Introduction

Every true work of literature re-asks the question of what it means to tell a story. In doing so, it moves towards what cannot be spoken; something that lies beyond it, an impossible, shimmering thing. This is why the work of literature, when one encounters it, is always a surprise. It is also why it is a rarity. For support in this claim, we might ask the two great European critics of the previous century: “all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one” (Walter Benjamin), “Let us suppose that literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question” (Maurice Blanchot). More immediate, much closer to the bone, than this however is simply that those works which move towards this darkness between word and world, whose mediation we call experience and whose terrain the imagination roves over but ever fails to grasp, they are the place where literature, in all its deadness, comes closest to life.

To personalize this diatribe, I can only say that this explanation rings true for me, and has remained the only reliable guide when examining why some novels and stories remain with me when most others seem to have suffocated before they’ve even got going. The stories I’ve chosen, have all remained with me for these reasons. They re-shaped how I think about stories, living in me as I have in them. I’ve presented them in roughly autobiographical order and, in order to work against the equivocations of the critic, attempted to type this in one sitting, to hold the twelve stories that first rose to the surface when I accepted this task no matter how many others (Joyce, Rhys, Spark, Purdey, Yates, Bolaño, Salter, Stamm, Nice, MIshima, Cooper, Pink, Lin…) were clamouring from the depths beneath. ‘In the Penal Colony’ was the most painful excision, which is as things should be.

‘Terra Incognita’ by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by the author and his son, Dmitri Nabokov

The Penguin Classics edition of Nabokov’s Collected Short Stories was the first book that made me want to give up writing. I was 16 and had only just started. In fact, I’d really only started reading novels that weren’t for children, emerging from a few years filled with comics, Diabolo II forums, and Magic: the Gathering cards. I’d also just met the friend that would come to be the closest of all, and we’d read, lend books to each other, listen to records, get high, and talk about either escaping or dying in our Yorkshire mill town, whichever seemed easiest. Against this, the shock of reading ‘Terra Incognita’ is still with me. It is a narrative about a tropical expedition in a fictional country, Zonraki, with a narrator hallucinating and succumbing to some strange fever, caught between two worlds neither of which quite seems like the “real” one, written in (what was for me) difficult, showily eloquent language. Nothing could have been more alien to the experience of my own life. And yet, it got close to something inside me, a sensation I didn’t really understand and probably still don’t, manifesting like an opening in the stomach or something trapped in the roof of the mouth. This thing now seemed like it was the most important thing in the world to search for, but which I was hopelessly unequipped to ever find. If, as a remark from Angela Davis a couple of years ago so succinctly put it, “art can make us feel what we cannot yet think”, then this was my first feeling of literature.

First published in Posledniya Novosti, Paris 1931, English translation published in The New Yorker, May 1963; collected in A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, McGraw-Hill, 1973 and the Collected Stories, Penguin, 1997

‘Funes the Memorious’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby

Borges I read not long after Nabokov. Having grown up with a secondhand bookseller for a dad, Borges made sense to me right away. There had always been something magical about all the evenings spent driving in the dark to garages in Huddersfield or damp terraced rooms on the outskirts of Halifax, watching as dad picked through endless boxes and sports bags heaped with books. Borges got into these moments and, again from a seemingly impossible distance, transfigured them. Borges, perhaps more than any modern writer, takes on directly the infinite as the promise of literature, its curse being always to break that promise. Borges’ talent is that he manages to make these stories read not like intellectual exercises but as the leftover case files of literature’s unsolved crimes. In this story we learn of Ireneo Funes who is given a perfect memory after a riding accident. Being able to perceive not only the individuality of every leaf on a tree, but each of his perceptions of each leaf, destroys his ability to talk, his ability to live. As I learned from philosophy a little later, it is a story that will absorb and spit back as much Hegel as it will Nietzsche, will wrestle with the paradox of sense certainty as ferociously as it will the reductive epistemological violence of conceptuality. It will also, like the Babylonian libraries and books of sand, remake into the patterns of the infinite the memory of an excited child on a rainy night watching his dad drive from the back of a Volvo.

