Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘Promenade’ by Henrietta Rose-Innes

This really is the most exquisitely crafted story, which captures the wordless intimacies we exchange with the strangers we fall into step with. The language has an intense, compacted elegance, each phrase unfolding into the next with a knowing sure-footedness. After all, the story is not ignorant of what will happen when an ageing copywriter, out for his evening constitutionals, begins to encounter a vigorous young boxer out on his training runs. Indeed, it teases us with the imagery of blood and bone, of the shattering force of impact. Even so, it does not prepare us for the groundswell of loss that accompanies the ending. When it’s over, I can’t help thinking of those lines by Thornton Wilder: ‘And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring? Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God’. 

In Homing (Umuzi, 2010)

‘The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp, and Carr’ by Jesse Ball

I read this story ten years ago, pretty much to the month. I was bowled over by it and parts of it — the bit where Carr encounters the girl with the cygnet on a leash, for instance; or when the judge’s wife comes to visit — have remained lodged in my mind ever since. Although it all begins in relatively innocuous fashion — an ill-advised approach in a bar — as the title suggests, the story doesn’t hide its intention. On the contrary, it powerfully — terrifyingly — represents the ineluctability of fate. Once the pattern is set, the story continues without mercy along its rutted track. The writing, the phrasing, the wit, the imagination — all are of the highest order. Dreamy, in the way of a nightmare. 

In The Paris Review 183 (Winter 2007) and available online here, if you’re a subscriber

‘Dead Men’ by Christine Schutt

I’m going to describe this story as a palate cleanser, which is a wildly inappropriate term, while at the same time getting somewhere close to rapidly articulating the effect reading the prose of Christine Schutt has on me. These are dark materials, but the writing is astonishingly clean, astonishingly sharp. Here, a woman is in bed, with her lover on top of her. Beneath her, under the bed, trussed, it seems, in canvas, is a former lover, now dead. A haunting, then, or something like it, charged with guilt in the face of a new, better desire. At the end, however, which hits hard, we might come to look again at the title and think about the plural noun.  

In Nightwork (Dalkey Archive, 1996)

‘Axolotl’ by Julio Cortázar

Cortázar is right up there in my personal pantheon and I could probably have filled this whole anthology with his stories, from ‘Blow-up’ to ‘A Continuity of Parks’ to ‘The Night Face Up’ to ‘House Taken Over’ and on and on. Over the years, I have stolen from him shamefully and repeatedly. This great story, about the young man going again and again to see the axolotls in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, can easily — on account of our foreknowledge of the appearance of its subject — seduce us into thinking it’s a cute little story, kind of funny and kind of playful. It kind of isn’t, though. It’s kind of horrifying. Two lines (a half line in one case) spliced together, stop me in my tracks: ‘I began seeing in the axolotls a metamorphosis which did not succeed… They were lying in wait for something, a remote dominion destroyed, an age of liberty when the world had been that of axolotls’. Reading that, I come to think that we are all metamorphoses which did not succeed; we are all stalled and unfulfilled dreams, trapped forever in a larval stage of never-becoming. Happy New Year!

In Blow-up and Other Stories (trans. Paul Blackthorn, Pantheon Books, 1985) and available online here

Introduction

Works are listed below not according to any order in which I encountered the stories and when they sent me reeling. It is obvious that 20th-century white male writers were overwhelmingly significant to my early reading patterns and reelings-in to the short story form. The momentum gathered along these bookshelves means that I now spin away from them.

‘A Labour of Moles’ by Ivan Vladislavić

A business of ferrets, a skulk of foxes, a drudgery of lexicographers: everybody loves an evocative collective noun. It was for this most chirpheaded of reasons that I clocked this slim, red-spined Sylph Edition in a secondhand bookshop. Vladislavić was not a name I recognized and it was purely because of the pamphlet’s pleasing title, the fact its pages had a beautiful weight to them and the wonderful illustrations — watercolour splashes across technical illustrations from the Duden Bildwörterbuch‘ pictorial dictionary, printed on tracing paper — that my idle curiosity became a more committed browsing. By the end of the first paragraph, my jaw was on the floor.

A strange narrator explores the strange limits of a strange new world: indexed language itself. This short story has all the charge of a murder mystery, the playful wince and winch of Carrollian rabbitholes and the whirl of a prose-poem. ‘A Labour of Moles’ changed my relationship to the alphabet.

