‘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

Introduction

I’ve been the filter reader for the Willesden Herald short story competition and its New Short Stories book series for getting on for 20 years. In selecting stories here, I decided not to include any by those contributors or by the judges or any of my friends, as I love them all and couldn’t choose.

Beyond childhood reading, Phibsboro Library in Dublin introduced me to The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud and collections by William Saroyan, James Thurber, Turgenev and Pushkin. I went on to absorb short fiction by Beckett, Joyce and J. P. Donleavy. I remember loving the stories of Neil Jordan, Fred Johnston and others from the weekly New Irish Writing pages edited by David Marcus every Saturday in The Irish Press.

A confession: I don’t remember much about most stories a few weeks after reading them. In most cases, all I recall is how enjoyable they were, the mood, the setting and an ever-vaguer outline of the plot. I keep a general impression of the characters though, including the narrator, as if I had met them in person.

The short stories I selected for this anthology are ones that come readily to mind and that I remember better than the rest, ones that left me with that glowing sense of wonder, almost a physical effect like a rush of some pleasure hormone, to which I am addicted.

‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ by Ambrose Bierce

We had this story on the high school curriculum in Ireland and it is the one I always cite as my favourite ever since. The experience of first reading the ending can never be quite as intense but the narrative is so wonderful that it bears rereading. We begin with the slow ticking of a fob watch. In the American civil war, a man is about to be hanged on Owl Creek Bridge. This is an adventure story of escape and pursuit leading to a beautiful and emotional vision, perhaps symbolising what was lost in Civil War. It has something in common with ‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff, another story often selected as a favourite, in that the action in both takes place in an instant.

First published in The San Francisco Examiner, 1890. Collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, ELG Steele, 1891. Available to read online at Project Gutenberg

‘Steady Hands at Seattle General’ by Denis Johnson

There are not many stories from which one can remember an actual line. Something that has made such an impression, no pun intended (you’ll see), that it keeps a permanent place in your mind. In this case it’s “Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.” The guy has the scar of a bullet hole on the side of his face. It’s a retort by a world-weary inmate to someone trying to cheer him up while giving him a haircut.

First published in Jesus’ Son, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992

‘Clay’ by James Joyce

This story is built around a song and is a classic in the use of symbolism, something that would die in the hands of anyone other than Mr Joyce. We are with poor old Maria as she buys treats and makes her way to visit some of her relations. She is an ordinary well-meaning person but has never found a life partner. (Now I feel a bit gloomy and wish I’d chosen ‘Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen’ by P. G. Wodehouse, the go-to writer if you need a laugh.) When Maria is buying a cake, the shop girls tease her about a wedding cake. On her visit, she sings “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls / With vassals and serfs at my side / And of all who assembled within those halls / That I was the hope and the pride.” There is a game the family’s children play of guessing what something is by touch when blindfolded. Maria can’t guess what the hilarious substance is that they have given her to dabble her fingers in. It’s clay. By the way, there’s an excellent article about the story in Wikipedia, which has just reminded me how thin my own memory of it is.

First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914. Available to read online at Project Gutenberg

‘The Bath’ by Raymond Carver

In this story a mother orders a birthday cake for her son but the same day her son, Scotty, is in a road traffic accident and ends up in a coma. The anxiety of the boy’s parents throughout the day is interspersed with calls from the baker, who wants the cake paid for and collected. It’s interesting because there are two versions of this story: the originally published one, which was brutally cut by editor Gordon Lish, and the restored full version about four times the length, subsequently released and titled ‘A Small, Good Thing’, which became one of Carver’s most lauded and best loved stories. Towards the end of this version, the mother has taken a break from watching over the child who is in a coma in hospital and gone home intending to take a bath. When she reaches home, someone phones and asks for her by name. She asks, “Is it about Scotty?” The man says, “It has to do with Scotty, yes.” That is the last line, the abrupt ending of the Lish version. It leaves us with the bitter sense of cruelty and selfishness of the baker and his unconcern for the plight of the distraught parents.

First published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981

‘The River Potudan’ by Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler

I love a journey story. ‘The Return’ by the same author is also a great journey story but I prefer this one, which I read first in Granta. Often in Russian short stories someone sets out for a destination. It’s common in Chekhov and it affords a great opportunity not just to describe scenery but to bring a place to life in the mind of the protagonist. You feel like you’re there on the journey with them. And there is literally no bigger country than Russia for providing the drug of evocation with snow and steppes, hovels and in the old stories, peasants, wood stoves, sleighs, troikas and so on. In this story we’re following the course of the eponymous river in the aftermath of the Russian civil war. A soldier’s journey forms the first part of the story but most of it is about life in the village when he gets there, as I see now that I’m re-reading it. When he returns he finds dire poverty and although he marries his sweetheart from before the war, their lives in the village are pitifully cold and poor.

First published in English translation in The Return and Other Stories, Harvill, 1999. Available to Granta subscribers to read online here