‘Seven Floors’ by Dino Buzzati, trans. Judith Landry and Cynthia Jolly

One man’s hopeless fight against bureaucracy, sums up this story for me. The more I read this story, the more I realise this is painfully true to life. Less a story of fiction and more of a documentary.

Giuseppe Corte, suffering from an unidentified illness, books into a seven-storey nursing clinic for treatment. There he is placed on the seventh floor reserved for those patients with only the mildest of symptoms. This cheers him up especially as he learns that the lower floors are for those patients with more serious symptoms. After a while he finds he is moving down through the floors, towards his destiny on the first floor, not because of his illness, but for bureaucratic reasons.

“‘There’s only one inconvenience.’
‘What?’ asked Corte with a vague presentiment.
‘Inconvenient, as a form of expression,’ the doctor corrected himself. ‘I meant that the treatment unit is on the fourth floor, and I wouldn’t advise you to make the trek three times a day.’
‘So, then, nothing?’
‘Well, it would be better if you would be so kind as to go down to the fourth floor until the eczema has passed.’
‘Enough!’ screamed Giuseppe Corte. ‘I’ve already gone down enough! I would die. I’m not going to the fourth!’
‘As you wish,’ remarked the doctor, conciliatory so as not to irritate him.

First published in I sette messaggeri (The Seven Messengers), Arnoldo Mondadori, 1942. First translated in Catastrophe and Other Stories, Calder, 1965

‘Sanatorium’ by W. Somerset Maugham

This is what our cousins across the pond would call a bottle story: that is, all the action takes place in one location, in this case a Scottish sanatorium. All the patients are under pressure due to the illness, which effects various characters in different ways. Major Templeton, is relaxed about it. He knows he’s going to die, but he’s had a grand life: ladies, gambling, shooting and so on. Mr. Chester on the other hand is resentful and angry and constantly asks, why me? And is also harsh with his wife, because she is going to live.

All of life is to be found in this story. Romance, laughter, death, confessions, rivalry, anger, mental cruelty and so on. I discover something new in this story every time I read it. The narrator Ashenden (a thinly disguised Maugham), is sent to the sanatorium to recover from Tuberculosis. During the months he is there he observes his fellow patients and records their lives. Mr. Chester, who feels it is unfair he should be ill as he has lived a clean life; the gentle courtship between Miss Bishop and the rakish Major Templeton and the ongoing feud between McLeod and Campbell.

“‘First time they’ve let you get up, is it?’ said McLeod.
‘Yes.’
‘Where’s your room?’
Ashenden told him.
‘Small. I know every room in the place. I’ve been here for seventeen years. I’ve got the best room here and so I damned well ought to have. Campbell’s been trying to get me out of it, he wants it himself, but I’m not going to budge; I’ve got a right to it, I came here six months before he did.’”

Collected in Collected Short Stories vol.3. Vintage, 2002

‘Tabula Rasa’ by Etgar Keret

Sometimes when reading a story a reader can detect the direction a story is going in and how it will finish. But not with this tale. The author is known for writing stories with bizarre plots and flights of fancy. Children born with an aging disease and abandoned by their parents at birth are taken in by an institution. There to be looked after until they are ready to go out into the world. But what are they been made ready for? A. is one such child. And it’s through his thoughts that we find out what else is going on. By far the nastiest but also, thought provoking story on my list.

“Why, of all people in the world, did A. hate more than anyone else the man who had helped him the most? Why did A. wish that bad things would happen to the person who had taken him under his wing after his parents had abandoned him and who had devoted his life to helping him and others who suffered the same fate? The answer was easy: If there’s one thing in the world more annoying than being dependent on someone, it’s when that someone constantly reminds you that you are dependent on him. And Goodman was exactly that sort of person: insulting, controlling, patronising. Every word he said, every gesture he made, carried the clear message – your fate is in my hands, and without me, you all would have died a long time ago.”

Published in Fly Already, Granta, 2019

‘Grand Stand-in’ by Kevin Wilson

Another author who likes to write flight-of-fancy stories.

“I am an employee of Grand Stand-In, a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider. It’s pretty simple. With so many new families popping up, upwardly mobile couples with new children, there is a segment of this demographic, more than you would think, who no longer have any living parents. So many of these new parents feel their children are missing out on a crucial part of their life experience, a grandparent. And that’s where I come in.”

