‘The Fifth Story’ by Clarice Lispector, translated by Giovanni Pontiero

If you’ve read The Passion According to GH, you’ll know Clarice has a thing about vermin – as do I. This very short story is about a woman dealing with an infestation of cockroaches. It begins by outlining all the possible alternate titles the story could have had, and how she will

…tell at least three stories, all of them true, because none of the three will contradict the others. Although they constitute one story, they could become a thousand and one, were I to be granted a thousand and one nights. 

In the first story, she learns a horrible kitchen potion for killing them and in the second she puts it to use. By the time we reach the third story, she must face the aftermath of what she has done, squaring up to an existential horror that is at once domestic and universal. I won’t spoil what comes next, except to say that these moments are replayed and echoed, and what seems to be a resolution is absolutely not, exploding your preconception of narrative, passage of time, intent, self, the natural world, violence, obsession and a fair few other things too.

First published as ‘A quinta história’ in A legião estrangeira, 1964 and in translation in The Foreign Legion, New Directions. Also in the Complete Stories, New Directions, 2015, and in Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms, Persea. You can read it in full here

‘And You Will Stand On Windswept Beaches’ by Owen Booth

This is another one of my favourite secret stories, discovered quivering and jellified, fresh from the author’s brain. I could happily have chosen Owen Booth’s prize-winning White Review story or his Moth Short Story Prize winner, and nearly did, but I prefer this one for its concealed power. It was given away as an Influx Patreon Incentive in 2018, openly acknowledged as a ‘work in progress’, complete with the odd typo.

And you will be a warning to others. And you will be a cautionary tale. And you will be the before in the before and after pictures. And you will be terrified, most of the time, and like an idiot you will visit your fear and pain on everyone around you. And one day everything will finally fall apart in front of you and you won’t even realise that this is the best thing that could possible [sic] have happened. And you will trudge across snowy fields keeping your eyes out for rogue polar bears because you never know. 

For me this is like dipping my toe into an elemental stream of consciousness as it bubbles fresh from underground. It’s almost a sermon. It’s shapeless and every sentence starts with an ‘And’ and I absolutely freaking love it. 

Gifted an Influx Patreon Incentive, 2018

‘Tailors’ Dummies’ by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celia Wieniewska

Okay, so I’m cheating (again) here. Technically Street of Crocodiles is a ‘novelistic collection of short stories’ and technically I want to include all four chapters about tailor’s dummies. But anyway. I’ve always been a sucker for descriptions of dysfunctional family dynamics, and this particular depiction of a household is like nothing else. Described by Schulz himself as a “genealogy of the spirit”, he manufactures myth from the plain and obvious, weaving place and atmosphere so vividly and yet allowing everything to bleed together and feel utterly insubstantial and unclear. 

In ‘Tailors’ Dummies’ the largely invisible narrator’s father is parading around the family house, indulging in increasingly eccentric flights of intellectual and imaginative fancy.  

The affair of the birds was the last colourful and splendid counteroffensive of fantasy which my father, that incorrigible improviser, that fencing master of imagination, had led against the trenches and defenseworks of a sterile and empty winter. Only now do I understand the lonely hero who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city. 

I can’t coherently do justice to what follows, so I won’t even try. Other than to say it’s sublime. 

Originally published in Poland in Sklepy cynamonowe, 1934. First published in English in Cinammon Shops, and later reissued as Street of Crocodiles, Penguin 20th Century Classic, 1992

‘Raw Water’ by Wells Tower

It sounds like ropey sci fi – and came from a McSweeney’s Quarterly themed around ‘an investigation of the world to come’ – but this story by Wells Tower is the best kind of down-to-earth unpleasantness. A married couple – Rodney and Cora Booth – travel out to a holiday caravan on the edge of a “do-it-yourself ocean”, a manmade sea that has turned red thanks to a bunch of one-celled organisms that thrive in the salt. It’s supposedly harmless, but weird stuff starts happening to them and Rodney begins regressing to a primal state. 

 Even in the new hours of the day, the water was hot and alarmingly solid, like paddling through Crisco. It seared his pores and mucous parts, but his body had a thrilling buoyancy in the thick water. A single kick of the legs sent him gliding like a hockey puck.

