‘Strategies Against Sleeping’ by Liliana Heker, translated by Alberto Manguel and Miranda France

Another Latin American – from Argentina this time – and not even one who has lived in Spain, but Heker’s short story ‘Strategies Against Sleeping’ was inspired by a long car journey the author took from Segovia to Madrid, and since it was the first short story of hers I ever translated, it has a special place in my heart. The story starts with the narrator setting off on her journey and looking forward to nodding off on the back seat, but the driver – who is himself fighting an urge to sleep – keeps asking her to talk to him (“Please, Talk to Me” provides the title for this collection). The woman makes some half-hearted attempts at conversation but, as is often the case with Heker’s work, what seems like a fairly straightforward situation gradually reveals itself to be charged with unexpected menace, taking an extraordinary turn at the end. The Argentine writer and intellectual Alberto Manguel asked me to translate Heker’s stories with him for this collection and I was grateful to be introduced to a woman is unusual and engaging, both on the page and in person. Her writing, recalling both Saki and Roald Dahl, can be devilishly difficult to translate, though. Once when I asked her what she had meant by a particular phrase she said “I don’t really know, put whatever you think.

First published as ‘Maniobras contra el sueño’, in La crueldad de la vida, Alfaguara, 2001, translation in Please Talk to Me, Yale University Press, 2015

‘Feminist’ by Emilia Pardo Bazán, translated by Maria Cristina Urruela

Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) is an extraordinary figure in Spanish literature. Encouraged by her enlightened father to pursue her education and read whatever she wanted, she was an admirer of Zola and both praised and reviled for introducing Naturalism to Spain. Her ideas on feminism were extremely radical for the time (she judged Spain to be about two hundred years behind the rest of European in terms of sexual equality) and she spoke often about the need for women to receive the same access to education as men.

Pardo Bazán’s outspoken views on female emancipation were considered so scandalous that her husband finally demanded she end her career. She ended her marriage instead, and went on to become Spain’s first female university professor. Best known for her novels, Pardo Bazán also produced nearly six hundred short stories, many of which are very brief, little more than telling vignettes. In ‘Feminist’ – the title itself is a bold statement – we learn how a man has kept his doting wife in her place: on their wedding night he commanded her to put on his trousers, then told her that she would never “wear the trousers” in their relationship again. The tables are turned, though, when the man becomes an invalid, dependent on his wife’s care. Then she gets her own back by making him wear her petticoat every morning and leaving him in it while she goes about other duties, “Just so you know that now you must wear it for the rest of your life.”

First published as ‘Feminista’, translation in Torn Lace and Other Stories, The Modern Language Association of America, 1996

‘Post tenebras spero lucem’ by Bernardo Atxaga, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

My Basque friend Jokim once made me wait at Bilbao bus station for a coach to the airport while he ran to the nearest bookshop to get me a copy of Obabakoak. The publication of this book in 1989 was hugely significant in the Basque Country and across Spain. There is very little literature published in Euskera (Basque), because the language is so hard to learn: a pre-Indo-European language, its origins are mysterious. Euskera was suppressed during the dictatorship (signs in telephone boxes would warn the public to “speak Christian”) and Jokim was among a generation who learned the language of their forebears in clandestine schools.

Obabakoak was not only a vibrant addition to the Basque canon, but the first Euskera novel to win Spain’s National Prize for literature, in a Spanish translation Atxaga produced himself. The title means “the people and events of Obaba”(a fictional village)and the book comprises a series of tales about different characters in a fictional Basque village, a place Atxaga has described an “an interior landscape.”

In this story, a young schoolmistress, far from home and feeling starved of affection, begins to lose her mind in the cold and forbidding landscape of her new posting. A serious soul whose penchant for maths means that she is always counting steps, or mountains or swallows (“one hundred and twenty swallows on one wire and one hundred and forty on the other, two hundred and sixty swallows in all”), she is finally driven by loneliness to seduce one of her young pupils, with disastrous results. Once more, this translation is by the peerless Margaret Jull Costa, who has played such an important part in making Spanish fiction available to a wider audience.

First published in Obabakoak, Erein, 1988 and in translation from Hutchinson, 1992

‘Con Agata en Estamboul’ (With Agatha, in Istanbul) by Cristina Fernández Cubas

Although I have been aware of her for a few years, I hadn’t read any Fernández Cubas until staff in the cultural office of the Spanish Embassy in London recommended her to me. She is known as a writer of fantasy in Spain, but her stories might better be described as unsettling, taking place in realities that are other-worldly and may be permeated by unexplained influences. Her taste for mystery began in childhood, whenFernández Cubas’s brother would tell her stories from Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie.