As the story progresses, the narrator starts to question the work she is doing. This is a story I find hard to resist, an author working with an unusual idea and running with it.

Published in Tunnelling to the Centre of the Earth, Ecco/Harper Collins, 2009

‘Mr. Whittaker’s Retirement’ by Paul Rutherford (pen name of William Hale White)

Some stories refuse to be forgotten, and remain lodged in my mind for whatever reason. They aren’t always stories by famous writers or well-known tales or have anything important to say. The story is just there in my mind. ‘Mr. Whittaker’s Retirement’ is just such a tale.

Mr. Whittaker, a senior partner in a drug company is forced to take early retirement due to ill health. For the first few weeks he finds retirement agreeable, but after that time hangs heavy on his hands. Then a bad investment on the stock market makes his financial situation difficult. In short, he finds he needs to go back to work. He’s fortunate to find a very junior position, but finds he’s now on the bottom rung and having to put up with being snubbed by clerks who previously were junior to him.

“For the first two or three weeks I enjoyed my freedom, but when they had passed I had had enough of it. I had nothing to do! Every day at the hours when business was at its height, I thought of the hurry, of the inquiries, of the people waiting in the anteroom, of the ringing of bells, of the rapid instructions to clerks, of the consultations after the letters were opened, of our anxious deliberations, of the journeys to Scotland at an hour’s notice, and of the interviews with customers. I pictured to myself that all this still went on, but went on without me, while I had no better occupation than to unpack a parcel, pick the knots out of the string, and put it in a string-box.”

Published in More Pages from a Journal: With Other Papers, Henry Frowde, 1910. Available to read online via the Gutenberg Project

‘The Quiet’ by Carys Davies

You could argue that all fiction asks you to do one of two things: to believe or to suspend disbelief. You could also argue that, providing one or the other is possible, they yield the same outcome – a state of willing collusion with the author. In my own experience, the more immersive I’ve found a story at the time of reading the more I’m likely to have enjoyed it, and to remember it.

Carys Davies is immensely skilful in accumulating the tiny increments of detail that build a sense of immersion. So much so that when deeply improbable events take place, albeit at times within the most mundane circumstances, the reader is primed, cleverly and unobtrusively, to accept them. Her persuasiveness, and she is the most persuasive of writers, also derives from a consistency and intimacy of tone that imbues her stories with credibility. Her characters are built from their doubts, their disappointments, their failures, and yet her narratives, more often than not, are driven by hope. The desire to know how or whether that hope will be realised, or even to learn exactly what manner of hope will be unfurled, is the force that pulls the reader through the story.

‘The Quiet’, opening Davies’ second collection, epitomises aspects of the stories to follow. In one way or another – physically, psychologically, geographically – her characters find themselves alone. They are isolated within their circumstances. And they possess secrets by which they are burdened, which are cleverly hidden from the reader, and which lead them to yearn for some sort of release or fulfilment.

Like the other stories in the collection, ‘The Quiet’ has much to say about the intractability of lives lived in unforgiving conditions, about the exchange of hidden elements of personal history, about improbable moments of empathy, and about the urgency of the human heart needing to unburden itself.

Susan Boyce and Henry Fowler – she married, he formerly so, live as settlers six miles apart in an isolated, unspecified valley. On rare occasions Henry visits, and on one such occasion something extraordinary, but heartrendingly credible, occurs. And that is all I can say without ruining a story that presses deep into our need to share a common humanity. Please read it.

First published in The Stinging Fly, 2014, then in the collection The Redemption of Galen Pike, Salt 2014. Available to read online at LitHub

‘The Automaton’ by David Wheldon

The late David Wheldon was a medical doctor who specialised in the treatment of multiple sclerosis, successfully devising a protocol to treat his wife, the artist Sarah Longlands, so that she could live a full life and continue to paint. He also wrote novels and short stories, initially to acclaim, but latterly in something like obscurity until, by the good works of writers Aiden O’Reilly and David Rose, his more recent stories began to find homes, culminating in the publication by Confingo Publishing of the collection mentioned above.

The Automaton, like most of Wheldon’s fiction, is best described by a term I think first coined by O’Reilly – ‘ireal’, since it’s a story very much of this world, and very much not. To this end, Wheldon is a master of specifics and tone, able to convince his readers while leading them guilefully into the unforeseeable.

