dovegreyreader scribbles

This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You ~ Jon McGregor

So long ago that I can't remember exactly when, I read half of the stories in what was then Jon McGregor's latest collection entitled This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You. Phew, typing that title twice in as many minutes is quite enough, that's being shortened to TITSOTTHTSLY... no perhaps not. Anyway, I expect Jon McGregor has written two more collections and a novel since this one, but the book has sat by my desk all this time waiting for me to write about it, because there was a story in there that moved me beyond words.

Today is the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, and, with the recent publicity and new developments surrounding that tragedy, this particular story surfaced in my mind again.

This has to be the mark of a brilliant piece of writing surely... especially given my 'where-on-earth-have-I-parked-the car' memory these days. But there are some writers whose work does have that stickability for me and Jon McGregor is definitely one. As I read The Casual Vacancy by J.K.Rowling, it was with real clarity that I recalled Jon's utterly devastating and convincing account of the life of a drug addict in Even the Dogs, and 'tis true. this literary recall may have been to J.K.R's detriment. Incidentally how well-deserved was Jon's McGregor's winning of the Impac prize for that novel

One of the cohesive factors to the stories in this collection (I will just call it 'this collection' I think) is their mapping of Norfolk, and though there is no title story the broader significance of the title is clear... these are the life events that could happen to any one of us. Those unpredictable, wrong-place-wrong-time moments of coincidence that culminate in something life-changing, an event that will shift the unsuspecting person's life on its axis, tip the equilibrium, to reveal the frailties and fragility that normality and routine can sometimes paper over quite effectively. Once the paper covering those stresses, anxieties and phobias rips just a little and the defences are breached, what lies beneath is exposed. Those are the glimpses that Jon McGregor offers, sometimes just for  the briefest of moments, long enough for the reader to see plenty and more before they are papered over again and life carries on. As in Even the Dogs, these are the people who may become the unwanted, or marginalised... or who to the rest of the world seem to be constantly living off piste as they deal with grief and guilt, trauma and misunderstanding, and who so often the world may feel more comfortable leaving behind. 

If you only read one short story a year, even if you read none, I would recommend you seek out If It Keeps On Raining - Susworth from this collection.

Why is the man living alone by the river, seemingly estranged from his family and building a fifty-foot tree house as insurance against a great flood that he is convinced will happen.

Could it be because he has witnessed a tragedy first hand, and one so terrible and that he was utterly helpless to prevent, a disaster that unfolded before his eyes. It has cost him his career, his marriage and his family... the sequalae to the tragedy barely hinted at, tantalising clues offered at a slant, yet crystal clear. Surely all a man can do at times like this is to be prepared for all eventualities, attempt to be in control, because life has already proved that disaster can strike once, just supposing it were to strike twice....and in this way he convinces himself of the rightness of his actions. Belt and braces are required because potential disaster now lurks everywhere, in every situation, just waiting to strike...surely everyone knows that.

This is the unsayable revealed as a supposition... via someone else's life, presented indirectly and deflected onto someone else, because to speak directly and personally would be far too painful. But be in no doubt, something has happened, a tragedy of huge proportions that has changed a life forever, and when the hint of that tragedy came suddenly I realised I was reading a brilliant and startlingly accurate account of the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder.

As the man ponders the life of the fisherman on the opposite bank of the river, I realised he was pondering and seeking justification for his own predicament...

'Maybe he got grounds of ill health out of someone. out of whoever he was working for. The police maybe...like mental distress for example, like if something were to happen... for example things you might witness or be part of.'

There is a double spaced paragraph break in the book here, reader thinking time well-used by me so that by the time I read the next paragraph I knew what I was reading about and who the man was...

'Like being in front of a crowd, and saying : 'Stop pushing there's enough room for everyone...'

I have just read the story again, however long after that first read and its power to grip and astonish remains just as strong, so though you may think I have given it away, trust me the punch will remain for you if you do read it.

Plus there are another thirty in this collection waiting to stun you just as much, and as I pick it up again I realise fifteen that I haven't read yet. The guilt that pervades In Winter The Sky, the loss that invades She Was Looking For This Coat, the way a reader's sympathies will twist and turn as they read Keeping Watch Over The Sheep, a story told from the self-deluded point of view of a perpetrator, one in possession of no insight.

In a way I can only only apologise for taking however long to write about Jon McGregor's glittering and accomplished collection, but in a way I am not sorry. Sometimes waiting and then picking a book up again and recognising its merits instantly can only serve to emphasise just how good it is, and why you might not want to miss it.

Scroll down for gifts...

 

The Persephone 100

I can't tell you how thrilled I was when an unexpected package arrived from Persephone Books last week.

Tucked up inside I found a copy of the one hundredth Persephone book, The Persephone Book of Short Stories complete with two bookmarks, the Biannually, a catalogue and a lovely note from Nicola Beauman.

I have spent a happy hour browsing the catalogue again, remembering the books I have read and recalling the huge amount of reading pleasure that these books have given me over the years, and though I didn't discover Persephone until they were up to number thirty-six or so, as soon as I did I wasted no time in ordering up the ones I had missed.

Forgive the repetition but I have never forgotten this moment...

I had finished my OU English Literature degree in 2002 and, as is customary with the OU, the results had arrived about a week before Christmas. I had a quick gnash of the teeth over missing a First by a whisker, but was delighted with my 2:1 considering I had done all the studying over the previous six years, and whilst working a full time health visitor caseload and raising teenagers. No I don't know how I managed it either beyond picking up the derisory gauntlet thrown down by a very cynical GP I was working with at the time who said, when I mentioned that I was doing it...