First published as ‘Funes el memorioso’ in La Nación, June 1942 and collected in the 1944 anthology Ficciones. The first English translation appeared in Avon Modern Writing No. 2, 1954. Collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1964/Penguin, 1970 and in Fictions and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998/Penguin, 2000, where it is translated by Andrew Hurley as ‘Funes, His Memory’

‘Blackbird Pie’ by Raymond Carver

At university, an unrequited love (or unconsummated crush, I’ll never know) told me to read Carver. I’m not sure there could be a better introduction. In the finest Carver stories, that unspoken force called literature stands just in the next room and, at certain moments, we are allowed to glimpse it, like neighbours who have snuck into its apartment, finding it gone but frozen with awareness of its having been. It is usually an everyday breakdown of reality, by a car accident and a cake or a broken fridge, or, in this case, a letter pushed under a door, that affords us this glimpse. Why I think ‘Blackbird Pie’ stands out among the Carver stories I love is that here, quite literally, literature itself is what intrudes, what pulls at the fabric of living, of all that rough sentiment Carver writes so expertly.

First published in The New Yorker, July 7, 1986; collected in Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic Monthly, 1988/Harvill Press, 1993

‘The Malady of Death’ by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray

Duras is someone I discovered in my early twenties who, as I’m now in the mid-stages of completing a PhD on her work (alongside that of Paul Celan), one of the writers I read most frequently. This short, intense work opens with a direct sexual address in the second person.

“You wouldn’t have known her, you’d have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a book, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its load of tears.”

The personal and anonymous are united from the outset. The text hovers, like that of another book later on this list (one that Duras translated and staged) with the presence of death in life, of a life that does nothing but die while it is living, living in the grip of its inevitability. In the meantime, we dance around the bed. In Duras, the locus of desire as a dissolving infinity is too often used to psychoanalyse away the philosophical and political commitments of her work, transmute them into inwardness. Rather, the logic of desire always operates in the shadow of historical obliteration: commodified, genocidal, colonial. Through this framework Duras continually tries to give us a new experience of time. Thank you for coming to my viva.

La maladie de la mort, first published by Les Éditions de Minuit 1982; English translation published by Grove Atlantic, 1986

‘Stirrings Still’ by Samuel Beckett

Superlatives and Beckett: a dry hole to dig in if ever there was one. I say only that ‘Stirrings Still’, and Beckett’s other short prose leading up to it (from the mid-1950s with ‘Texts for Nothing’ but particularly from the early 1960s onwards), are the height of Beckett’s achievement and the best short prose works written in Europe since the war. I gasp before them, through them. Language gnaws itself to life from its own bones. What else to say about a work that begins:

“One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. One night or day. For when his own light went out he was not left in the dark.”

And closes:

“Then such silence since the cries that perhaps they would not be heard again. Perhaps thus the end. Unless no more than a mere lull. Then all as before. The strokes and cries as before and he as before now there now gone now there again now gone again. Then the lull again. Then all as before again. So again and again. And patience till the one true end to time and grief and second self his own.”

In the words of Winnie (who better to help us dig in a dry hole?):

Marvellous gift. Nothing to touch it in my opinion. Always said so.

First published in a limited edition illustrated by Louis le Brocquy, John Calder, 1988. Now available in Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still, Faber, 2009

Kaddish for a Child Not Born by Imre Kertész, translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson

Everything begins with ‘No’. A work spun from refusal, but not, like Bartleby’s refusal of the societal pressures of administration, of the crushing conformity of dominant social forms, of saying no to the present. No. it is too late for that. The no here is that of birth, it is a no to the future, of all possible futures in the wake of genocide. No. No. Never again. It is a book we pray will stop being relevant. It should lacerate us, and does.

First published as Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekértin 1990; first English translation Northwestern University Press, 1999; also translated as Kaddish for an Unborn Child, translated by Tim Wilkinson, Vintage, 2004

The Cheap-Eaters by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Douglas Robertson

Bernhard has been, and remains, one of the most important writers in my life. After leaving university and moving to London, I met a friend who shaped the course of my life more than I can say. Bernhard numbered among the countless things he introduced me to, as did a group of other people, writers, critics, bloggers, and students, who had found ways to articulate that shifting darkness that literature had and reading activated. Bernhard acted like a gateway for this way of thinking about literature, of trying to think what I had previously felt. In his work, Bernhard takes the promise and failure of literature and turns it into self-immolating obsession. Writing’s frozen infinite is not a hexagonal library but pain in the chest, a tightness in the lungs. Its bleak humour and fulminating recursion reveal their propulsive force in Bernhard like nowhere else. The unraveling of reality by the most quotidian events is taken to a pitch nothing short of daemonic. Bernhard takes the humiliation and shame of being human and winds it into the sensation of totalisation and collapse that unites everything from a single breath to the movement of life as such. The Cheap-Eaters is not Bernhard’s greatest book, what prevents it from being so is the same thing that makes it exemplary for including on a list such as this: it is the work where Bernhard’s style is most present, where even his own techniques of construction appear to get caught in the machine of their unfolding. By turning the tools of the writer against himself, making a success of his failure, a failure of his success, it stands as the ideal introduction.