The story, set in 1905, is narrated by a grammar school boy, the son of the manager of an ailing theatre. A preface tells us the narrator fell in battle near the end of the First World War. Thus the narrative has the flavour of a memoir, presumably discovered after his death.

First published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press in 2017, and then in the collection The Guiltless Bystander, Confingo Publishing 2022

The automaton in question is a waxwork of a beautiful woman, dignified and unknowable, clothed in finery that has seen better days. She is also an unbeatable chess master, who sighs gently before manipulating her pieces in a manner designed to perplex her opponent. She is introduced – borne upon a sedan by an impresario of questionable character – to the theatre in the hope of saving its financial future.

There’s a gradualness to Wheldon’s storytelling which adds to its richness. His use of dialogue is mannered and leisurely but, in its own time, revealing. Because of this, I feel that all I should say further is that the boy forms a relationship with this beguiling, unworldly creature, and that the term sentience is introduced and repeated artfully as the story develops. This is an enigmatic, troubling, and deeply moving story that leaves a lasting mark on the reader.

‘Butterflies of the Balkans’ by Jo Lloyd

It was a happy day when I discovered Jo Lloyd’s stories. The most quotable of writers, I’ll resist the temptation, otherwise I’d go on for ever. Let me just say that she writes sculpted, verve-filled sentences which, at least in my experience, are not to be found elsewhere. I mean only good things when I say that reading this story was like having a Merchant Ivory film craftily inserted in my visual cortex. And so…

Prue and Lottie, ageing, infirm and intrepid, are travelling, by means not associated with the elderly, through rough Balkan terrain in search of rare species of butterflies. The reader is given to understand that, despite sharing a range of ailments that would flatten an army, they are by no means done with life. Garbed in the costume of their day, and hence mistaken for the late Queen Victoria, butterflies are their passion, and they are in pursuit.

Liberated by widowhood, though not without personal histories, we follow them, and the various dignitaries, outriders and bandits they accrue, over land and across borders, lepidoptera in their wake, as time presses against them. Lottie intends to publish their findings, to make the world aware. On their journey we learn about their loves, their regrets, their philosophies, their irritations (not least with each other). We sense they are unlikely to fail.

I won’t describe the ending, but it contains a moment of mingled tenderness and resolution which having read you’ll do well not to weep. Prue and Lottie are fully realised characters in a story that celebrates stoicism, endurance, and the power of curiosity to galvanise – virtues of a past age.

I understand that the collection that contains this story was published during lockdown, and so somewhat overlooked. I would encourage anyone seeking fiction of the highest calibre to go out of their way to read it. Prue and Lottie, and the other characters you encounter, will not disappoint.

Published in The Earth Thy Great Exchequer Ready Lies, Swift Press, 2021

‘The Story of Mats Israelson’ by Julian Barnes

During the time I worked as a therapist, one philosophical issue that kept presenting was the conundrum between determinism and free will. How much are we owned by our circumstances, and to what extent if any can we break loose? In the space of twenty-three pages, Julian Barnes, a writer I revere, explores this dilemma with all the precision and humanity you might expect from such a profound chronicler of the human spirit.

The story is set in a small industrial town in nineteenth century Sweden. The community is self-enclosed, inward looking and stiflingly conventional. Standards of propriety are rigid and enforced by prying and gossip. In this unpromising setting two people, both, by their own admission, unimaginative and in many respects unremarkable, fall deeply and unexpectedly in love. They are each married to other people. As Scott Fitzgerald once remarked, there is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and Barnes tells their story with a simplicity of style that both reflects the tone of their inner turmoil and belies the minute subtleties he manages to tease out in their conflicted situation. It’s intensely clever writing in which all the cleverness is hidden, so that what remains is the tragedy of ordinary lives offered a glimpse of the heavens, but predestined to be nothing other than ordinary.

Strangely, Barnes’s short stories seem rarely to find their way into anthologies. Can’t think why.

Published in The Lemon Table,Jonathan Cape, 2004

‘St Francis Treads the Stones of Hoy’ by David Rose

I’m not religious, but has anyone, anywhere, quite managed to shed a Catholic upbringing? Speaking personally the residue I’m left with, apart from the guilt, is a Pavlovian obsession with medieval saints. Consequently, when fortune led me to a story titled ‘St Francis Treads the Stones of Hoy’, written by David Rose, man of letters and vast but modestly deployed erudition, I was there.