'Oh that's one of those things everyone starts and no one ever finishes.'

In a way I think the whole family earned that degree with me because they all helped and supported me enormously, but the upshot was that I just couldn't pick up a book and read it for pleasure.

Unbeknown to me Bookhound had seen an article about Persephone Books in the newspaper. He phoned and spoke to Nicola Beauman and asked her to choose six books and gift wrap them for me for Christmas. Then he put them on my desk on Christmas morning...where I was supposed to find them...except I didn't go near my desk until eventually, at about 3pm, Bookhound suggested I did.

I was beside myself, as you can well imagine, as I opened my first read, Fidelity by Susan Glaspell... and possibly chosen above the others for the endpaper. It is that wonderful log cabin quilt, and I had studied Susan Glaspell's short story A Jury of Her Peers and made much of the log cabin quilt being stitched in that story for an exam question... well I knew instantly that I was back into me real reading life again. 

The next ten books I read in succession (because I quickly sent for more) were...

Lettice Delmer by Susan Miles
The Far Cry by Emma Smith
The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski
The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson-Burnett
Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy
A Woman's Place by Ruth Adam
The Montana Stories by Katherine Mansfield
Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day by Winifred Watson
A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair

After a short rest when I see from my reading journal that I read We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates and Embers by Sandor Marai, I was back with Persephone again..

The Homemaker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Mariana by Monica Dickens
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

Before the year was out I had also read

The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holome
The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay-Holding
Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge
Tell it to a Stranger by Elizabeth Berridge
The Priory by Dorthy Whipple
William - An Engishman by Cicely Hamilton
Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell
Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Stracehy
They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple 

I don't think that year's glut and gorge has ever been repeated, but I have read a Persephone book regularly ever since, not only for the pleasure and the memories of that Christmas day discovery, but also because the books will always fit the moment and when perhaps nothing else does. Links to those I have written about can be found here. I nip into the shop when I am in London (I was there on Monday and did so) and may buy a book or two I have missed (not this time). I often associate them with that train journey back to Devon too because I can never resist a read on the way home.

The book of thirty short stories, the hundredth book and a landmark, is billed as a celebration of the diversity of the writers that Persephone publish, and the list is certainly stellar... Katherine Mansfield, Irene Nemirovsky, Mollie Panter-Downes, Dorothy Whipple, Edith Wharton, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Penelope Fitzgerald to name but a few. With the dates of the stories ranging from 1909 to 1986 and in order of publication date within this volume, a really clever touch is the different endpapers; the front a fabric dating from 1911 whilst the one at the back dates from 1983. I have decided to alternate, reading one story from the beginning and one from the end until I meet myself in the middle, and four stories in I am loving the way the old and the newer do 'compare and contrast' as suggested by Nicola in her write-up of the book.

For those who loved the Persephone Diary of a few years ago there will be another one for 2013 so that's one for the Christmas list too, and if you are a fan and don't already subscribe to the daily Persephone Post hie there over to the new website now and be ready for a wonderful weekday fillip of something special.

So it's a great big THANK YOU from me to Nicola Beauman and Persephone Books for all the reading pleasure they have given me in the last nine years, and for bringing forgotten fiction by women right back into a spotlight of its own. 

So how about you...

Do you have a favourite Persephone book and why...

A favourite endpaper...

Do you keep the books together on one shelf or all over the place...for a while some of mine were in this cabinet, now I'm a bit hither and thither with them...

And what about a book or author you wish Persephone would publish...

 

 

 

 

The 3000th blog post :: Beer Trip to Llandudno ~ Kevin Barry

'Oh don't worry, I'll only do it for about a week then the novelty will wear off,'

That was me back in 2006, when the family looked at me aghast at the idea that I was starting a blog.

So here I am six years and bit later, six years and a bit older, and this week we have passed the 3000th blog post.

I'd been having a low-key celebration with myself to mark the occasion with a week of daily posts which I have loved writing, and about books I have loved reading... and I wasn't going to say anything because it all seems a bit brag and boast...but in the end... well here we go onwards, and though I can't stand the stuff please do share a toast with me in real ale today, and let's all go to Llandudno with Kevin Barry.

I am always ready to buy into the short story.

If I embark on a collection I tend to keep the book to hand and read one every so often. This probably makes sharing my thoughts on the whole collection almost impossible as the book can be 'around' for months waiting for me to finish it. This happened with Julian Barnes's collection Pulse which I really enjoyed, but after about six months of dipping in I really had lost any connecting thread if there was one.

This is probably not the way to do this.

I doubtless miss all the subtle nuances, and links between stories and then there's the order. I feel sure collections are put together with great deliberations over the sequence, and there's me reading them on a whim and completely out of order....do you do this with a short story collection, or are you all more disciplined than I am??

When I heard that Kevin Barry had recently won the prestigious Sunday Times Short Story Award with Beer Trip to Llandudno, I was delighted to find it was in his latest collection Dark Lies the Island, and a proof copy from Jonathan Cape sitting on my shelf filed under month of publication, April. Incidentally, if anyone has ever wondered (as if you haven't got anything else to wonder about) whether I have any sort of system for Books In, the answer is yes, and that is it.

But bearing in mind it might be Christmas before I finish every story in Dark Lies the Island, or it might be next week, I never can tell, I thought I would leap in and read Beer Trip to Llandudno and of course, though I haven't read the other shortlisters, I can see exactly why this won.

