Category: Rachel Malik

Rachel Malik is a writer and teacher. She has written for a wide range of publications, including the LRB Blog, New Left Review, Radical Philosophy, and English Literary History. She taught English Literature for many years at Middlesex University, leaving to concentrate on writing fiction. Her first novel Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves was published in 2017 by Penguin and was shortlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2018. Her short story, ‘Wires’ was longlisted for the V. S. Pritchett Short Story Prize in 2019. Her second novel, Belvedere, will be published in 2027 by Wilton Square Books.

‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

A story about reputation, the relations between truth and spectacle and the prison space of the ideal reader, story and telling are both so daring you gasp with delight. Borges is convinced that a short story can be absolutely anything he wants it to be – and why not. The tale concerns the dramatic assassination of a much-loved national independence hero, or rather the unravelling of what ‘really’ happened by the hero’s great grandson who is compiling his biography. The idea that stories should be, if not exactly original, then at least different from other stories, is demolished:

“The action transpires in some oppressed and stubborn country: Poland, Ireland, the Republic of Venice, some state in South America or the Balkans … Has transpired, we should say, for although the narrator is contemporary, the narrative related by him occurred towards the middle or beginning of the nineteenth century. Let us say, for purposes of narration, that it was in Ireland, in 1824. The narrator is named Ryan …’

This is not only a story that could happen in many times and places and has. It also bears uncanny resemblances to famous historical events and literary texts, as Ryan discovers. These likenesses both ground the story as the tale of a ‘true’ hero, and suggest complex, near-unbelievable duplicity.

First published in Spanish in Sur in February 1944. First published in English in Fictions, Jupiter Books, 1965, translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Also available, translated by Andrew Hurley, in Collected Fictions, Penguin, 1999

‘Her Table Spread’ by Elizabeth Bowen

I have never been sure about what happens at the end of this story and I won’t speculate here, except to say that all the possibilities are disturbing.

The action takes place over a single evening. An Englishman, Alban, whose point of view prevails for much of the story, has been invited to a dinner party at a grand house, or ‘Castle’, owned by an Anglo-Irish heiress, Valeria Cuff. The exactness of the moment, after the Anglo-Irish Treaty but presumably before the Civil War, gives specific charge to the Gothic elements of the tale.

House and inhabitants are the ghosts and relics of the dying Protestant Ascendancy. Valeria’s avid sexual exuberance and disproportionate ambitions promise transgression. An English destroyer, moored in the estuary, intimates violence. And yet. The story’s tone and form are comic. The vain dinner guest quickly discovers that the lady of the house is more excited about the arrival of other visitors. Attempts at elegance founder, Alban sets down to play a damp piano. “He played badly, but they were unmusical.” In the strange, expectant atmosphere which Bowen creates with such delicate discipline, comic misunderstanding thrives but so do Gothic delusions and hallucinations. By the end of the story, the boundaries and differences between the two have become difficult for the reader to fathom.

First published as ‘A Conversation Piece’ in The Broadsheet Press, May 1930. Collected in Collected Stories, Vintage Classics, 1999

‘Catastrophe’ by Dino Buzzati, translated by Judith Landry

The Tartar Steppe (1940) was my introduction to Buzzati. It occupies one of my favourite types of literary space: a highly specific, plausible world whose logic and ontology remains just out of view. Many of the stories in this collection exist in similar territory, including ‘Catastrophe’. The story has a very simple shape. The narrator is on a non-stop, fast train to Northern Italy when an idle glance out of the window reveals the unexpected. A woman leaning on the fence, who he is smugly sure is watching his train speed by, is distracted from “a wonderful daily spectacle”, by a man who rushes up to her shouting. Similar episodes follow and start to create a disturbing pattern. The strange behaviour of people outside the train is captured in a few, spare images: a man with cupped hands calling across a field, fields of corn and lucerne trampled by anxious, running feet. As the train hurtles through a station, “[a] small boy with a bundle of newspapers tried to chase after us, waving one with great black headline on the front page…” Like many of Buzzati’s stories, ‘Catastrophe’ is about anxiety. The story starts to bounce between the images of flight and panic beyond the train and the passengers’ attempt to ignore what is obvious or break the silence, even when everyone stares at the emergency cord at the same moment. But no one does anything and they carry on hurtling towards the very place from which everyone else is fleeing, and the reader must travel with them.