And what a luminous tale it is. It seems unlikely that Francis actually went to Hoy. I can’t find evidence. The only biography I’ve read, by G.K. Chesterton, contained remarkably little biographical information. But records suggest he certainly preached a sermon to birds, no shortage of which exist on Hoy. The scene is set.

Francis, it would appear, is seeking a challenge. He is by now experienced in avian-related oratory, having already converted the birds of Umbria. He alights on Hoy. Prepares himself. Seeks the right spot on which to pour forth. Checks the direction of the wind. The birds grow, not silent, but quiet and uniform in their expectation. They pulse simultaneously. Francis begins.

Though new to those in attendance, his words are not original. He has used them on many occasions. Perhaps the birds begin to sense this, as at some point they become a little restless. But a puffin remains intrigued. It steps forward attentively. It releases the fish it was holding in its beak.

As someone who also wrote a scene in which a wild bird laid a fish before a human, only to be accused of going woo-woo, I would like to point something out here. Wild animals, circs allowing, take their prey to places where they feel safe, and are programmed to keep a firm grip on it. This is Rose’s subtlety. The puffin leaves its fish on the ground, near Francis, and only retrieves them once he has gone.

Sermon given, Francis feels euphoric, the euphoria gently fading as the burden of his life, with all its previous discord, re-enters his thoughts. By the time he boards the ferry he is weary.

The story, which is framed in a musical motif, ends with two sentences of transcendent beauty. They could belong to a poem. They get me every time.

Published in Confingo Magazine, Autumn 2023, by Confingo Publishing

‘Blind Water Pass’ by Anna Metcalfe

Granny Bud lives alone in a mountainous region, one assumes in some part of China. She is visited each summer by her city-dwelling granddaughter Lily, who loves her and who lost her mother when young. Granny Bud was once a farmhand, then a mother, and is now a herbalist and spirit guide. Hers has become a liminal existence, veering between the mundane and the etheric, increasingly the latter. Her more worldly granddaughter spends her summer days on the nearby Blind Water Pass, the higher of two mountain treks frequented by tourists on pilgrimage. Here she earns a small amount of money collecting and recycling bottles they discard, and a larger amount from tips earned by feeding them bogus aphorisms, ostensibly ancient, but actually made up by herself. She passes her tip money to Granny Bud, pretending it is the legitimately earned part of her wages. She is attentive to her grandmother and, despite her youth and otherness, deeply attuned to her way of life.

The lower trek, formerly existing above a peaceful river, was damaged irretrievably, then closed, when the river was dammed into a reservoir. Blind Water Pass is itself threatened by the construction of a funicular railway. Granny Bud’s spirits, long in retreat at these industrial goings-on, are finally disturbed into extinction, and at this point the story ends.

Metcalfe’s prose is artfully simple. The apparent plainness of her description belies the metaphors beneath. The juxtaposition of guile and gullibility, the erosion of tradition by commerce, and the modern mind in search of things lost, are all drawn sparingly and unemphatically by a master storyteller who, one suspects, conveys exactly what she means to.

Published in the collection of that title by JM Originals, an imprint of John Murray publishers, 2016

‘Celia’ by Graham Mort

I was blessed to discover Graham Mort’s stories when they began to appear in Fictive Dream, an online journal that has come to mean much to me over the years. Immediately I was drawn to the voice, the economy, the understatement, the quiet poetic sensibility. Upon research I discovered that Mort is in fact a distinguished poet. No surprise.

In this story which, despite its brevity and unhurriedness, spans most of two lives, we meet Celia and Stefan. We meet them first when just married, living in a cramped bedsit. Celia is performing her morning wash as Stefan looks on, struggling to believe his luck. Prior to this they first encounter one another in a pub in Camden. Stefan we’re subsequently told, is Polish, Celia Irish. We learn these details at the author’s leisure. A gentle slipping back and forward in time typifies the narrative as it unfolds. It hovers, offers snapshots, blossoms into longer description, then contracts again.

You could call Celia a love story, but perhaps it’s more a story about living together, sharing lives, and what can happen to love at close quarters over a long period. Nothing special occurs, even Stefan’s ‘mistake’ is mundane when seen from the outside. Two boys are born and in time each produce a grandchild. Celia and Stefan, separately, grow distant from their Catholic faith. Eventually Celia tends Stefan as he is dying, and then is left with the life they have lived, with the lasting effect of a crucial happening, with a sense of things beyond words.