We've all seen them, perhaps we know some of them, and perhaps we may all have made some sort of judgements based just on looking, finding appearance and behaviour that makes them fit the stereotype. Bring on the 'biggish lads' taking off on a Real Ale Club outing on a sweltering hot day in July. Travelling by train from Lime Street, Liverpool to Llandudno via Rhyl, with a crate of Marston's Old Familiar (3.9 per cent to volume) to see them on their way, and a quick hop off the train at Flint for some 'beef n'gravies from the Pie-O-Matic'

Mo, Everett, Tom, Big John, Billy and the narrator, also in charge of 'publications and outings both', are already 'hot as pigs' and stripped off down to their tee-shirts as they arrive in Llandudno...

'Billy Stroud sadly raised his T-shirt above his man boobs. He put his arms above his head and gyrated slowly his vast belly and danced his way off the train...'

I love the word order. It makes me stop dead and think, and then stay in the sentence long enough to visualise. You see you can picture it already can't you...


Kevin Barry perfectly captures the vernacular, the phrasing, the lingo and along with it the camaraderie, the male bonding and the sensitivities...

'Mo was down a testicle since the spring. We'd called in at the Royal the night of his operation. We'd stopped at the Ship and Mitre on the way - they'd a handsome bitter from Clitheroe on guest tap. We needed the fortification : when Real Ale Club boys parade down hospital wards, we tend to draw worried glances from the whitecoats. We are shaped like those chaps in the warning illustrations on cardiac charts...'

and the humour..

'... we joshed him but gently.

    'Sounding a little high-pitched, Mo?'

    'Other lad's going to be working overtime.'

Those sensitivities and tenderness creep in around the edges of the macho as it becomes clear these men, whilst not using the word willingly,

'Love is a strong word, but.'

most definitely share the nearest they will allow themselves to get to it. Bromance seems to be the word for it these days though I suspect our lads would be having no truck with that idea, this is good old-fashioned male-bonding over booze, full stop. Five or six nights a week, 'hobbyists' not 'a bunch of sots'...and this being me, well of course I'm worried for their fibrosing livers.

By the time they board the train back to Liverpool the lads have sampled and scored pints of everything from Phoenix Tram Driver, Cornish Lightning and Lancaster Bomber through to Miner's Slattern. An old flame has surfaced for one of them and they have set foot in The Heron, The Otter, The Crippled Ox and heaven knows where else. And they still seem to be standing.


Civilised, never aggressive, tender and funny.. as the men watch Billy's gyrating stomach they unite, and Kevin Barry seems to surround him with something invisible, perhaps to protect him from the judgements that you and I may have been making as we looked on. Impervious and oblivious to others and to any opprobrium headed their way,

'We lost weight in tears as we tumbled onto the platform...'

Outward impressions of having a good time need to be upheld, yet at the end of day, and home, the mood will often be maudlin...

' It has this effect, Liverpool. You're not back in the place five minutes and you go sentimental as a famine ship.'

Loyalty is examined and tested, life's hardships and mistakes exposed, but in their All For One and One For All way the lads stick together until it slowly becomes clear to the reader that all these 'six big blokes' have is each other, and they know it.

Meanwhile Jonathan Cape have made Beer Trip to Llandudno  available as a free download for the next seven days. It is poignant, sad and funny by turns and I am so glad to have read it, congratulations to Kevin Barry on winning the award, and I promise I will read the rest now....eventually.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foster ~ Claire Keegan

If I look up from my desk and gaze around the room to have a think, which I do a lot, this sloping and helpfully magnetic board, my Ideas Board, is to my right hand and almost constantly in my field of vision, so after almost four months of looking at that headline it is almost branded into my skull

'I often have to write a story to make an image go away'

Claire Keegan's short story Foster, published as a stand-alone, long short story by Faber last September has been sitting on my shelf in proof copy for a very long time. So has the interview that Claire Keegan gave Sean O'Hagan that I had cut out from the paper ready for the day that I would read the book, and that snippet declaring that headline has sat on the board next to my desk as a prompt ever since.

Well eventually I had to read the story so that I could finally put that snippet away, clear the board and start a new year with some new prompts and ideas. You might be able to glimpse on there a list of books from BibliOz, enter your date of birth and see what was top of the NYT Best Sellers list for the date, second guess what the midwife might have been reading as you prepared to make your entrance, and I do fancy reading a few of them. You might also be able to spot some cartoons from the New Yorker which our Erika from comments very kindly snips out and sends me and which I love ...and that's enough of a diversion and all you need to know as to why I suddenly picked up Foster and read it as my first book of the new decade.

Foster is set in County Wexford, rural Ireland in 1981, and told in the first person and through the eyes of a young girl who is taken to spend the summer with distant relatives, the Kinsellas whilst her mother gives birth to yet another baby. The story is immaculately measured and boundaried by the limitations of a child's understanding, whilst teeming with those observational skills with which children are frequently not credited but at which they excel. Moments of uneasiness or awkwardness are never missed, nor are the moments of unexpected care

'Her hands are like my mother's hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.'

Slowly what has begun as a cautious and careful relationship between the girl and her carers becomes something much deeper as she settles into this loving and warm, yet inevitably temporary life. The bed-wetting is glossed over by her new 'mother' and it stops, but it is clear this is a home that has known abundant sadness; grief and loss are concealed here somewhere and little signals and hints creep into the narrative, much as they would trickle into a child's awareness.

As Claire Keegan goes on to say on the subject of having to write

'It's like an elbow nudging you into examining something you don't quite understand but need to. For me writing is a way of understanding something, and as such a journey into the unknown.'