First published in English in Catastrophe and Other Stories, Alma Classics, 2018

‘The Lady of the House of Love’ by Angela Carter

Rewritings of fairy tales and myths from alternative perspectives are now so ubiquitous that it’s worth returning to Carter’s collection to grasp just what a challenge her writing represents. ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ is a vampire story, and I love vampires, but the vampire heroine, with her enormous dark eyes and monstrously luscious mouth longs to escape her Nosferatu ancestry and sanguinary appetite. Her next likely victim, a young, blond, British soldier may just offer her salvation. “He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip around the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion.”

The young soldier thinks the lady of the house is wearing an old wedding dress – shades of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. But she also seems not human, a ventriloquist’s doll or automaton – a favourite figure in Carter – which also evokes Estella, Miss Havisham’s puppet. Like the other stories in The Bloody Chamber, ‘The Lady … ’ foregrounds fairy tale law: the mute crone who offers supper and a bed for the night to the lonely traveller, stark visual polarities, the concealed, vivid presence of the supernatural, and all manner of vampire lore. Above all, it is the patriarchal and determinist logic of fairy tales that Carter dissolves with her characteristic meshing of the critical and the erotic, not to speak of history hidden in plain sight.

Frst published in The Iowa Review, 1975. Collected in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Gollancz 1979 and in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Vintage 1996.

‘The Reservoir’ by Janet Frame

The children are told not to go to the reservoir by their parents, but no one explains why. Is it too far? Is it dangerous? Inevitably it exerts a fascination, over a long, hot, boring summer.

“It was said to be four or five miles along the gully, past orchards and farms, paddocks filled with cattle, sheep, wheat, gorse, and the squatters of the land who were the rabbits eating like modern sculpture into the hills, though how could we know anything of modern sculpture, we knew nothing but the Warrior in the main street with his wreaths of poppies on Anzac Day, the gnomes weeping in the Gardens because the seagulls perched on their green caps and showed no respect, and how important it was for birds, animals and people, especially children, to show respect!”

Frame’s linguistic brilliance glitters from the very first, long sentence of the story which starts with naturalistic description and standard metaphor – the squatters are rabbits – and then turns strange, the rabbits are eating like “modern sculpture” – changing the shape of the landscape. But the phrase is jarring as the narrator immediately admits, introducing a subsequent self who sees differently.

Frame is one of my favourite writers, fusing psychological complexity with a quicksilver imaginary. Her take on the growing-up story explores childhood knowledge as an ever-shifting threshold. The children wander around Woolworths looking at condoms that might be finger stalls, no one is sure. The same goes for the iron lung that afflicts some of the children. Is it a site of glamour, something akin to the iron mask of the Count of Monte Cristo, or is it something to be terrified of?

First published in The New Yorker in January 1963. Collected in The Daylight and the Dust: Selected Short Stories, Virago, 2015. Read online at the Internet Archive here

‘From Far Around They Saw Us Burn’ by Alice Jolly

‘From Far Away …’ is closely based on real events, a fire at St Joseph’s Orphanage in Cavan, the Irish Free State in 1943. Here, as elsewhere, Jolly seems drawn to characters whose voices have been erased or cannot be heard. There’s a paradox then in the form of the story which is so polyvocal. Everyone in the town has something to say about what happened, and there is all manner of details about fire hoses, keys and fire escapes, who saw and did what, which belong to the register of the legal enquiry. A narrative of attempted rescue is interlaced with a collective ‘we’ – a group of girls trapped in an upstairs dormitory as the fire advances. The tension is desperate, but long after reading this story, you wonder about their voices and the plane from which they speak.

