‘The Lawyer’s Tale’ as told to Stephen Collis

During most summers since 2015 refugees, their supporters, poets and novelists have walked as a group the route of the Canterbury Tales in reverse. The refugees share their stories with the writers while walking, they are written up and shared as the convoy overnights in community halls, after which they are published in collections, of which there are four volumes to date.

It’s a unique collaborative process in which established authors such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ali Smith, Jackie Kay and many others midwife anonymous stories, and refugees gain allies and solidarity in a new literature and location. Some of the narratives are predictable, in terms of lived experience and form. Lorries, pitiless border staff, stark detention centres and moments of injustice and legal limbo figure prominently.

A few collaborations stand out and ‘The Lawyer’s Tale’ as shaped by Stephen Collis is one.

we were in motion
complicating
the empty category
– ‘we’ –
moving north

His montage of poetry, reportage, reflections on Gericault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa and general disregard for boundaries between genres of writing – an analogue, perhaps, for the project’s aims – sets the bar high for future volunteers.

First published in Refugee Tales, ed. David Herd and Anna Pincus, Comma Press, 2016

‘He Contemplates a Photograph in a Newspaper’ by Gabriel Josipovici

A very short story about an encounter with an image of a woman, and the viewer/narrator’s gradually accruing response.

A close reading of a newspaper photograph in which the young woman stands in a wood, side on, by a large tree. Her hair obscures her features. Sunlight plays on her back. Beauty amid peace and silence, that’s his impression.

He notices the nearest hand is clenched like a fist. And that her heels are a little higher than her toes.

He looks at the leaves beneath her feet. She doesn’t appear to be standing on them, she isn’t standing on them, there’s a gap between her feet and the leaves.

“Suddenly, sickeningly, he understands what it is he is looking at. The woman is not standing at all.”

Sunlight has bleached out the rope. The profusion of hair hides a noose. He reads the caption. It tells him she’s a refugee who hanged herself after Serbian forces stormed Srebrenica.

The photograph, as it turns out, is a record of a body without pain, without pleasure, a corpse.

I have recalled this text during every war since I first read it almost fourteen years ago. So I have recalled and read it often, far too often. Focussed, concise, and tragically perennial.

First published in Heart’s Wings and Other Stories, Carcanet 2010

‘Like a Fever’ by Tim Etchells

The longest unbroken series of similes you are ever likely to come across.

But what it is that has so many likenesses isn’t disclosed.

“It was like a fever and like seeing a crash in slow motion and like my son never existed. It was like a boxing match and like music I had only ever imagined and like a scary movie when you don’t know where it will end and like I was sedated for 20 years.”

This, and its like, over seven and a half pages. An incantation, arhythmic and never tailing off, never lapsing to monotony. Breathless couplings and troilings and foursomes of cliches and overused sensational phrases.

“And it was like he’d never seen soap or even heard of a bathtub and like the straw that broke a camel’s back and like a maze and like a labyrinth and like a hall of mirrors and like the whole house of cards was collapsing and like she knew she would lose him, even before she met him.

That, by the way, is one of only ten commas in the whole piece.

A telling not a told, a writing not a representation.

I first encountered this story as the script to a remarkable online performance by the author during Covid. ‘Like a Fever’ had a simpler setting then. The word ‘breathtaking’ designated a threat to life.

Context, as they say, makes a huge difference. This text may be about the pandemic, but it isn’t. It could be about a relationship coming to an end. It might be an advertising copywriter frantically searching for a punchline. It’s an overexcited chain of non-meaning, a critique of vacuous rhetoric, a wake up call to us all.

Published by Nightjar Press, 2020

Introduction

Novellas and short stories are the forms of fiction I love the most—their brevity means that they can come as close to perfection as is possible in prose. This means narrowing choices down to only a dozen is bloody hard. The easiest thing in the world would be to point to any 12 stories by Chekhov or Mansfield or Borges or Trevor and say, ‘Have at it!’, because you couldn’t really go wrong. Instead, though, I’ve tried to pick stories that are mostly less well known, but not too hard or ruinously expensive to find, which is why, for example, you won’t find any of my beloved Hungarian writers here. So, with that throat-clearing out of the way, here we go!