Cahier Series #17, published by University of Chicago Press through Sylph Editions with the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris in 2012

‘The Mountain Inn’ by Guy de Maupassant

I was pronouncing ‘Guy’ incorrectly, the librarian told me. Still getting used to being comfortable with choosing my own etiquette for approaching collections, I read the title story first as a light bedtime treat. I read it again. I kept reading under my covers with a torch until four in the morning, the first time I had ever seen that time on a clock. The underside of my duvet was an alpine slope, the shadows in my curtains were the trunks of sycamores and rifle butts, a knot of wood on my desk was a screaming, hopeless mouth. Nowadays perhaps I would attempt to categorize the stories as psychological thrillers or ghost stories or tight, taut, social commentaries—all I knew at the time was that the final sentence of ‘The Mountain Inn’ reversed the flow of blood in my veins and that the next day when I saw a large-eyed, soft-pawed dog chasing after a ball in the park, I burst into tears and would not be consoled.

Translated by H. N. P. Sloman. Found in a soft, green 1957 Penguin books with a far too sedate cover, available to read online here

‘The Schartz-Metterklume Method’ by Saki

‘Seconds after telling a fellow soldier to “Put that bloody cigarette out,” Munro was shot through the head by an enemy sniper aiming for the lit cigarette.’ Every single one of H. H. Munro’s short stories is a study in how to handle delight, frailty, cruelty and absurdity with gorgeous lucid prose. ‘The Schartz-Metterklume Method’ is an unskittish but nose-thumbing, joyful sketch that covers trust, power, a fraudulent governess and merely THE WAYS BY WHICH OUR ENGAGEMENT WITH HISTORY CAN UNRAVEL.

As a side-note: the writer and composer Timothy Thornton has mentioned a couple of times that he would like to make an opera based on Saki’s short stories and sometimes I think I live only to see this happen.

‘Razor’ by Vladimir Nabokov

Generally I’d say one should read Nabokov to experience language as a release of birds but my relationship to ‘Razor’ is not really representative of this. I had been reading pieces of his thick, lush prose and feeling heady with the sheer exhilaration of it—thank god for short stories, where you can sustain momentary whiplash from a plot or sentence and pretend it’s giddiness. This story centres on the chance encounter of two old acquaintances, and a shift of power that occurs in front of a mirror and beneath a lathered brush.

Reading ‘Razor’ is to feel the testing of metal across your throat.

First published, in Russian, as ‘Britva’ in 1926. Read in Collected Stories as part of Penguin Modern Classics in 2001. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov, the writer’s son, in 1995

‘The Second Person’ by Ali Smith

To my mind, nothing can convey flares of tenderness like a short story (…possibly this says more about me than I’d like) and no-one conveys flares of tenderness like Ali Smith. ‘The Second Person’ feels as personal as an anecdote and as universal as a fable, wheeling without ever being wheedling and ridiculous without being laughable. That’s what every great love story should be, and this one  also features accordion shops and Ella Fitzgerald. Prat-fall into love with Smith’s light touch and then read everything else by her right now right now right now.

(First Collected in The First Person and Other Stories, Hamish Hamilton, 2008. First published in and available to read on Prospect, 2005, here)

‘The Tower’ by Marghanita Laski

Do you enjoy the taste of adventure? Do you like wanderlust, curiosity, self-directed exploration? Do you like counting? Do you like purpose draining away? Do you like a kaleidoscopic sense of slow dread? Do you want to feel the horrors of Sisyphus and Tantalus amid the grotesqueries of Escher-like architectural glitching in the European countryside? Me too, and what a tour guide.

Published in 1955, read in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories ed. Michael Cox  (1996)

‘Kaleidoscope’ by Ray Bradbury

A lot of my exposure to short stories comes through listening to readings or dramatizations on the radio, and my habit of falling under their thrall leads to many scorched shirts abandoned mid-ironing and dishes left unwashed in the sink. The BBC iPlayer Radio app portions its ‘Drama’ into particular (often baffling) genre categories, and generally my thumb slips to the ‘Horror/Supernatural’ and ‘Psychological’ labels. When the continuity announcer gave a quick precis for the day’s story and a  rumbling, stern voice introduced itself (‘This is Ray Bradbury…’) I almost unplugged my headphones: I had decided I knew what ‘Sci-fi’ meant, was and could be, and that it could not possibly hold anything for me. I was an idiot, and soon an agog, reformed idiot with something in their eye.

Men are drifting in space. ‘They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.’ Their communication channels are still open, and they are able to talk for a short while as they spin further and further apart.

Original story, published 1951, adapted drama broadcast in 1991 which I believe you can hear here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjeiHRm8LNE