First published in The Best Short Stories 2021: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jenny Minto Quigley, Anchor Books, 2021. Collected in From Far Around They Saw Us Burn, Unbound, 2023

‘So Late in the Day’ by Claire Keegan

Cathal, the main character and perspective in the story is a man you might have met but wouldn’t want to know. The combination of his symptomatically revelatory actions and unwillingness to reflect or follow difficult thoughts makes for the most brilliantly uncomfortable reading. Developing over a single afternoon and evening, the story switches between a recent past when Cathal starts a relationship with an Anglo-French woman, Simone, and a lonely present. Something has gone drastically wrong but there’s a tension in its progression that feels disproportionate to the content.

As he tries to work out and avoid what happened, we accumulate “evidence”: his criticism of the “lazy” women he sees in Vermeer paintings, the recurring anger about the six Euros he spent on cherries, his irritation at the space her stuff takes up when she moves in. There are funny if jaw-dropping details and spare, normalised moments of horror but, as always with Keegan, the individual always leads to the systemic and institutional.

First published in French as a stand-alone story, ‘Misogynie’ and translated from the English by Jacqueline Odin. Published in English in The New Yorker, February 2022, and then as a stand-alone story by Faber, 2023. Listen to Keegan reading the story here.

‘Quaestio Di Centauris’ by Primo Levi, translated by Jenny McPhee

The Latin title (‘On the question of Centaurs’) mimics a learned treatise and promises a narrative of classification, what is a centaur? We are told of the centaur’s extraordinary physiognomy, exhausting eating habits and mythical origins, which substitute the dull two-by-two of Noah’s ark with a period of wild desire, fecundity and mixing of all kinds. But Trachi, the centaur in the story, exists in a recognisable, non-magical world where he is constrained and nearly invisible. He is owned by the narrator’s father and lives in a stable, though he has human friends who value his wisdom. As the narrative unfolds, we realise that this is a story about the terrible violence of classification. It may well be the most beautiful story I’ve ever read.

First published in Italian in Storie Naturali, 1966. Published in English in The New Yorker in 2015. Collected in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories edited by Jhumpa Lahiri. Listen to Lahiri reading the story here

‘Mario the Magician’ by Thomas Mann, translated from the German by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter

Is it a novella or a short story? For the purposes of this list, definitely a short story and one which has everything, including a terrifying magic show. The narrator is a father on holiday from Vienna with his wife and two young children at a coastal resort in Southern Italy. His attention and anxieties are the familiar ones of the tourist. He wants his family to have a wonderful time, but a series of unpleasant incidents occur leave them uncomfortable and dissatisfied. They are not allowed to eat on the terrace, they are forced to move hotel, and their young daughter is upbraided for her behaviour. The incidents appear unconnected but are part of a social and political logic: nationalist, exclusionary, judgemental. This is Italy in the late 1920s, some years into the Fascist era. The second half of the story takes places on a single evening when the narrator and his family go to a magic show hoping for a different, lighter mood. The reader suspects that things will take a darker turn but not the ugly, amorphous form the turn will take.

First published in German as a novella in 1929. First published in English by Martin Secker, 1930. Collected in Mario and the Magician and Other Stories, Vintage, 2000

‘The Man without a Temperament’ by Katherine Mansfield

I read Katherine Mansfield and this story obsessively when I was looking after my mum in the year before her death. I had, still have, the idea of a writing a collection of essays about this one story, drawing on my many readings. The setting is brilliant: a long stay hotel in the South of France where nearly everyone is on special diets. The gossipy, fussy clientele are nearly all displaced by illness or the aftermath of the First World War. It’s about the complicated dynamic between carer and cared-for, though in this case it’s a married couple, not a child and their parent. And we see nearly everything from the carer’s point of view. Robert’s wife Jinnie could be dying – it isn’t certain – but what Jinnie knows or thinks about this is not the focus of the story, though it scratches at the door wanting to come in. Just how resentful Robert may be is revealed by his shocking final word in the story, but it’s not conclusive. The setting and minor characters contribute actively to the psychological dynamic between husband and wife. Robert is devoted and punctilious but also distracted and resentful and Mansfield’s representation of conventional masculinity being undermined is just brilliant.

