Tag: Benjamin Myers

‘Snorri & Frosti’ by Benjamin Myers

Chosen by Nick Allen

You’re always thinking Frosti … sometimes it is fine to just be.

The final entry in Benjamin Myers’ short story collection Male Tears, ‘Snorri & Frosti’ is pure Beckett, told almost entirely through dialogue and wonderful for that. Two old brothers, living in a cabin in Northern Europe, chopping wood, shooting the breeze, “listening to the silence”, trying not to die. They make coffee. They philosophize: “The world is full of uncertainty, change and confusion but there is truth in an axe blade.” They bicker. They can’t decide whether to build a sweat lodge. Full of mordant humour, the type of pedantry that only plays between two people who have been together for years… and there is a story about the time Snorri left the village, repeatedly told over dinner.

“It is winter. It is cold. Frosti has a headache.”

First published as a limited edition chapbook by 3AM:Press, 2013. Also available as an ebook from Galley Beggar Press, 2013 and available to buy here. Collected in Male Tears, Bloomsbury, 2021. * Nick Allen has published one collection and three pamphlets of poetry, with a new pamphlet due in the Spring. He gets most of his sustenance from espressos and malt whisky

‘The Folk Singer’ by Ben Myers

It goes without saying that Ben Myers is a hugely gifted writer, but I don’t think people always recognise how versatile he is. He’s associated with the sort of rural noir/gothic that he mastered in his first three novels, but as this collection shows, he can turn his hand to more or less anything. Yes, there are dark tales of travellers and farmers and the like, but there’s also the Beckettian tragi-comic duologue of ‘Snorri and Frosti’, and this one, which is my favourite in the set. In it, an ageing folk singer is interviewed by a music journalist – who’s a big fan of her work – in a café in London. “For a fleeting moment the writer experiences that feeling of being faced with someone so utterly familiar and yet completely unknown; an intimate stranger,” is how he so tantalisingly describes the journalist watching the singer walk down the street and into the building. What I love about this story is the way he fits so many layers into the dialogue – there’s something of the film noir about it in the way questions are answered with questions and every exchange has a subtext that goes way deeper than the words alone suggest. Not only this, but it’s clear that both characters are aware of it and appear to enjoy the game, playful and teasing in the way they interact, but always with a jagged edge. His years as a music journalist give this a real authenticity too (“everyone knows that interviews start when they’re no longer ‘interviews’” as the singer says), which only adds to the overall effect.

First published as a Galley Beggar Single, 2014, and collected in Male Tears, Bloomsbury 2021