‘Flying in the Face of God’ by Nina Allan

I began this anthology with a writer who was (and remains) particularly important to me; I’m ending with another. I had heard great things about Nina Allan’s fiction from the corner of the SF/fantasy community that I followed. After I read ‘Flying in the Face of God’, I understood why.

In the story, we meet Rachel Alvin, who is about to undergo a process that will alter her physiology such that she will be able to travel through space – but it will also transform her psychologically. Rachel’s close friend Anita Schleif is making a film about her – but it seems to be at least as much an attempt to hold on to Rachel as it is an actual piece of documentary-making. Furthermore, Anita’s grandmother is suffering from dementia, so essentially Anita is seeing the two most important people in her life disappear, albeit in different ways. Allan is concerned with exploring how her characters respond to the prospect and reality of profound personal change.

I’ve continued to follow Allan’s work, both fiction and reviews, and again hers has become a key voice in shaping how I think about fiction.

(Read and first published in Interzone #227, Mar-Apr 2010. Available in the collection Microcosmos, NewCon Press, 2013)

‘Deux Amis’ (‘Two Friends’) by Guy de Maupassant

I’ve gone for Maupassant as my first choice. probably because this is the first short story I remember really sticking in my mind, and it’s therefore acquired a kind of nostalgic perfection.  To my great satisfaction  I was the only member of sixth form to receive a detention (I misremember the reason) and was locked by my A-level French teacher alone in a classroom for two hours one Friday afternoon. Before escaping via the window, I read this deceptively simple, gallant story of two old friends who meet again by chance during the Franco-Prussian war and the 1871 Siege of Paris. Reminiscing about the fishing trips they used to take together, the men obtain leave to do so one more time. Their excursion is interrupted by four Prussian soldiers and what ensues,  despite the patina of propaganda and nationalistic pride, is a story of quiet bravery, the desperate losses of war on both sides and the sheer bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

(First published 1883. Also published in A Parisian Affair and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2004. Translated from French by Sian Miles)

‘The Bloody Chamber’, by Angela Carter

The 1984 film The Company of Wolves, based on Carter’s stories, had a big effect on me as teenager and led me to her writing. The opening salvo from her first short-story collection, published in 1979, is typical of her baroque, joyous subversion of the fairy tale – while also making significant points about the shifting balance of sexual power, desire, disgust and how the two often disturbingly collide. In this interpretation of ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’, a young ingenue is married off to a rich Maquis, who, after their wedding night, leaves her alone in his isolated castle on France’s  bleak Atlantic coast  with a set of golden keys and one proviso – do not open THAT door. The prose is gorgeous, full of a perverse longing and indefinable sorrow: ‘Time was his servant, too; it would trap me here, in a night that would last until he came back to me, like a black sun on a winter morning’. This being Carter, the ingenue is not so innocent of course, and has a gun-toting vengeful mother to boot. All the better to eat you with, my dear…

(From The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Vintage Classics, 1995)

‘The Lame Shall Enter First’, by Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor died of lupus in 1964  at the age  of 39; this story was published posthumously a year later in the collection Everything that Rises Must Converge.Like William Faulkner , Carson McCullers and a host of others, O’Connor wrote in the Southern Gothic tradition, populating her work with grotesque characters, violent incident  and moral debate. I also have lupus; on diagnosis I identified as a shadowy Flannery O’Connor, one without the writing talent or the peacocks (she famously kept many exotic birds), an atheist in thrall to O’Connor’s rhapsodic Catholicism. In this story, a father refuses to empathise with the grief of his young son who has recently lost his mother. Instead, he offers his charity to a manipulative homeless teenager, with tragic consequences for the child. It’s unsettling, unsentimental and never fails to make me weep and rage.

(In Complete Stories, Faber and Faber, 1990)

‘Errand’, by Raymond Carver

As a Chekhov devotee it might seem odd I should choose a story about, not by, Chekhov. But in truth, I prefer his plays, and this, about Chekhov’s final moments and death by champagne is classic Carver – or classic Gordon Lish (Carver’s editor), as we might now be led to believe. Regardless of that, it has all the precision, sobriety and exquisite timing of Carver’s best work with an added Russian flourish, and is the last story in Elephant, the collection published in the final year of Carver’s life. (Carver died aged 50 in 1988). My best friend, Sonia Misak, with whom I’ve been sharing stories both real and imagined  for most of our lives, gave me my copy of Elephant at New Year 1990. Carver was quite possibly already terminally ill when he wrote ‘Errand’, but in it he is exploring Chekhov the writer rather than Chekhov the dying man; and reading it calls to mind that great line of Virginia Woolf’s: ‘I meant to write about death, but life kept breaking in as usual.’