I would suggest that reading that writing also becomes a journey into the unknown of the imagination, because I wasn't to know that this would all, at a slant, remind me of the story so well-known in our family... of how my mum at the age of thirteen was evacuated from her working class home in the Dingle in Liverpool at the beginning of the war and placed with a childless couple living in Chester. The couple had sufferred countless miscarriages and lost a baby at a few weeks old, so perhaps my mum fell into a deep pool of surplus love just waiting to be shared because they adored her. They settled her into the Queen's School and paid the fees and my mum was blissfully happy and my grandmother was decidedly not. Taking fright at just how happy her daughter was my grandfather was swiftly dispatched to bring my mum back to Liverpool just as the bombs started to fall and apparently the couple didn't give her up without a bit of a tussle.

Reading Foster suddenly opened up a whole breadth of new understanding to that tale now firmly entrenched in family folklore. I had never really considered the impact on my mum of all this but I feel sure she felt as torn as the girl in Foster, and that is all beautifully delineated by Claire Keegan. Because of the war my mum's education never really resumed, any chances of a career dissipated and her life took a very different path... well she eventually went to work in the NAAFI canteen and met the Tinker for a start... and then they had me so it wasn't all bad.

I'm not sure all this may be what Claire Keegan had in mind when she wrote Foster, and I don't want to elaborate further because to do so would spoil the ending of the book, but there was much more enlightenment for me about the depth of my mum's feelings as I read on. Claire Keegan also talks fascinatingly about the wealth of detail that was left off the page and had to remain so because the girl couldn't have known about it, and you can only wonder at the writerly discipline required to achieve that,

'It's essentially about trusting in the reader's intelligence rather than labouring a point. To work on the level of suggestion is what I aim for. There are so many things the short story cannot do; it's by learning those limitations that I am cornered into writing what I can.'

Oh allelulia to that, because in allowing those gaps and silences Claire Keegan offers her reader the space to expand on her narrative and even, as I have done, overwrite a narrative of their own if they choose and that remains one of fiction's mightiest powers for me. So in these days of stonking great big fat chunky contemporary novels I say three cheers for less is more and 57 pages that say as much as 570, and please can we have much more of this less is more, thank you.

 

 

Perfect Lives ~ Polly Samson

I am unusually (for me and reading) measured and disciplined with the short story. One a day at most, occasionally two, but one good one will give me enough to think about through the day as a sort of little performance stage to walk onto in my mind. A nice place to visit as I go about the less exciting aspects of life chez dovegrey, where things still need ironing, washing machines need feeding, you spend half your life on this recycling thing and cats still sick up on the kitchen floor, you know the score.
However schedules and discipline were scattered to the west winds when I started reading Polly Samson's new collection, Perfect Lives, recently published by Virago.

Now I'll own up I only picked this up in desperation for a book to take along to the Endsleigh Salon last week for the theme of Music.
How can I have struggled with such an enticing theme and always I promise myself that I'll be organised like Linda and Rebecca, but there I was Mrs Last-Minute.Com again? So I bargained with Polly Samson and said she could come with me if I got the merest hint of music in the first story. Polly squeaked it with a reference to a song playing on the car radio but in fact it wouldn't have mattered because it didn't need a song, I was hooked anyway, and to be honest she was home and dry with her epigraph from Leonard Cohen,

"It's the notion that there is no perfecttion - that this is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still that is no alibi for anything. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances."

Dear old Leonard, how we loved him and music surfaces frequently in this collection, in the shape of concert pianists, classical singers and piano tuners, and I felt at times as if I was reading the literary equivalent of a suite or a concerto or a fugue or something. Help me out musical readers...the one where the melody changes and is reshaped a little later on, enough to trigger your memory of what went before.

This musical interest would all have come as no surprise had I done my homework first because Polly Sansom is a pianist and lyricist and the wife of David Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame, so clearly music matters, but as Dave Gilmour has been keen to point out about Polly's book ..."it's not %&*^&% autobiographical." so don't go there. I don't know about you but I rarely make that assumption about fiction these days so no problem. In fact forget autobiographical connections (and what would I know) I was more as sick as a parrot to discover I'd read five stories in one sitting and the remaining six in another which meant I didn't have any left and I wanted many more.

The difference being that in this collection that is Perfect Lives... except you know these are only going to be Perfect-Enough Lives because Leonard has said as much... the stories connect and weave into each other offering differing perspectives on the lives they contain. The web is intricately woven across the whole which made this book read quite differently, unlike a disparate collection here there were connections to hold in mind and make throughout.

This is my favourite sort of writing, events told slant and all off to a riveting start with Celia's discovery of her husband's waywardness and her subsequent coping strategies, and all set against the backdrop of the beach side home, exposed and battered by the weather and the sight of the waves. A home harbouring secrets which are slowly unwrapped, just a few words here, a  few there, enough to help me sniff out the trail and a home offering but limited protection for poor Celia's battered emotions too...amazing what can sneak in through the letter box. And then there are the waves with their potential to be calm and soothing or to hold the power of malevolent forces, and all exploited wonderfully in the telling of this story. The local weather forecast here in Devon always predicts wave conditions for surfers and often the lovely David Brain tells us the waves are 'messy', Celia knows about 'messy' waves.

The stories progress through the connected lives so this is one collection you need to read in the given order, which I often don't, if you are to get to grips with who belongs to who and thus experience the full and very satisfying impact of the slow dawning realisation about those relationships.