Die Billigesser first published by Edition Suhrkamp, 1980; English translation, Spurl Editions, 2021

Everything Passes by Gabriel Josipovici

A room.
He stands at the window.
And a voice says: Everything passes. The
good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow.
Everything passes.

Josipovici is the only writer on this list I’ve known personally, and I think one of our finest living novelists and critics. In this short fragmentary novel literature opens itself in the smallest of spaces. Narrative is exposed, stripped bare, in a way quite different to Beckett. It has an austerity and development of tonal and sentence patterns that draws from music as much as poetry, leaving any consistent narrative elusive. It works in the little shadow that writing opens, where life shows itself to us, life and the passing time that will eventually take us from it.

Published by Carcanet, 2006

‘The Beast in the Jungle’ by Henry James

“He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him.”

The best novella in the English language. It describes the two most important forces in life, anticipation and loss, in a way that has probably never been bettered. The idea of the spectacular, of a life-defining catastrophe, lies in so many hearts. This is what James plays on, and in doing so gets closer to the nub of our shared pain, that substance that life is and history crystallises, than almost any writer I can think of. Experience is only able to become what it is once a distance has been established that keeps it from our grasp. That’s life.

First published in the collection The Better Sort, Methuen & Co., 1903. Currently available in the Everyman Collected Stories Vol 2, 2000. Published as a Penguin Mini Modern Classic in 2011

‘Philology’ by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Avril Bardoni

A Sciascia paperback, The Wine-Dark Sea turned up in my dad’s bookshop a decade or so ago, among the boxes salvaged from a house clearance in the part of France where my dad now lives. The Homeric title and Sicilian setting were enough to get me to start leafing through. There are few greater pleasures in reading, in the search for literature in whatever new form it might be hiding, than the bolt from the blue, of picking up something unknown and realising, after a few pages, then a few more, this is it. In Sciascia, the dark force that lurks behind language has a material, even brutal presence. His stories, even the ones without any violence, are like crimes in which the satisfaction offered by successful detection is precluded from the outset.

“‘Do you think it comes from the Arabic?’
‘Very likely, my friend, very likely…But the study of words is far from being an exact science.’”

In ‘Philology’, two men discuss the origins of the word mafia. It quickly becomes clear than one is a mafia boss and the other his associate. I say nothing more, for fear of giving too much away. Everyone in Sciascia’s fiction knows when to shut up, or should do.

First published as part of the collection Il mare colore del vino, Adelphi, 1973; English translation The Wine-Dark Sea, Granta, 2001

Parade by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Allison Markin Powell

Kawakami’s Parade arrived in the depths of COVID isolation. It is a work that exists on a delicate, almost liquescent narrative terrain (a trademark of her fiction), as though written from a point on the horizon where the eye can’t quite fix points to on place or another. A woman tells a sort-of folktale to her older lover (and former teacher) in modern Japan, about some red-faced creatures called tengu that attached themselves to her when she was a girl. The folktale can’t quite get going and the supernatural element proves to be something of a nuisance. In a short space and from simple means, Kawakami creates something gentle in the full sense of that word given it by the late philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle, putting the question of storytelling, and narrative meaning, to us in a place where those things seem on the verge of being hopelessly outmoded. What is left? A strange feeling of attunement in confusion, of keeping on anyway.

First published in Japanese as パレード, 平凡社, 2002; English translation first published Soft Skull Press, 2019

‘Breakfast’ by Joy Williams

I read this in the winter just gone, looking at frost on the watery meadows near our house. Cows used to graze there but they flooded them to make a bypass. At her best, Williams one exceeds all those to whom she is compared. Her grasp of the fragility of the American character is not as deeply-rooted as that of Kittredge, not as uncanny as that of Carver, but more nuanced, more universal. If sometimes it means her stories remain confined by the realist paradigm so be it, those that do escape are all the more precious, because they extend that grasp of fragility to fiction itself. America is a fiction barely holding itself together. Here we get something like ‘a fragment of time in its pure state’, a ragtag group hopelessly making myths of themselves with good cheer and an ironic wink. Little details continue to unsettle us, fiction and the characters within it perched on their easy talk and melodramas of the self, a little nag in the back of the mind saying, how long, how long can we keep this going?

First published in Esquire, August, 1981; collected in Taking Care, Knopf Doubleday, 1985