(Originally published in Elephant. Also in from Where I’m Calling From, Harvill, 1993)

‘A Little Night Music’, by Jeanette Turner Hospital

The Australian author Jeanette Turner Hospital’s  collection Isobars is uneven in places but its themes of unreliable memory, fugue states and global connections are persistent and powerful. (An isobar, in meteorology, is a line on a map where linked points have the same atmospheric pressure occurring at a given time). All anxieties about flying are fully indulged in this brief ghost story, written about an eleventh-hour passenger who boards a plane at the last minute. The narrator of the story, a woman, is highly apprehensive, with good reason: the previous night a flight on the same route had been blown up by a suicide bomber: there were no survivors. Her seat companion for this flight is a young man who speaks little English and appears distracted and tormented. The woman seeks to comfort him. After they both fall asleep she is ravaged by terrible dreams; when she wakes to daylight, the man has gone. Not to be read on long-haul, unless you’re  a complete masochist.

(From Isobars, Virago Press, 1990)

‘Most Beloved’, by Tatyana Tolstaya

A descendant of Leo Tolstoy, Tatyana Tolstaya’s ravishingly bittersweet stories started appearing in 1983. (I would also point readers to her extraordinary dystopian novel The Slynx, published by NYRB Classics). In ‘Most Beloved’, from her second collection Sleepwalker in a Fog, originally published as part of Penguin’s International Writers series, the life and death of an seemingly unremarkable woman, Zhenechka, a fixture in the household which she serves as devoted housekeeper and governess is sketched in the form of impressions, dreams and wistful – but not whimsical – remembrances of her by those she loved, scolded and taught. It is a supremely Russian story of the Soviet era – yet all the perceived greyness and sterility of that period is transformed, under Tolstaya, into luscious Pushkin-like prose.

(From Sleepwalker in A Fog (Penguin, 1991), translated from Russian by Jamey Gambrell)

‘Secretary’, by Mary Gaitskill

Everyone familiar with the film of the same name should read the original story by Mary Gaitskill, whose tense accounts of New York in the 1980s are some of the best I’ve read, the written equivalent of photographer Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency series. Instead of the Hollywood version of ‘Secretary’ with shy but sexy Maggie Gyllenhaal and remote but irresistible James Spader hooking up in a BDSM happy-ever-after, this is entirely more grubby, unfulfilling and realistic. Introverted Debby is persuaded by her despairing family to take a dull job as typist for an unassuming, not particularly successful lawyer, who remains unnamed. When Debby makes a typing mistake, the spanking begins, to her terror and delight. It’s a study in social awkwardness and mutual loneliness with faultless sentences such as this: ‘It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it a little to see how it felt, then let go’.

(From Bad Behavior, Sceptre, 1988)

‘A Night at the Opera’, by Janet Frame

The New Zealand author Janet Frame is best known for the autobiographical trilogy published as An Angel at my Table, and the subsequent film by Jane Campion. It was Frame’s stories and novels, though,  which would prove a lifeline and her way out of rural poverty, family tragedy and mental instability. Frame was frequently admitted to psychiatric hospitals in her 20s and underwent electroconvulsive therapy following a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She was scheduled for a lobotomy, which was cancelled when, in 1951, her dreamlike first collection of fiction,The Lagoon, won one of NZ’s most prestigious literary awards, an almost unbelievably fated intervention. In this story, found among Frame’s papers after her death, a screening of the Marx Brothers’ classic film parallels the humdrum yet surreal routine of the residents of Park Lane Hospital, where ‘the weeks had no name, nor the months, nor the years’.