Needless to say, things get very creepy, though you never quite know if the lustful, elemental transformation overtaking Rodney is caused by the water or something else about this place on the edge of things. Tower is an arch-stylist and this is one of my favourites of his simply because it’s so hard to find, compared to his extraordinary collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. We’re well overdue a follow up, so hopefully he’s completing the final edits on the periphery of some remote, hostile expanse right now. 

Published in McSweeney’s 32, 2009

‘We Are the 300-year-old Big Bois of the Sea and We Did Not Come to Play’ by Emrys Donaldson

Getting Electric Literature straight to your inbox is always a good thing, but nothing has so totally shaken me out of the stupor of the ordinary working day quite like this story from Emrys Donaldson. Their story is nearly impossible to categorise. The best I can do is that it is a primal scream of frustration from ancient/futuristic crustaceans, turning an oceanographic lexicon into a unique study of consciousness, place, balance and ecosystemic connectedness. By turns surreal and moving, it’s shatteringly good. 

We are the three-hundred-year-old heckin big bois of the sea, grown larger than any of our kind has ever been before, covered in carapaces made of titanium custom-molded to our bodies, the embodied dreams of our elders who gradually decayed until they collapsed into fleshy heaps on the floor of the sea, fortified with the language we developed to sustain us, suited up in our cyborg flesh probably able to live forever, placed here in the time where we have a fighting chance at taking over the rest of this water planet, kind among our kind, moulting with the assistance of bigboi doctors and bigboi scientists, investigating the future-focused potentialities of telomerase manipulation, well-armored against enemies of any size, and we did not come to play.

Published in Electric Literature, Nov 9, 2020 – Issue No 141, You can read it here

‘Al Roosten’ by George Saunders

No map of my psycho-fictional-geography would be complete without a nod to George Saunders and Tenth of December, my favourite of his collections. He’s like an acupuncturist who somehow knows your internal nervous system so well that he can just reach over and prod you somewhere and before you know it you’re laughing and crying simultaneously. 

Al Roosten is a painful and very funny exploration of one man stranded in his own life, yo-yoing between over-confident aloofness and crushing self-doubt. It opens with him backstage at a Local Celebrities charity auction, comparing himself to a buff, swimsuit-wearing rival. When he eventually follows him on stage, a new bar is set for literary cringe: 

Roosten stepped warily out from behind the paper screen. No one whooped. He started down the runway. No cheering. The room made the sound a room makes when attempting not to laugh. He tried to smile sexily but his mouth was too dry. Probably his yellow teeth were showing and the place where his gums dipped down. Frozen in the harsh spotlight, he looked so crazy and old and forlorn and yet residually arrogant that an intense discomfort settled on the room, a discomfort that, in a non-charity situation, might have led to shouted insults or thrown objects but in this case drew a kind of pity whoop from near the salad bar.

Al is tormented by the life he’s been given by a culture that is full of paradoxes and disappointment, that asks such strange mental athletics of identity to feel like you have a role with value. It moves effortlessly between his self-critical and self-congratulatory POV and objective third person narration, no mean feat. The painfully flawed antihero has never been in more masterful hands. 

First published in The New Yorker, February 2009, and available to subscribers to read here, and collected in Tenth of December, Random House/Bloomsbury, 2013

‘Teddy’ by JD Salinger

There’s not a bum note in Salinger’s collection For Esme with Love and Squalor, but the closing story is the best. Set on a cruise ship, it centres around Teddy McArdle, a ten-year-old blessed with a universal wisdom far beyond his years. He rises above his sniping family’s emotional, easily riled American excesses, calmly musing on concepts of permanence, reality and reincarnation.

As the story gently leads us towards his 10:30am swimming lesson Teddy, we learn that he a cause célèbre among high ranking professors of religion and philosophy in various countries. Before this trip to Europe, he left some deeply ruffled feathers among an examination group in Boston. The tape of the occasion has been heard by a fellow traveller who corners Teddy, anxious to interrogate him on his views about life, God, death and existence.  

‘I understand you left a pretty disturbed bunch–’
‘“Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,”’ Teddy said suddenly. ‘“Along this road goes no one, this Autumn eve.”’ 
‘What was that?’ Nicholson asked, smiling. ‘Say that again.’
‘Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff,’ Teddy said.