It all reminded me of health visiting days and suddenly in mid-home visit someone would say, "Oh you visit my sister" and then you'd place them in a much bigger setting and pull in another raft of background information that informed and expanded on what you already knew. Talking of which, a stout health visitor wearing Hush Puppies features in this book, and doing daily visits too, (neither of those is me in this picture by the way, but I do love it and one of them is a health visitor...your guess) so for all its contemporary setting this bit must have been well before my time.I didn't wear Hush Puppies once in thirty years honest, and daily visits?

Then there are the gaps and silences and how much I appreciate an un-bossy writer who trusts me to fill them as I choose, not as they insist.

Prose described as lyrical switches me off almost as much as limpid, I think we need to draw on a whole new batch of prose-describing adjectives, I just can't think of any at the moment so perhaps decide for yourselves...

'She grew up with the delicate weight of her grandmother's dreams draped around her shoulders like a shawl...'

'That and the way he played Chopin, long strong fingers playing the keys so softly they might have been stroking the cheek of an infant...'

Pulling 'lyrical prose' out of context may do it no favours now I read that back but when you come across moments like this in a book, and in a short story in particular, it really is like finding your favourite chocolate in a box that you are already enjoying gorging on anyway.

Are they funny, are they dead? ~ Marjorie Ann Watts

"Life is too short for a long story..."

So sayeth Lady Mary Wortley Montague (1689-1762) her good looks and her eyelashes apparently decimated by smallpox and Mary one of the first to have her children innoculated against the disease in 1717 thus paving the way for Jenner's discovery and the widespread acceptance of his much safer process of vaccination.
All of which has nothing to do with Marjorie Ann Watts' book Are they funny, are they dead? published by CB Editions, but I came across that quote whilst looking for some pithy mention of the short story genre by someone famous, and was then completely sidetracked by Mary's colourful life and her position between Aphra Behn and Jane Austen in the canon of literature by women writers.
Except Marjorie does have a literary claim to fame... her grandmother CA Dawson Scott, known as Sappho, wrote twenty novels and also established PEN, the international writer's organisation and it will coincidentally be my pleasure to visit PEN, having been invited to take part in a panel discussion there in the autumn.
But Marjorie Ann Watts's story is interesting in its own right and perhaps that quote isn't so out of place, because at the age of eighty three she finally has a book for adults in print after successes some years ago with children's books, namely The Mill House Cat.  Marjorie trained as a painter at the Chelsea School of Art, studying with Edward Ardizzone and was taught life drawing by Henry Moore.
Are they funny, are they dead? originally presented to a publisher who tutted and sent Marjorie off to write a novel first, far more acceptable than a short story collection. That novel duly written and liked by the publisher but publication then declined again on the grounds that eighty three was too old for a book deal....gasp...if the Tinker reads this he'll be onto the Ageism Dept @ EqualOpps in a flash. He's currently arguing the toss with car hire firms who class him as too old to hire a car for his next trip around Orkney, this despite a lifetime of No Claims bonus to his name....don't get him started.
So I think we must be grateful to Charles Boyle of CB Editions who saw through the hogwash and has published this remarkable collection of short stories which I have been reading slowly over the last few weeks. I'm trying to keep a collection on the go at all times now, on that one-a-day basis which allows the story to blossom and grow petals in my mind through the day, though I must admit I was frequently tempted to race on and squeeze in several a day of these.
So much publicity recently surrounding press lists of the up-coming twenty-somethings, the promising authors we absolutely must look out for, all very laudable and interesting, but I'm sorry the blindingly obvious has to be said ...you might know about cutting edge literary devices and creative writing at that age, but you know very little about life compared to the experiences of an eighty-three year old, and it is that life that shines through in Marjorie Ann Watts's stories.
Ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, the daily humdrum stuff of living and loving all telescoped through the perceptive eyes of an octogenarian. So the insensitivities of others laid bare with refreshing candour, those miscommunications, the innocent observations of children so frequently misunderstood by adults and there's something about revenge being a dish best served cold that is meted out here too...
...Mrs Calder wickedly determined to go out in her own style despite her daughter's best and more socially acceptable intentions
...the deliciously and much-deserved retribution awaiting the blase and cynical psychiatrist, or the philandering husband
...the struggles with conscience
...the unlikely combinations of characters, the immigrant and the vagrant
all beautifully observed from that unique vantage point of age and experience; ageing seen through the eyes, with respect, of the 'aged' and then that retrospective analysis of childhood that it's impossible to make when you are younger.
Clare Wigfall writing of her own short story collection The Loudest Sound & Nothing sees it as a book of her twenties for its recollections of time and place as she wrote, the books she was reading, the friends she hang out with and, as she sent the book out into the world, hoped it wouldn't be judged or rejected unfairly; in fact it won prizes.
This is surely Marjorie Ann Watts's book of her entire lifetime and I sincerely hope there are more to come.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher at my kitchen table

The kitchen table has looked like this through this week as I've indulged in some mellow, sun-dappled quilt-history reading, some knitting planning and general book-meandering to any warmth that may escape past the Aga-Hog, a sleeping - snoring Rocky. In the midst of all that I've strayed wantonly off into yet another exploration of the writing of Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
I also discover that Remembrance Sunday was the fiftieth anniversary of her death, November 9th 1958.
I have been re-reading The Homemaker for the zillionth time and each time I find a new and previously unseen perspective in that book to explore and more of that soon, but as you already know I have also found myself completely engrossed in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's book of short stories, The Bedquilt edited by Mark Madigan.
In his introduction Mark Madigan crystallises my thoughts on the writing of Dorothy (incidentally originally named Dorothea after her Middlemarch namesake) and perhaps now explains why hers is writing I return to with great frequency,

'Fisher brought to her short fiction a deep understanding of human beings and the world we inhabit. Above all else, these stories bear the imprint of her "special way of looking at things", a way of interpreting life as she knew it - with "her whole personality."