In this story the narrator travels with her husband to Istanbul for a two-week stay at the Pera Palace, where Christie famously was a regular guest (always staying in room 411). That room is thought to hold answers to the author’s mysterious disappearance in 1926, after a clairvoyant guided investigators to the discovery of a key, under its floorboards, in 1979.

From the start, this story’s characters seem to have entered a parallel world. Istanbul itself, which is permanently shrouded in fog, seems barely to exist; they can’t pick out any of its famous sights. Moreover, the story’s narrator has just turned forty and is troubled by her own identity, just as Christie was at the time of her disappearance. When her husband keeps bumping into a beautiful acquaintance, she becomes increasingly uneasy, especially when a sprained ankle hobbles her and keeps her from joining them. This is not only a strange, compulsive read, but a strong argument for having more of Fernández Cubas available in English. At present one selection of her stories, Nona’s Room, is available, published by Peter Owen.

Published in Todos los Cuentos, Tusquets, 2009

‘The Novel on a Tram’ by Benito Pérez Galdós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Gladós is the Spanish Dickens, a nineteenth-century writer of substantial, satisfying realist novels,the most famous being Fortunata y Jacinta. As a student in Madrid, I devoured this novel, especially a passage which showed Fortunata, a poor woman who suffers at the hands of a series of exploitative men, walking back to her lodgings in Chueca, a rundown area of Madrid. The narrative followed her all the way to my barrio – we were living in the same street! More than a century later, Chueca was still a dodgy part of town and the centre of Madrid’s sex trade. These days it’s very fashionable. Although he was a nineteenth-century novelist, Galdós had distinctly modern traits, and three of his books were brought to the screen by the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. ‘The Novel on the Tram’ (1871) is, in its turn, inspired by Don Quixote. Its protagonist is travelling across Madrid by tram, carrying a parcel of books. He encounters a friend who passes on some gossip about a Countess whose unkind and jealous husband suspects her of having an affair, and whose butler is blackmailing her. After his friend has got off the tram, the narrator falls into a kind of delirium in which he imagines that different people getting on and off the tram are characters from involved in this scandal. Apart from being an entertaining story, ‘The Novel on the Tram’ is a kind of paean to public transport:

…a tram contains a miniature world of passions. We judge many of those we see there to be excellent people, we like their looks and are even saddened when they leave. Then there are those who, on the contrary, we loathe on sight: we hate them for ten minutes, rather rancorously examine their phrenological character, and feel real pleasure when they leave. And meanwhile, the tram, that imitation of human life, keeps moving, constantly receiving and letting go, uniform, tireless, majestic, indifferent to what is going on inside, entirely unstirred by the barely repressed emotions of that dumbshow, always travelling along those two endless parallel steel lines, as long and slippery as the centuries.

First published as La novela en el tranvía, translation in Madrid Tales, edited by Helen Constantine, Oxford University Press, 2012. Also available online, including in a translation by Michael Wooff at the Gutenberg Project)

Introduction

I have selected a dozen stories which, cumulatively, describe the progress of my relationship to short fiction over four decades; my enjoyment of each piece owes something to the enjoyment of its predecessor; and having arranged them in this way, I conclude that the last story ‘The Axe’ contains elements of all the other stories here while also suggesting a way forward.

‘The Mezzotint’ by M.R. James

‘The Mezzotint’ was read to me on Friday November 21st 1980 when it was screened on BBC1 as part of a series called Spine Chillers; the performer was the actor Michael Bryant and the series was produced by the same team that made Jackanory. The literary and the uncanny were both well represented on TV in the 1970s and early 1980s, occasionally overlapping in strands like this one, the BBC Ghost Story for Christmas adaptations of ‘A Warning to the Curious’, ‘The Signalman’ and so on, and portmanteau series such as Dead of Night and Tales of the Unexpected.

It was years before I read ‘The Mezzotint’ for myself because I had no idea who had written it or who M.R. James was; it remains my favourite of his stories.

First published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Edward Arnold, 1904; Collected in Collected Ghost Stories, Edward Arnold, 1931 and widely available, including in Ghost Stories by M.R. James, Penguin English Library, 2018, and online here

‘The Great Circling Poets of Arium’ by Douglas Adams

There is an obvious correspondence between Monty James spinning a plausible yarn in his rooms at King’s and the anecdotal digressions of ‘the Book’ in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Cambridge graduate Douglas Adams, especially as voiced by Peter Jones in the original radio series.

The tale of the Great Circling Poets of Arium is presented as part of the mysterious history of the planet of Golgafrincham and Adams does various characteristic things with it – it is a parody of medieval bardic song, it has its own internal logic and structure, and as a narrative, it is a Russian doll: the legend is related by Adams in the voice of ‘the Book’ reporting the words of some travellers who are recounting an ancient story sung to them by the Great Circling Poets of Arium.