The lightness with which Teddy embodies this enlightenment makes the impact of the final, inevitable scene – to which we’ve been inexorably drawn throughout – all the more devastating.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1953 and collected in Nine Stories, a.k.a. For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, Little, Brown/Penguin, 1953

‘Wild Milk’ by Sabrina Orah Mark

Every now and then you come across a story that operates on a completely different frequency and yet makes so much sense it hurts. ‘Wild Milk’’s narrator is leaving her baby at Live Oak Daycare for the first time, and the description of those feelings and exchanges trace a vivid network of associations that I relate to intensely. It shines a Klieg light on the disorientating and illogical pain of navigating your offspring’s separateness from you in the world. 

“Your child,” says Miss Birdy, “is a phenomenon.” I blush. “Oh, thank you. We too think he is very special,” I say. I want to ask about the poncho, but Miss Birdy goes on. “I mean, your child is a mana mana,” says Miss Birdy. “What I mean to say is that your child is a real man.” Miss Birdy softly pinches her tongue and pulls out a long white hair. “Oh, that’s better,” she says. “I mean, a ma.” She makes little, tiny spits. “I mean, a no one. Your child,” says Miss Birdy, “is a real no one. No, no. That’s not it either.” Miss Birdy smoothes her stiff cotton skirt. It’s pink with tiny red cherries on it. “What I mean to say, most of all,” says Miss Birdy, “is that I love not being dead.” “Me too,” I say. “Oh, good! says Miss Birdy. Here’s his bottle. He drank all his milk and then cried and cried and cried for more.

First published by Tin House, 2014 and available to read here. Later collected in Wild Milk, Dorothy a Publishing Project, 2018

‘Full Frontal’ by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox

Assuming it’s a mission in your life, how do you find your way to new writers? One thing I do is follow the Nobel Prize scene. Not necessarily those who win (another white European, yawn) but those whose names are frequently mentioned yet never land that big Swedish gong. One of whom is Maryse Condé from Guadeloupe. As a black woman from a small Francophone island, Condé hasn’t made much headway in our dreary Anglo-Saxon world with its weather eye always on America. Which is a shame because she’s the most terrific writer. Every story in this collection, Tales from the Heart:True Stories from My Childhood, is superb. (And when we read, in the account of her own birth, that “The colours and lights of the word around me were no consolation for the nine months in the dark where I had swum blind and happy with catfish fins,” we might feel inclined to treat one or two of these ‘true’ stories with a sprinkling of salt.)

Sometimes gently, sometimes violently, the veils of childhood innocence are removed. One of the most striking stories in the collection is ‘Full Frontal’. Born the youngest child of a large family, with a vigorous mother – “the success story of her generation”, Condé calls her – and a wealthy but ageing father, the young Maryse is the spoiled baby of the family. Having decided one day to pay a spontaneous visit to a cousin, Madame Condé packs Maryse into their Citroen (that’s how successful they are) and off they set across the island. When they arrive the house is a pigsty and a woman’s screaming. Right there and then the cousin’s wife, Charlotte, is giving birth – and no midwife to be found as it’s a Sunday. Shooing Maryse away, Madame Condé delivers the baby with the help of a servant dressed in a butcher’s apron, all the while speaking in forbidden Creole. Maryse, meanwhile, banished to the room next door, hasn’t (for once) sought companionship in a book. Through a hole in the wall she and host of other children compete to watch the birth from start to finish.

As bloated as a blimp, Charlotte was lying spread-eagled on the bed. Her centre, gaping open like a drainpipe, was spurting blood… I who lived with blinkers on my eyes with a mother who never told me anything, not a word about periods or menstruation… was intent on seeing everything. I saw the head of the baby appear. I saw its entire body sticky with mucus and faecal matter.

Afterwards she faints, then dashes off to tell her brother Sandrino: “For once his little sister had got the better of him. I had been enriched by an experience he would have trouble bettering.” From page 1 of this collection you know you’re in the hands of a master. Simple sentences with bite, vivid images, compressed events. Alas, Maryse Condé is now 84 years old and not in the best of health, but I hope to read, in the newspapers, that story about her collecting the big Swedish gong.