The story of the title has long been a favourite, as spinster relation and Elwell family drudge Aunt Mehetabel dreams up the superlative quilt pattern which she then proceeds to hand piece and quilt over a period of years. Eventually her skill and application win her the status of minor local celebrity and a previously unthinkable degree of inclusion into a family who have taken this maiden aunt for granted all her life. As word spreads of a masterpiece in the making and strangers arrive at the door to view her tiny stitches and immaculate seams, the family begin to realise her value, though perhaps still as a marketable commodity. Nevertheless Aunt Mehetable is given fabrics, a work table of her own and best of all, every quilter's dream possession, time away from her chores to sew.
The empowering 'completeness' this offers to Mehetable's self esteem, giving her a voice after a lifetime of silent disadvantage, makes for a far deeper read than the brevity of the story first suggests. Similar themes to those that always jump out at me from Susan Glaspell's brilliant play Trifles where, through the stitching of the log cabin quilt, Mrs Wright heart-breakingly but symbolically creates that warm, happy home she yearns for.
The metaphor of the quilt is a powerful and multi-faceted one wherever it is used
As well as a perceptive empathy in identifying the plight of these single, seemingly parasitical women,  there can be no better story than The Bedquilt for conveying the joy and thrill of creativity.
I'm convinced that any craft activity done at any level accesses a feel-good bit of the brain. Knowing and feeling those shafts of excitement that can pierce the day in day out-ness of life once that bout of startitis strikes, the idea is born, the mind-planning begins and the materials are required yesterday, which all justifies the existence in every knitting or quilting home of  the ubiquitous stash. Truly awful, I'm sure you'll agree, not to be able to respond instantly to those moments of pure inspiration before they are effaced by the sight of a full washing machine.
For Elaine Showalter The Bedquilt is no less than " a parable of the woman writer and her creative fantasies.'
Hmm, parable? Fantasies? So we might not quite have perfected the bouts of finishitis here yet, but we will, we will. But yes it is a parable ( I never argue with Elaine...'Showalter argues that...' has earned me many a good essay mark) and on so many levels.
Meanwhile lest you thought I may have finished it this week, no it's still a fantasy awaiting reality.

as is this one,
 

but for the hundredth time of showing, here is one I made earlier.

Roll Up Prize Draw - The Lost College - Oxford Writers

I'm feeling the need for another prize draw after all that Booker excitement and I hope all the books have now arrived on winning doormats (William don't panic, The Secret Scripture only just sorted, sorry your address got lost in my 650 emails after France)

You may recall my trip to meet the Oxford Writers and the prize draw here for signed copies of their first anthology of short stories The Sixpenny Debt with a promise of more bounty to follow.
Well the bounty has arrived in the shape of their second anthology The Lost College and other Oxford Stories. It looks just as tantalising and with an equally delectable cover and a fine foreword by Colin Dexter.
Colin hones in on the difficult territory of the second book, the hurdle that so frequently incurs penalty points but not so the Oxford Writers,
'our talented writers have collectively cleared the hurdle with stylish assurance'
and across a wide range from,
' humour and satire to psychological insights; from l history old and new, to romance and reflection...spookery and science fiction too.'
I've had a read and believe me, anyone who loves Oxford will walk the streets of the city through the pages of these stories.
Bless them all, they've sent us a prize and just look at this, it's perfectly splendiferously gorgeous.
Lots of author signatures and Colin Dexter's too. Lovely to see old (as in previous) online acquaintance Margaret Pelling in there, Gina Claye and Mary Cavanagh too. I loved Mary's novel The Crowded Bed and can't wait for her next A Man Like Any Other, The Priest's Tale.
Jane Gordon-Cumming also in there and what excellent news after such a huge disappointment last Christmas, her lovely novel A Proper Family Christmas is back in print in  plenty of time for this year's festive season.
Names in comments as usual for that fine specimen of a signed copy of The Lost College.Rocky will assume donnish mantle, possibly a gown and select in a week or so's time and we will post worldwide as always.

Lunchtime

It's a lesser known fact that when I'm at work and the clock strikes one or thereabouts, I hang up my metaphorical work hat, head for my car if I'm not already in it, and whizz two minutes up the road onto Dartmoor. I have several favoured parking places where I can eat my lunch and read for about thirty minutes or so. This might seem acutely anti-social but to be frank  when I've been listening and talking to people all morning I'm a bit fed up with the sound of my own voice.
Time to give it a rest, make myself leave my desk and disappear off into another world.
I might listen to some of the news but it's all ever-so slightly depressing and seems at odds with the beautiful view, though I do like to hear Martha Kearney put someone on the rack and turn the screws. She does it so nicely and politely but to lethal effect.
The books need to be small and the reading has to be of a particular variety because my mind can only be allowed to descend into temporary respite before I have to crank it up again, the diversion can't afford to be too great, so a complex novel is hopeless. I don't have enough time to pick up the thread and proceed.
Barbara Pym is proving to be the perfect lunchtime companion as is H.E.Bates, and following his recent rehabilitation in my mind with The Triple Echo I have really enjoyed more in the shape of The Yellow Meads of Asphodel, a collection of his short stories.
Initially I had assumed they might be slightly Pym-like in their style and substance,but how wrong I was as things rapidly became darker and increasingly sinister and with an undisguised slightly risque edge. I don't associate risque with H.E.Bates, thinking Larkins, but perhaps I haven't read enough and am therefore guilty of pigeon-holing him very incorrectly?
There's that subtle dissection without anaesthetic going on as H.E.Bates strips away the surface layers and reveals those red-raw layers beneath which sting and smart when exposed to the air for the first time and the story of the title is one.
John and Virginia Claridge, more like man and wife than the seemingly devoted brother and sister they are, who have never argued and call each other darling until a suitor arrives on the scene to court Virginia and suddenly they both revert to type. The spats between the siblings finally begin and John's insane jealousy looks set to spoil Virginia's party.
Then the scatty Miss Shuttleworth, the bemused recipient of mysterious doorstep gifts of surplus garden produce, the cantaloupe melons, nectarines and asparagus. She too has a suitor but can he get the words out or do his exotic vegetables have to do the talking?
This is a tiny slip of a book full of great big huge surprises and I could so easily have missed it, but for anyone else who needs a little lunchtime escape or the short commute read, here's one perfect solution.