(Published posthumously in the New Yorker, 2008. Available online)

‘A Tranquil Star’, by Primo Levi, translated by Ann Goldstein

When I think of Primo Levi, I think of the title of Myriam Anissimov ‘s Levi biography: Tragedy of an Optimist. Levi was a young Jewish chemist from Turin when he was deported to Auschwitz; his incredible survival and long return journey home to Italy are documented in works such as  If The is A Man and The Drowned and the Saved. His death in 1987 as a result of a fall from the staircase in the apartment building where he was born and continued to live has long been debated as suicide or accident. But Levi was not only a witness and documenter of the Holocaust; his writing was also intellectually and playfully curious, quixotic and strangely comforting, as his stories prove. As with his masterpiece The Periodic Table, Levi combines complex scientific fact with lyrical language to lovely effect, as in the mysterious, allegorical yet highly rigorous ‘A Tranquil Star’.

(From A Tranquil Star and Other Stories. Penguin Classics, 2007)

‘A Bit On the Side’, by William Trevor

It was my mother, who was of Irish extraction, who first introduced me to William Trevor’s writing, and to Trevor himself: they both died at the end of last year.‘A Bit On the Side’ is typical downbeat WT, suffused with unshowy regret  about chances not taken and lives not lived – the whole watched over with his all-seeing, all-compassionate eye. Two unprepossessing lovers in middle age resolve to part, but agonisingly find they cannot; she has recently divorced, he remains married. ‘She had never asked, she did not know, why he would not leave his marriage. His reason, she supposed, were all the reasons there usually were’. Unfailingly polite to and considerate of each other, there are no Grand Guignol turns here: instead, ‘they would grow old together while never being together’.

(From A Bit On the Side and Other Stories. Penguin, 2005)

‘The Blue Lenses’, by Daphne du Maurier

A decade ago  I compiled an anthology of Daphne du Maurier’s menacing short stories for the Folio Society, with an introduction by Patrick McGrath (this has since been republished by NYRB Classics). ‘Don’t Look Now’ and ‘The Birds’ are probably the best known, but to me ‘The Blue Lenses’ is the most sinister. A woman, Marda West (even her name is weirdly off-key), undergoes a serious eye operation. Weeks later, and once the bandages have been removed, with replacement lenses implanted, she perceives that the heads of her fellow humans have been gruesomely replaced with those of animals, the worst saved for those closest to her: her surgeon, her personal nurse and her husband. In 2015, like Marda in the story, I began a series of sight-saving operations. I’d completely forgotten about ‘The Blue Lenses’ till the morning of the first procedure, when it inconveniently came back to me in all its full horror. Du Maurier’s cleverness at building suspense into the everyday, using, as Patrick McGrath describes, a ‘reverse anthropomorphism’ to emphasise the old adage of seeing people as they truly are, is told with quiet matter-of-factness which only increases the helplessness and fear of both Marda and the reader. I’ve omitted the brilliant final twist.

(From The Breaking Point and Other Stories, 1959. Available in Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, NYRB Classics, 2008, and The Breaking Point, Virago Modern Cassics, 2009)

‘Gold Boy, Emerald Girl’, by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li left her training as an immunologist to become a writer. Medicine’s loss is literature’s gain: her first novel, the grim, Dostoevsky-like The Vagrants, is one of the best books published in the last 10 years. Li excels at short fiction, too: in this collection she explores, through the latent melancholy and resigned pragmatism of her characters, the fractured nature of modern China, where she grew up (she moved to the US in her 20s): its cultural and historical upheavals, its individual deaths and departures arbitrarily violent or casually mundane by turns. In the strikingly hesitant title story, the Gold Boy and the Emerald Girl, both raised as only children, are set up for a pairing off in middle age by his anxious mother, who is unaware that they are mismatched because their romantic impulses lie in different, possibly forbidden, directions. Nonetheless, the two reach an understanding and a resolution that ‘they would not make on another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness’.

(From Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Hamish Hamilton, 2010)

Introduction

Certain kinds of personalities have great trouble with lists, and I have one of them: I can actually conceive of the entries left out as slighted objects with tangible emotions. So it’s a great temptation to begin this selection with a rush of obviouslykatherinemansfieldchekhovtessahadleymavisgallanttoo, tucked within which is a clear pleasedontjudgeme. But this is madness, and I have found myself freed by something that the great broadcaster Danny Baker said of his appearance on Desert Island Discs: it’s not an affidavit, you can change them all if you like. So these are stories that have made a great impression on me at some point in my life, but if I look too carefully at why it will all stop making sense. If I had to isolate one common element, it would be that, in completely different ways, they are all thrilling; they provoked in me a feeling of utter absorption and delight.