First published in French in Le coeur à rire et à pleurer: souvenirs de mon enfance, Editions Robert Laffont, 1998. Published in English in Tales from the Heart: True Stories from my Childhood, Soho Press, 2001

‘Thurkell the Tall’ by Jill Paton-Walsh

Personally, I would rather have been born a Guadeloupean – or Gallic, or Russian. But since my DNA comes from unvarying Anglo-Saxon stock I might as well read about them every once in a while. In this book, Wordhoard, stories by Jill Paton-Walsh alternate with others by Kevin Crossley-Holland (did one have to possess a double-barrelled name to make it into this collection?), all covering the years between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of William the Bastard. Some are duffers, some are very much not. 
 
But first the cover: a garish hybrid of Anglo-Saxon style ornamentation and early 1970s psychedelia. Who could resist such a potent brew? Besides, these old Puffins are so evocative of long-ago school libraries and the books teachers wanted you to read but which you never did. Turns out some of them are quite good! This wonderful story, ‘Thurkell the Tall’, starts in media res. Crowds of frightened people huddle inside Canterbury cathedral while besieging Vikings attempt to batter their way in. The year is 1012 AD. When the battering ram fails, the Vikings set fire to the building – iron spear-points await any who escape. A handful do survive, and one of them happens to be Alfig, the Archbishop himself. Kept as a high-value hostage by Danish warlord Thurkell The Tall, Alfig does a fair amount of preaching, converts a number of his captors to Christianity, antagonises the rest, until finally he’s slaughtered at a feast by Vikings shitfaced on mead. Upon hearing the news, Thurkell the Tall is filled with such disgust and heaviness of spirit that he himself converts and changes sides. (But don’t worry, Alfig, you did enough to be canonised – now you’re St. Alphege!)
 
All true and brought magically to life by Paton-Walsh. Which only leaves one pondering why one ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ should be so enshrined in history, while that of Alfig, a mere 158 years earlier, could be so utterly forgotten. The answer lies in the self-serving historiography of the Norman ruling class, of course. But there’s no time to get into that now.

Published in Wordhoard: Anglo-Saxon Stories for Young People, Puffin Books, 1972

‘The Death of Dolgushov’ by Isaac Babel, translated by David McDuff

Jump forward nine hundred years and here’s another war story. Men love them apparently – as much as war itself. Can’t get enough of them! Isaac Babel couldn’t, anyway, not in 1920. By then he’d met Maxim Gorky in Petrograd (as St Peterburg had been renamed) and shown him his early short stories. “Not bad,” Gorky says, “but you’re still pretty young, you need to go out and experience life a bit more. Then you’ll really have something to write about.” 

No sooner said than done: Babel’s conscripted into the Tsarist army and sent to the Romanian front during WW1 – his desertion and return home later to be described in his incredible seven-page story ‘The Journey’. Not content with that exploit he then volunteers to become a war correspondent with the Red Cavalry during the Soviet-Polish war of 1920.

The Red Cavalry stories are famous for their concision. But an equally important aspect is the tension throughout, the tension that’s manifest within the Babel-character himself. On one hand he’s the “milksop intellectual” with “glasses on his nose”, yearning after his Jewish heritage: “Oh, Talmuds of my childhood, turned to dust!” At the same time he’s desperate to shed these aspects of his personality and become a “noble savage”, an authentic manly warrior like the Cossacks he finds himself among. All the Red Cavalry stories treat this tension to some extent, but in ‘The Death of Dolgushov’ the movement between the two inner personalities ends in humiliating defeat for the heroic. 

Following an attack, Comrade Dolgushov lies on the side of the road: “His stomach had been torn out, his intestines had sagged down to his knees, and the beating of his heart was visible.” Dolgushov, however, can still speak: “If the Poles come they’ll make a right ninny of me… You’ll have to spend a cartridge on me,” he tells the narrator. (We know from his 1920 Diary that Babel found himself in these and other very similar situations). 

But Babel can’t do it. He runs away. And the response he receives from the Cossacks he wishes so badly to emulate has, here, the vicious ring of authenticity: “Go away,” says Afonka Bida (until that moment Babel’s best friend), “Or I’ll kill you. You four-eyed lot have as much pity for us as a cat has for a mouse.” Afonka Bida does not hesitate to place his revolver in Dolgushov’s mouth and pull the trigger. 