A sprinkling of Salt? Nay 'tis a veritable pillar.

It's not difficult to see that I've been seduced by some of the grand hitters from the big publishing houses of late and I'll confess the teetering booktowers of Babel have been far too tempting while I've been home having myself a restful convalesce. Analysis reveals some very satisfying reads and I'm going to say it now, I can't wait for the Booker Prize to come round. The dgr Bookerthon will most certainly be on again, anyone else up for the challenge?
But always trilling loudly alongside are the independent publishers, and I don't like to neglect their output for too long, especially when it slots so neatly into my short-story-a-day-for-a-year attempt.
Right so just to update, I've fallen off the short story wagon for the last couple of weeks, brain a bit wishy-washy and bizzarely demanding big long involving novels into which I can completely disappear. Short stories have however become the ambrosia (food of the gods, not the rice pudding) for my working brain, focusing as they do on the minuitiae of life in just a few pages and perfect preparation for the day ahead.
Adele Geras has written a marvellous defence of the short story over at normblog so that saves me the trouble because Adele articulates it far better than I could, but I am going to confirm the delights currently emerging from Salt, that most eclectic of independent publishers and I have a veritable pillar (will I get away with that?) of Salt books to read at the moment.
I've lapsed but will pick up where I left off with Some New Ambush by Carys Davies because, like Balancing on the Edge of the World by Elizabeth Baines, these stories capture the essence of a moment to perfection, the mistakes we all make and the solutions we find as we deal with everything life throws at us.
Hwang, the quiet revenge on the cheating adulterous friend had me cheering, yes cheering I tell you over a lost dry cleaning ticket. And just wait until you discover its demise, it's hilarious.
Waking the Princess reveals a unique way to a woman's heart and I guess, yes is the answer, I'd have been delighted with this gift of invention too all those years ago. To tell what would be to spoil.
The Gingerbread Boy almost too disturbing to read in the light of recent headline-hitting child abductions and this one, quietly powerful short story left me anguished. There is an aspect to child abduction that is rarely considered, we invariably assume we know the worst outcome but Carys Davies cleverly explores another outcome, one that should be far more comforting, except it was far from that. No word of a lie, this single story will stay in my mind for ever.
Sifting through the rest of the pillar of  Salt, I have gathered in Richard Bardsley's Body Parts (not his actual body parts you understand) which will apparently shed a whole new light on the human body.
Then Broken Things by Padrika Tarrant.In her early thirties, based in Norwich and enthusiastically endorsed by the Hungarian poet and translator George Szirtes as

' an instinctive wanderer down knife edges...intensity of vision luminous...perception deeply humane, tender yet terrifying '

I love the idea of that seemingly impossible combination, I'm sold already, Padrika's world is likened to that of Angela Carter, and may both horrify and entertain at the same time.
I've started these and they absolutely do.
Read Darling and be equally sickened and moved to tears of empathy and sadness in the space of a mere five pages. Read Coffinwood and step for just five pages into the world of the psychotic mind and just see how real it seems.I'm just four stories into Broken Things but already I see precisely what George Szirtes meant when he wrote of Padrika Tarrant,

'It is the nature of her understanding that is perhaps the most remarkable...her poor crazy stuffed houses are overflowing with life, rich with spirits, miracles and creatures who, like the writing itself, shine and darken, jostle, sing and die.They are tangible, furnished visions, wonderful and humbling.'

Then The I Love You Book by William Guy looks quite unique. Monologues which gather together the thoughts of a hundred different men and women speaking about the people, places, life and things they love, The Footballer, The Twin, The Supermarket Checkout, The Night Angler, The Social Worker to name a few.
No The Health Visitor which is probably a relief.
However I've come to the conclusion that there's a unique correlation between the short story and my working health visiting day world but let's not confuse things for now, more on that another day.

P.S. I discover good news for Carys Davies and Some New Ambush here, congratulations to Carys and to Salt.

The Mark on the Wall

My short story progress towards The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald has been rudely interrupted by none other than Virginia Woolf.
Just butted her way in and insisted I listened to what she had to say.
Having mentioned the short story "Kew Gardens" and found my copy of Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction I  had little choice. I re-read "Kew Gardens" and was immediately connected to the very essence of Virginia Woolf's writing and I wanted more.
The short story providing the perfect form within which Virginia Woolf could explore that literary equivalent of the painterly, colourful artistic style favoured by the women artists. In "Kew Gardens" fusing it with nature in her descriptions of the minutiae of the flowerbeds.

'The light fell either upon the smooth grey back of a pebble, or the shell of a snail with its brown circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red,blue and yellow...'