First published in Art and Letters, Spring 2020, then collected in Bliss and Other Stories Constable, 1920. Now widely available, including in the Selected Stories, Oxford World Classics, 2008

‘The Assignment’ by Saadat Hasan Manto, translated by Khalid Hasan

Manto is probably most famous among English readers for his story ‘Toba Tek Singh’, when Partition come for the inmates of a Lahore asylum. It’s a fabulous story and you should definitely read it, but I decided on a different one here, ‘The Assignment’. It’s my most directly personal choice, as my father was one of millions who fled their homes in fear of their lives in August 1947.

Over the years, my dad told many stories about how he, his sisters and parents left India and travelled by train to Lahore in what was about to become Pakistan, where they claimed the empty house of a family fleeing the other way. But I don’t think I ever got the full version, or whether he could have told it. The figures will always be disputed but more than twelve million Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus became refugees and at least a million were murdered in intercommunal violence. Muslims attacked Sikhs and Hindus, Hindus and Sikhs attacked Muslims. Many were attacked as they fled. Trains arrived at their destinations with every passenger murdered. Manto wrote compulsively about the multi-formed violence of Partition and many of his stories, sketches and fragments, some just a few sentences long, are collected in Mottled Dawn. ‘The Assignment’ is set in Amritsar, my dad’s home city:

“Beginning with isolated incidents of stabbing, it had now developed into full-scale communal violence, with no holds barred. Even home-made bombs were being used.

The general view in Amritsar was that the riots could not last long …”

The gap between the first paragraph and the second is what the whole story is about. The cool, documentary narration never breaks down but the general gives way to a particular household, a retired (Muslim) judge, his seventeen-year-old daughter, Sughra, younger son and elderly servant. While their Muslim neighbours decamp to a Muslim neighbourhood (still believing the danger to be temporary), the father insists they stay put, but when Sughra goes up onto the roof, she sees ‘too many fires in too many places’. It soon becomes clear that they are prisoners in their home. Order breaks down, but tradition and the rule of the young by the old do not. The old judge is sure that the customary will be restored. His daughter knows that something irreversible has occurred. Both are right and the consequences are tragic.

First published in Urdu in Yazid, 1951 as ‘Gurmukh Singh Ki Wasiyat’ (The Last Will of Gurmukh Singh). First published in English as ‘The Assignment’ and collected in Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, Penguin Modern Classics, 2011

‘The Dead Girls’ Class Trip’ by Anna Seghers, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo

This is probably my favourite short story of all time – for now. It was written by Seghers when she was in Mexico after fleeing Nazi Germany and Europe in 1941. From the start, the female narrator is confused and disoriented, recovering or suffering from an unspecified illness akin to the narrator of Poe’s famous ‘The Man of the Crowd’. The hot, bleached Mexican setting constructs (or makes possible) a time-slip mirage where she is transported back to the Germany of her childhood and a class trip she took along the Rhine, where she is reunited with two of her dearest school friends. As in a dream or nightmare, her vision keeps opening into different spaces, a café by the waterside, the quay where they watch a boat of boys arrive. This nostalgic drive is seductive for narrator and reader, details of hairstyles, of one classmate pouring milk, or two others dressing the chair of a favourite teacher with flowers. But the narrator’s return is weighed down with what is to come. She knows the precise futures of everyone she encounters and is compelled to record their fates. Seghers has both narrator and reader hovering between times in ways that remind me of Sebald’s temporal vertigos.

First published in German in 1946. Collected in The Dead Girls’ Class Trip: Selected Stories, NYRB Classics, 2021