And that’s all. But a plain description belies the involving quality of this story, its profundity, its existential scope, its beauty. There’s true craft behind the apparent simplicity of Mort’s prose. He varies his sentences to great effect. The way he builds imagery is painterly.

I’ve read this story a number of times now, and on each reading it goes deeper, says more, asks further questions. It won’t leave me alone.

Published online in Fictive Dream, 2025 and available to read here

‘The Fly’ by Katherine Mansfield

Written in three weeks in a Paris hotel when Mansfield was desperately ill, ‘The Fly’ is a story about death, the anticipation of death, and the challenge of survival in its aftermath. It’s a tiny story that contains three distinct frames, in each of which time has a different dimension.

In the first, Woodifield, an elderly ex-employee, a stroke survivor, very frail, revisits his former boss in his plush office. We are given to understand that this is a frequent occurrence, and both a trial to the boss but also an opportunity for self-congratulation, and the expression of small acts of kindness. He is older but in good health, well-to-do, and the apparent master of his circumstances.

Towards the end of some inconsequential chat, Woodifield mentions in passing that his daughters had visited his son’s war grave in Belgium, which happens to lie near the grave of his boss’s son. He leaves soon after.

Now alone, and devastated by this unforeseen turn of events, the boss locks his office and sets himself to weep, his only means of catharsis. Tears, however, won’t come, and he is forced to remember his son and intended heir, in all the vividness of his youth and promise.

In the final scene he is distracted from his grief when a fly drops into the inkpot on his desk. He watches as it torturously crawls out and cleans itself, before saturating it again, not once, but three times. In doing so he enters several conflicting mood states, each characterised by dissociation.

The brilliance of this story lies in Mansfield’s piercing acuity, her control of time as an experiential phenomenon, and her masterful brevity. Is the story about the implacable burden of memory? Or about the illusion of certainty in a manifestly precarious world? Or does it suggest that the true realisation of cruelty must rest in its final outcome? The reader is left to seek a hypothesis.

First published in The Nation and Athenaeum in 1922 then in the collection The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, Constable and Company 1923; it’s available to read here

‘The Conversion of William Kirkwood’ by John McGahern

I’m not pedantic about how prose should be written, although in that respect I sometimes feel in a minority: some of the dictums I come across online remind me of those schoolteachers whose hearts could only allow them to find merit in one style of writing. Having said that, I do look on John McGahern as some sort of exemplar in the craft of the short story.

A contemporary review of Housman’s poetic style comes to mind: “the sort of hard writing that makes easy reading”. So it is with McGahern. Clear, fluent, uncluttered – if you hadn’t tried yourself you might think there was nothing to it. Except that when you do try you quickly understand what a Herculean task it is to distil perception and expression to that level of refinement.

‘The Conversion of William Kirkwood’ is one of a pair of stories, its predecessor being ‘Eddie Mac’. If you’d read the latter you would know that William and his father, living a gentle and cerebral life amidst Catholics in a large Protestant estate, have been abruptly deprived or their cattle by said Eddie Mac. Also left behind was Annie May Moran, pregnant by Mac, who had served the Kirkwoods since the age of fourteen.

Subject to derision for their gullibility, it would not occur to William and his father to abandon Annie May, or Lucy, the child she subsequently bears, and they are henceforth incorporated into the household and treated like family. When William’s father dies, the remaining three live harmoniously together, with Lucy becoming devoted to a man who treats her as a daughter.

Now two things occur. War begins and, though Ireland is neutral, local defence forces are convened. William signs up and, by the long-held seniority of his family name, augmented by an unforeseeable emergence of military instincts, is made a captain. His new status is resented, then begrudgingly admired.

Alongside this, while helping Lucy with her homework, he grows fascinated by the Catholic catechism that is part of her studies, so much so that he attends the local presbytery for instruction, and in due course converts. This turn of events does much to alleviate the historic distance between the Kirkwood household and the surrounding community. Though still unmarried at forty-five, his refined manners and distinguished bearing attract interest from local women.

And there I will leave it. Perhaps you can see the dilemma that awaits him, alas fated to remain unresolved within the scope of this story. Maybe it’s this that has made me read it ten or more times. Or maybe it’s McGahern’s gorgeous prose, utter command of his characters, and deep instinct for the human spirit. How I wish he’d written a sequel.

First published in The New Yorker in 1982, then in the collection High Ground, Faber and Faber, 1985