’), it’s important that you understood how seriously I take Ozick’s proposition, how fully I inhabit that method of understanding how short stories — at least, the good ones — work. The stories that populate this fantasy anthology are among my current talismen. I carry them around in my head like some people carry old coins in the pocket of a beloved pair of jeans. Every now and then, I mentally rub them together and see what sparks they bring. They are not necessary, but I can’t tell you how pleased I am that they exist, that I have them in my head. To borrow from Deborah Levy, they make my world a better place to live. On which subject…

‘A Better Way To Live’ by Deborah Levy

I have the most ungodly crush on this story. I love its racing, bracing passage, its exuberant leaps in time and imagination, its magnificent yearning. It is a thing of extraordinary beauty, a battered love story about being alone and lost and adrift in the world even when you’re not. Most of all, at times like these – and despite/because of the grief at the story’s heart – I love its affirmative power: ‘We said Yes in all the European languages. Yes. We said yes we said yes, yes to vague but powerful things, we said yes to hope which has to be vague, we said yes to love which is always blind, we smiled and said yes without blinking.’ Not a bad way to live in 2018: don’t blink, say yes.

In Black Vodka (And Other Stories, 2013)

‘Misery’ by Anton Chekhov, trans. Constance Garnett

I cannot make up my mind whether it is the case that, as I get older, I become more in touch with my emotions, or whether, as I get older, life’s painful reality becomes more apparent. Perhaps they amount to the same thing. Either way, I cry more now than I used to. This Chekhov story might stand as a marker of the change. A long time ago — fifteen years at least, perhaps twenty — I went on a Chekhov jag, reading his stories and little else for months. I read this story then, I know I did, but it vanished from my memory until I read it again last summer and found myself bawling at its end in a way that might have made my younger self laugh. Also, that line about cakes of snow falling off the horse’s back.

In Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories (W. W. Norton, 1979) and available online here, in a different translation

‘101’ by May-Lan Tan

I probably could have chosen any of the stories from this extraordinary collection. (For instance, I could happily have chosen ‘Julia K.’ simply on the basis of that one line — you know the one: ‘Language, as she deployed it, was neither a line cast nor a bullet fired. It was a catholic mechanism: the sharp twist of a pilot biscuit into the waifish body of Christ’). As it is, I choose this. I choose it because of the near total brilliance of its execution. The way, the more you read it, the more everything seems to slot into place, not neatly and tidily, but raggedly and bloodily; from the palindromic title — those two ones with nothing in between — to the playful, cutesy doubling, too self-consciously cool to be taken seriously, until it slowly resolves into something that cannot, by any measure, be taken lightly. Oh, and did I mention the language? Hell on earth, the language.

In Things to Make and Break (CB Editions, 2014)

‘Hay’ by David Hayden

I’ve known David for a long time, which perhaps accounts in part for the profound effect this collection had when I first read it at the fag end of last summer. In part, but not entirely. It’s a wonderful book and this is a wonderful story, which, from its everyday opening — Andy, sitting on a train, looking out of the window — enacts a gradual stepping away from the profane and the usual into a world of such rich invention and beauty that it takes the breath away. The beauty and invention that most beguiles here is not the kind associated with language or phrase – although there is plenty of that too — but the beauty of thought and of execution. It’s a story that both asks everything from us and nothing at all. I’m not joking — or exaggerating — when I say that this story, and this collection more widely, jolted me out of some pretty tired habits of reading.

In Darker With The Lights On (Little Island Press, 2017)

‘Free’ by Clare Wigfall

A woman, hitchhiking across Spain, walks into a quiet bar in a quiet village in the middle of a quiet afternoon and orders a drink. Out of so slight a frame emerges a story I’ve read countless times and yet cannot quite put to bed. Of course, one reason lies in its audacious sin of omission, that little artificial gap in the story’s surface that seems to contain the clue to its interpretation. (Raymond ‘No Tricks’ Carver, you suspect, would have hurled the book across the room.) And yet there’s so much more to it than that, from the poise and restraint of the writing, to the echoing sound of that fly swatter coming down hard on a flat surface to signal that the story, in its material sense, is done. In recent times, I’ve come to thinking that the story represents an answering call to Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’: ‘“Free! Body and soul free!”’

In The Loudest Sound and Nothing (Faber & Faber, 2007)

‘In Uncertain Time’ by Javier Marías

Once upon a time, I had the best job in the world. For four years in my mid-twenties I spent much of my time travelling in southern Europe on behalf of several independent American publishers, one of which was responsible for the volume from which this story is taken. Those were heady times, both highly social — meetings, dinners — and highly alienating — long nights in lonely hotel rooms, too much coffee. I mention the context because I have a particular memory of reading this story on one of those trips, late at night, in a hotel room high above Plaza d’España in Madrid. Marias does late Spanish nights as well as anyone — just think of Tomorrow in the Battle… — and this story pivots out from just such a late night, an encounter in a night club between the story’s narrator and a Hungarian footballer by the name of Szentkuthy. Now, Marias isn’t a great short story writer. And this isn’t a great short story, but it does contain within it a great passage. It’s the part when the narrator recalls a goal Szentkuthy scored when playing for Real Madrid against Inter Milan, a goal of such bewildering and unnecessary brilliance that ‘it was not so much that he had stopped time as that he had set a mark on it and made it uncertain’. As well as being a brilliant passage of writing, it seems to me to provide a wonderful account of one aspect of the art of storytelling: the deferral of the end until the author decides it should arrive. It’s all about timing, that moment when the elastic snaps back and we can all breathe again and tend to our bruises.

In When I Was Mortal (trans. Margaret Jull Costa, New Directions, 2000)

‘The Doll’s House’ by Katherine Mansfield

Another story I’ve read countless times and yet cannot seem to get to the bottom of; it changes, or seems to, each time I read it. The characters are lodged in my brain — Kezia, of course, our Else, and, most of all, the remarkable Aunt Beryl, who despite appearing only twice, briefly, at the beginning and end of the story, nonetheless rises to the status of unforgettable. Nor does the story need any rehashing; it’s all there, clear as a bell — the divisive doll’s house, all oily and green; that bloody lamp; the vicious clamouring of girls at school; the endnote with the Kelveys in the field with the patient cows. If I could paint, I’d be able to paint it without looking once at the source text. And yet, and yet… what is it, actually? Is it a story of the power of goodness to bring hope for the future, to bring about change? Or is it a story of stasis, of the futility of goodness, a recognition that nothing ever changes, that there is no hope and that we will all always be like those two girls, sitting in fields, staring mutely at cows and musing over symbols that promise much but deliver little?

In The Collected Stories (Penguin, 2007), and available online here

‘Henri Simon Leprince’ by Roberto Bolaño

I have an enormous soft spot for Bolaño. Indeed, I spent several years trying to write like him. In part this is because, if you aspire to be a writer, he seems so desirable to imitate; his subject, especially in the short stories, is you, yourself — or him, as you would want yourself to be. He’s no mean imitator himself, of course. Intone the opening paragraphs of this in a darkened room and you could be listening to the opening of a Borges story, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ say. Despite its satiric possibilities, I can’t help clinging to this quickly delivered story — of a bad writer who ascends to a kind of heroic status — as a form of consolation, (rather than the warning it claims to be).

In Last Evenings on Earth (trans. Chris Andrews, Harvill Secker, 2007) and available online here