Whether or by how much this episode was self-dramatised we’ll never know. But a word on modern approaches to this writer. Many editors these days prefer to seek the wellsprings of Babel’s talent in his Jewishness – which is fertile ground indeed. Much has been revealed. Yet many of these same editors evince bafflement that Babel could have supported the Russian Revolution, or not availed himself of the opportunity to flee Russia when he had the chance to do so. In order to explain away Babel’s revolutionary activities during these years they insist on seeing in his lines heavy doses of irony. 

For myself, I detect little of this quality, and in sentences such as this: “The evening flew up towards the sky like a flock of birds, and the darkness laid its wet wreath upon me. I was exhausted and, bent under the sepulchral crown, moved forward, begging fate for the simplest of abilities – the ability to kill a man” (from ‘After the Battle’), I find none at all.

First published in Russian in 1926. First published in English in Red Cavalry and Other Stories, 1994, and in Penguin Classics in 2005

‘Weekend’ by Fay Weldon

If the irony isn’t quite so ever-present in Isaac Babel as some like to think, in Fay Weldon’s ‘Weekend’ it’s so developed it’s heading straight for a thunderhead of bitterness. Martha works in an advertising agency, she’s married to Martin, is mother to three young children. As the story begins the family are about to set off for an idyllic weekend in their country cottage. Away from London and, supposedly, their cares and worries. But Martha does everything while her husband has a nice line in lazing around and delivering barbed comments.

Weekend guests arriving in the morning. Seven for lunch and dinner on Saturday. Seven for Sunday breakfast, nine for Sunday lunch. (Martin: ‘Don’t fuss darling. You always make such a fuss’).

She’s left reeling and worn out by the never-ending list of chores and small emergencies that arise, and this weekend isn’t an exception – it’s the pattern of her life. What I find fascinating is Weldon’s attitude to her protagonist. On a first read you can’t help but feel outraged on Martha’s behalf. Everyone’s taking the fullest advantage of her. They’re draining her life-energy and they’re as ignorant as vampire bats. The screw’s then twisted further when Colin, Martin’s oldest friend, turns up at the cottage with his new, attractive younger partner, Katie. 

Katie is his new wife. Janet, Colin’s other, earlier wife, was Martha’s friend. Janet was rather like Martha, quieter and duller than her husband. A nag and a drag, Martin rather thought, and said, and of course she’d let herself go, everyone agreed. No one exactly excused Colin for walking out, but you could see the temptation… Katie was languid, beautiful and elegant.

This languid, beautiful and elegant creature then proceeds to patronise Martha in various ways and generally make things more unpleasant than they already were.

So we see the drift. It’s an overtly feminist commentary on getting older, on being compared unfavourably to those who happen to be more beautiful, on the extraction and exploitation of unpaid labour in the form of housework. Yet re-readings reveal another, psychological, side: Martha’s complicity in being exploited, her willingness to put up with it, and Weldon’s camouflaged contempt for her protagonist. It only breaks through once or twice, but it’s there undeniably, a current that’s powerful if almost invisible. And here we have to bring in Weldon herself, who (allegedly) was neglectful of her own children. I don’t believe for a minute that Fay Weldon would have allowed herself to be treated like Martha is in this story. So what’s going on? Herein, I believe, lies a touch of James Frazer’s ‘homeopathic magic’. In creating this masterpiece-in-miniature, in externalising it, was there a process at work of self-justification, even expiation? It’s speculation only – possibly half-baked. Neither should such an interpretation detract in any way from the larger, truthful, critique of patriarchy’s structural forms. 