‘The Shooting Gallery’ by Yūko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt

Tsushima is a wonder. Almost all of her work has the same starting point: a Japanese woman, divorced or separated from her husband, left pregnant or as a single mother to one or more young children, remote from her own parents. Yet from this she spins what seems like an infinite variety of stories and novels, beautifully written (Harcourt was her usual English-language translator and champion) and full of subtle complexity. In this particular piece, a mother takes her two children to the beach, and things go awry at an amusement stall, but I almost chose it at random: all her work is wonderful.

First published in English in The Shooting Gallery and Other Stories by The Women’s Press, 1984. New edition from New Directions, 1987. You can read the story on the New Directions website here

‘Solidity’ by Greg Egan

In terms of the material of their work, Australian science-fiction writer Greg Egan is almost Tsushima’s exact opposite: he’s fizzing madly with ideas, each of them startling and clever enough for most lesser writers to spin out into 9-book series, whereas he despatches them in a 30-page short story and then moves on to something even weirder and wilder, often grounded in the extreme physics and mathematics he seems to work with professionally (the details of his life, and even his appearance, are something of a mystery). ‘Solidity’ is a case in point: something in reality breaks, and suddenly everybody starts slipping from parallel universe to parallel universe. The only thing that can keep you in the one ‘place’ is somebody else’s constant observation. How do you make a life, and even more impossibly, a functioning society, under these conditions?

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2022, and available to read here; collected in Sleep and the Soul, Greg Egan, 2023

‘All Saints’ Mountain’ by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

Most literary writers who tackle science-fiction stumble badly, either through ignorance (assuming their shopworn ideas are new and exciting) or condescension (also known as Atwood Syndrome). Tokarczuk, whose other work ranges pleasingly all over idea-space, is different. The core idea of this religiously themed science-fiction story has been considered before by writers as unalike as Peter Goldsworthy and Neil Cross, but Tokarczuk gives it her own unique, unsettling spin and does it with wonderful style.

First published in English in Hazlitt, 2019, and available to read here

‘When the Heart Drowns in Its Own Blood’ by Philip Schönthaler, translated by Amanda DeMarco

Termann is a competitive free diver about to attempt a world record. This is the entire focus of his existence in this story, in which motivational language starts to bleed into psychopathy. Published as a tiny, tiny book by a now sadly mothballed German English-language publisher (but still available from them electronically), this is funny and alarming in equal measures.

“Even in the 1960s, doctors conjectured that at a depth of fifty meters a human being would be squashed like a swatted fly. The French physician Dr. Cabarrou carried out experiments with plastic containers—the vessels imploded at a depth of forty-five meters. […] Today, physicians speculate whether the limit lies before or beyond three hundred meters—the blood is redistributed and becomes so heavily concentrated in the center of the body that circulation fails. ‘The heart drowns in its own blood.’”

First published in Readux, 2014

‘Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor’ by Franz Kafka

You are born in Prague 1883, a Jewish German Bohemian in Austria-Hungary. You are lonely, an isolated man. You become a lawyer and an insurance office worker. You want to write, but work consumes all your time. You work in a textile factory, a small tyrant at work and at home. You become a partner in an asbestos factory, but it too takes up all your time. You want companionship without having to have responsibility or empathy. You develop tuberculosis and are forced to take a pension and spend most of your time in sanatoriums. You are dying, but you have time to write. You get your wish. It is a curse. You are shy, you are hilarious, you are a womaniser, you are tormented by your family. Your life is invaded by two celluloid balls, constantly bouncing, which take over your home. You are incredibly sensitive to noise. The noise of the balls haunts you. You produce a series of idiosyncratic masterpieces, many of them unfinished at your death, including this story. You are haunted by duality: the balls, the Mädchen, the apprentices. You will die a couple of decades into the century which, perhaps more than any other writer, you will capture in its bureaucratic, savage, mechanised horror. You are Blumfeld, an Elderly Batchelor. You are Franz Kafka.