More to the point, it smuggles a magnificent joke past any reader who is not paying careful attention, a joke which has delighted me for forty years and which I shall now spoil:

The first part of each song would tell how there once went forth from the City of Vassillian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes, who are of course brave, noble and wise, travel widely in distant lands, fight giant ogres, pursue exotic philosophies, take tea with weird gods and rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses before finally announcing that they have achieved enlightenment and that their wanderings are therefore accomplished.

The second, and much longer, part of each song would then tell of all their bickerings about which one of them is going to have to walk back.

First broadcast in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‘Fit the Sixth’, BBC Radio 4, April 12th 1978 and published in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Pan Books Ltd, 1980

‘Time Enough at Last’ by Rod Serling

‘Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself…’

If you add together the elements I liked in the previous two choices – the humour, the horror, the bookishness, the authorial control, the anthology setting and the twist at the end – and add a burgeoning adolescent sense of cosmic injustice, this is what you get.

It’s not fair.

First broadcast as an episode of The Twilight Zone, CBS TV, November 20th 1959, adapted from the short story ‘Time Enough at Last’ by Lynn Venable, If magazine, January 1953. Available online here

A Shocking Accident’ by Graham Greene

This story is about a boy whose father is killed when a pig falls on top of him and who then spends the rest of his life trying to tell people about the tragedy without making them laugh.

I probably first read this when I was a teenager, around the time my father died.

There is probably no short story in existence I have thought about more often than this one.

First published in May We Borrow Your Husband?, The Bodley Head, 1967; Collected in Collected Stories, The Bodley Head, 1973 and now Penguin Classics, 2000

‘So Long Dad’ by Randy Newman

The everyday awfulness of human beings is becoming a theme in these stories now; no writer has given voice to awful human beings more dependably than Randy Newman.

In ‘So Long Dad’, a son returns home to visit his father and we get to hear about it via the son’s small talk. (“What’s new? Do you still work at the drugstore? Is that true? Still polishing the same floor?”) It soon transpires that the son is getting married and so this will be the last time he calls in to see “dear old Dad”.

Come and see us, Poppa, when you can.
There’ll always be a place for my old man.
Just drop by when it’s convenient to
Be sure and call before you do.

As devastating as Cheever, plus you can whistle it.

As to whether it is legitimate to include songs and TV programmes in this personal anthology, I once wrote an entire book about The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society LP, which is one of my favourite albums AND one of my favourite collections of short stories. Take it up with the New Yorker.

First recorded by Randy Newman on his debut LP Randy Newman, Reprise, June 1968; preferred version recorded by Harry Nilsson with Newman accompanying on piano, Nilsson Sings Newman LP, RCA Victor, February 1970

‘The Vane Sisters’ by Vladimir Nabokov

This story of Nabokov’s, with its infamous acrostic in the final paragraph, the device that according to the author ‘can only be tried once in a thousand years of fiction’, was rejected by the New Yorker.

I first read, and was bamboozled by, ‘The Vane Sisters’ shortly after I first read, and was bamboozled by, Pale Fire. But whereas I still love Pale Fire, I don’t know if I much like this story any more. Nabokov’s conspicuous intellectual presence in ‘The Vane Sisters’ strikes me as just the sort of thing that would have delighted me when I was 22 but now I can see is possibly a dead end, even a trap. Nevertheless in this context I hope you can see the correspondences: the humour, the supernatural twist and the author insolently needling the lazy reader.

First published in The Hudson Review, 1958, and in Nabokov’s Quartet, Phaedra, 1966; Collected in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, now Penguin Modern Classics, 2001

‘Jam’ by Dan Rhodes

The night before our wedding day, my fiancée and I had a romantic meal. She held my hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for marrying me. You’re just so wonderful taking me on. Me and my three ugly children.’ I was horrified. It was the first I’d heard of these three ugly children, and I wanted to know more. She explained that she hadn’t told me about them in case they put me off her. ‘Come and meet your new daddy,’ she called, and they ran into the room. Their faces were covered in jam. They were horrible.

First published in Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories, Fourth Estate, 2000)

‘Brownies’ by ZZ Packer

Another story about horrible children.

I first read ‘Brownies’ circa 2004 and at the time thought it was an efficient piece of creative writing, literary, circumscribed, American. But when, at the behest of Nikesh Shukla, we did ZZ Packer’s collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere on Backlisted last year I found I couldn’t get this particular story out of my head, and still can’t. No one appears to have tampered with my copy of the book so it must be the same story I read then. Gosh.

We don’t just change as readers as we get older, we improve.

If you haven’t read ‘Brownies’, you need to read it; also if you have read it.

First published in Harper’s Magazine, November 1999 and in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Riverhead Books, 2003