First published in Cosmopolitan, 1978. Collected in Watching Me, Watching You, Hodder & Stoughton, 1981 and also in The Penguin Book of Modern Women’s Short Stories, ed. Susan Hill, 1990

‘Aghwee the Sky Monster’ by Kenzaburō Ōe, translated by John Nathan

At least the children in ‘Weekend’ are real. The same can’t be said for the giant baby, “about the size of a kangaroo”, who takes a starring role in Kenzaburo Oe’s tale of a college graduate’s first job. Oe grew up in a village in rural Japan and was ten years old when the Americans occupied his country in 1945. Gifted with intelligence, he escaped the village to study at a Tokyo university. All looked set for a prosperous bourgeois future. Then, at 29, his first child born with serious brain damage. Everything I’ve read by Oe (Oh-way) deals with this catastrophe in one way or another. The pattern on a foundation level is a retreat into the realm of pure imagination, somewhat reminiscent of William Blake, who gets a mention towards the end of this story. Into his foundation, Oe cuts silicon-chip complexities uniquely his own and which sometimes take a bit of figuring out.

A first-person narrator is employed by a wealthy banker to be a ‘companion’ to his son, a thirty-year old composer who’s undergoing some sort of nervous breakdown and, the implication goes, needs protecting from himself. After encountering the man’s ex-wife and his movie actress mistress, our narrator discovers that there’s no nervous breakdown, but instead a madness inside the composer which exhibits itself in the form of an invisible friend who lives in the sky, and who pops down for a chat every now and then. The consensus is that this invisible friend is the imaginary ghost of the man’s dead and deformed baby, and it’s called ‘Aghwee’ because that was the single word the baby spoke while it lived. “That’s a pretty mushy way to name the ghost that’s haunting you, don’t you think?” comments the ex-wife bitterly. But is this ghost-baby really a delusion? By the closing pages the narrator himself has come to believe that Aghwee and other giant amoeba-like beings really do inhabit the sky, each representing a personal loss of great magnitude. Like William Blake watching his golden angels streaming above the roofs of Soho, he even sees them for a moment.

In real-life, Oe’s son, Hikari, did not die. According to John Nathan, Oe’s friend and translator: “Suffice to say that over the years as [the child] grew up, a fierce, exclusive, isolating bond developed between father and son.’” Now that son is a grown man, and Oe himself elderly. His 1996 book, A Healing Family, celebrates the small triumphs of their life together.

From Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe, Marion Boyars, 1978

‘The Moment of Eclipse’ by Brian Aldiss

Sometimes books walk into your life. One a day a friend knocked on the door with a cardboard box. “My teacher colleague’s leaving England, he’s going to Saudi Arabia to teach princes,” she tells me. “The princes aren’t bothered about English, all they care about is their falcons – each one has to have its own seat on the plane. Anyway, he can’t take these, so help yourself.” I open the box, not small, and it’s crammed with science fiction books. “Thanks, I will!” Plenty of space opera, which I’ve never had time to read, but other jewels were in there. My diamond – and again it was the cover which first drew my eye – was, still is, Best SF Stories of Brian Aldiss. Published by Faber from the days when they were still committed to putting out science fiction. (In Charles Monteith, Brian Aldiss had found his dream editor, to whom he gives fulsome praise at the beginning of this volume).
 
There are so many good stories here. ‘The Moment of Eclipse’ is a dazzler. Aldiss throws so many elements into the narrative that you don’t believe he’ll possibly be able to pull it off. How’s he going to develop and resolve them all? In a novel, maybe. In a short story, no chance. Yet he does, and with style. In his Introduction (dated July 1970) Aldiss speaks of writing from “an ill-defined place within which one is aware of a mystery”, or of those occasional stories which open “gates in the mind”. Into this narrow category which might crudely be labelled ‘total success’ he places only this story, ‘The Moment of Eclipse’, and ‘Old Hundredth’. The sly hint is that something effortless has happened, that those obstacles which ordinarily inhibit or stultify creativity came down and, so, the story rushed in fully formed, a tidal wave over a breached seawall. It’s a nice fairy tale – if I understand the hint, which I may not have – but I don’t buy it. I think he must have had to work his arse off to make ‘The Moment of Eclipse’ such a triumph. And perhaps it is very very slightly rushed towards the end. But that would be to pick the most unreasonable of holes. Better by far to immerse yourself and feel the heft. Taking apart a story as complex as this may not be a great idea, in case it doesn’t go back together again afterwards.

First published in The Moment of Eclipse, Faber, 1970, and collected in Best SF Stories of Brian W. Aldiss, Faber, 1971 and The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s (Part 4), Harper Voyager, 2015