First published by Mercy Sohn, 1936; first published in English in The Partisan Review, translated by Philip Horton, 1938, Vol 6 Nos 1 & 2. Collected in Description of a Struggle, Schocken, 1958, and The Complete Short Stories, Penguin, 1983

‘The Index’ by J. G. Ballard

The life of Henry Rhodes Hamilton is too strange and sprawling to be contained in any book, which perhaps is why only the index to his life story survives. Sample entries:

“Avignon, birthplace of HRH, 9-13, childhood holidays, 27; research at Pasteur Institute of Ophthalmology, 101; attempts to restore anti-Papacy, 420-35

“Schweitzer, Albert, receives HRH, 199; performs organ solo for HRH, 201; discusses quest for the historical Jesus with HRH, 203-11; HRH compared to by Leonard Bernstein, 245; expels HRH, 246”

One of Ballard’s funniest and most playful experiments with form, and the sort of thing that makes any writer who encounters it curse themselves for not thinking of it first.

First published in Bananas magazine, 1977. Collected in War Fever, Collins, 1964 and Complete Stories Vol 1, Flamingo, 2001. Also published in The Paris Review, 1991, and available to subscribers to read online here. Also anthologised in That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Written, ed. David Miller, Head of Zeus, 2014

‘A Lovely Morning’ by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Walter Kaiser

Though it’s a sequel to a longer story (‘An Obscure Man’), ‘A Lovely Morning’ stands on its own as a beautiful piece of work. A young boy named Lazarus, the son of a Dutch adventurer, is raised by an Amsterdam brothel-keeper but escapes to join a group of touring actors and dreams of his unfolding future life. The late-Renaissance setting is brought so compellingly and believably to life that it makes the real world around you pale in comparison. Both ‘An Obscure Man’ and ‘A Lovely Morning’ attempt to render the universe of Rembrandt’s paintings in prose, something you’d have to be incredibly ambitious to attempt and incredibly talented to achieve, but Yourcenar is more than up to the challenge.

First English publication in Two Lives and a Dream, Aiden Ellis, 1987

‘Calling Cards’ by Ivan Bunin

Born in Russia in 1870, Bunin’s life was one that took him from being a student of Tolstoy and friend of Chekhov to winning the Nobel, being repudiated by the new Soviet state, and dying in penury of pneumonia in Paris in 1953. He specialised in short stories, bringing the style of the great Nineteenth-Century Russians to the concerns of the Twentieth Century, including the series of dense, dark and sex-charged fictions he wrote while living in Nazi-occupied France, collected as Dark Avenues. ‘Calling Cards’ is one of the shortest and best from this book, a brief story about a brief liaison on a pre-revolution Volga steamboat. The description of a woman undressing, told with both admiration and pity, has stayed with me for more than 20 years while the rest of my memory has fallen away like wet cake:

“Thin collarbones and ribs stood out in conformity with the thin face and slender shins. But the hips were even large. The belly, with a small, deep navel, was sunken, the prominent triangle of dark, beautiful hair beneath it corresponded with the abundance of dark hair on her head. She took the pins out, and the hair fell down thickly onto her thin back with its protruding vertebrae. She bent to pull up the slipping stockings – the small breasts with frozen, wrinkled brown nipples hung down like skinny little pears, delightful in their meagreness.”

I’m not sure exactly what this says about me, so let’s just move along, shall we?

First English publication, translated by Sophie Lund, in The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, Angel Books, 1984. First full English publication of Dark Avenues, translated by Hugh Aplin, by Oneworld, 2008

‘The Day of the Funeral’ by Edith Wharton

“His wife had said: ‘If you don’t give her up I’ll throw myself from the roof.’ He had not given her up, and his wife had thrown herself from the roof.”

If these opening lines don’t make you want to read on, I can’t help you.

First published in Human Nature, D. Appleton and Company, 1933 and variously collected including in The Collected Stories 1911–1937, Library of America, 2001

‘The Legend of the Holy Drinker’ by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann

A transcendental story of a hopeless alcoholic drinking himself to death, written by a genius who was in the final stages of drinking himself to death. Joseph Roth, clear-eyed chronicler of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of Nazism, is one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest writers, and his work has almost all been translated by the brilliant poet Michael Hofmann. I don’t think that there’s a writer/translator pairing I love more.

First published in English, in a different translation, by Chatto & Windus, 1989. Hofmann’s translation published by Granta, 2000