The sentences adapted to take the natural shape of thought processes without distorting or crushing them and what results is beautifully vivid and descriptive writing.No requirement to provide an outcome or give meaning to an experience, no dependence on causality or a need for effect, quite literally nothing happens, yet everything happens. Characters brought to life by detail not by incident and formidably brave writing for a woman in the face of the male-dominated world of traditional storytelling. Resisting and rewriting the rules.
Through an intensity of focused thought, Virginia Woolf continues to open new doors to new territory for this reader that may just never have been traversed before. I don't think I'd ever considered a piece of furniture in quite such a detailed way until I read "The Mark on the Wall", taking its source back to its origins as wood (someone needs to update and write the Ikea version)

'Wood is a pleasant thing to think about...I like to think about the tree itself, first the close dry sensation of being wood...on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon the earth that goes tumbling, tumbling all night long.'

Then once the tree is felled by a storm,

'Even so life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree.'

This book is a little feast of such moments and in the short story you don't miss them, impossible to gloss over. "An Unwritten Novel" offers the Woolfian detailed eye on a train journey, likewise "The Shooting Party" imagines the significant events that may have led to the opening gambit of the story

'She got in and put her suitcase on the rack, and the brace of pheasants on top of it.'

A story just one page long entitled "Monday or Tuesday" and here's the first line

'Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself...'

Perfectly describes the flight of a heron, I shall never look on one again without watching him shake the space from his wings.
Virginia Woolf herself knew she had indeed hit the mother-lode with these and was mining a rich writing seam,

'I shall never forget the day I wrote "The Mark on the Wall" - all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months. "The Unwritten Novel" was the great discovery, however. That - again in one second - showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it...I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway etc - How I trembled with excitement.'

This is a tiny book, barely 100 pages, easy to overlook it on the shelves as I have for years, now it's deservedly had its moment and I feel fortified yet again by my short story a day.

ShortStoryLand

The quest was on to see what was lurking on the shelves to feed the ongoing short story habit and as I prowled around a surprising number came to light.

A little Pushkin Press edition with just two, The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant and The Pearls by Isak Dinesen.I need no persuasion to pick up a Pushkin, this one's nicely silver
According to my journal it's eighteen years since I first read Secret Villages by Douglas Dunn so before it re-emerges word perfect in my long-term memory I will read it again. This book did the rounds of quite a few of us who had small children at the time and were craving something other than Topsy & Tim on the reading list. We all nudged each other's reading along into new post-natal territory fearing the death of the brain cells if we didn't get a grip.
Likewise Katherine Mansfield and The Garden Party, long overdue a revisit.
Essential Kit by Linda Leatherbarrow published by Maia Press and bought in response to my initial enthusiasm for all things Maia and has remained unread.This garnered good reviews at the time as I recall.
Then over to the middlebrow shelves though why I have housed Elizabeth Taylor over there I'm not sure, but The Devastating Boys looks like a fine collection with another Paul Bailey introduction and as I haven't read any of her short stories Elizabeth makes the cut.
One or two Hemingway short stories read down the years but I must grasp the nettle so The Snows of Kilimanjaro it is.
Thence across to my US women writers shelves to see what's on offer. I'm hankerign after a return to Dawn Powell after finding several extracts from her diaries in my daily read of The Assassin's Cloak but I don't have any of her short stories. Did she actually write any? But there was Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk which will do very nicely for now.
Finally in this trawl Hotel of the Saints by Ursula Hegi. I bought this one in that great flurry that happens when you read one book that you love by an author so you dash out and buy the rest, but the moment has often passed by the time the books arrive. I read Stones From the River and then needed everything Ursula Hegi had written but nothing quite managed to grab my attention.
Ninety-six short stories in that lot which should keep me going into May, but being an indecisive Libran now I can't quite make up my mind whether to read volume by volume to get a real feel for each writer or swip and swap each day to ring the changes. Nothing would have induced me to interrupt Balancing on the Edge of the World by Elizabeth Baines until I'd read them all, so it will be interesting to see how this selection shapes up.

Balancing on the Edge of the World

Whilst I imagine Richard T.Kelly slapping the paint on that great big Crusaders canvas, creating a huge panoramic vista of 21st century life, I envisage Elizabeth Baines hunched over a magnifying glass, the finest, most delicate of brushes in her hand, painting exquisite little miniatures, and there you have the essence of her short story collection Balancing on the Edge of the World published by Salt.
The slimmest of volumes and alternating my reading of that with the heavyweight Crusaders I've inadvertently given myself the most illuminating of reading experiences, the words on the page have certainly worked their magic this last week.
Fourteen short stories and the prescription was one per day, apply slowly and liberally, allow to soak in, complete the course in a fortnight. I adjusted the script slightly because I'm a nurse prescriber so I'm allowed, a further dose may be taken if necessary within twelve hours.Then just to really nail this thing I added a repeat dose after six hours, often re-reading the previous story.
So I cheated, well I couldn't help it.
Suddenly my focus was narrowed down and my concentration total as I watched. Reading as an onlooker is such a treat and Elizabeth Baines positions the fulcrum of each story with absolute precision and then, with the most feather-weight whispers, proceeds to tip the balance of power first one way then the next. The whispers often so slight that I was often listening too loudly to hear them if that make sense.
Lives often teetering on the edge, some pulling back from the brink in the space of a few words so easily glossed over and the essence missed.I slowed to the ponderous and thoughtful pace of that snail in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens.
But this year I have pledged a daily visit to ShortStoryLand and I'm now perfectly at home in what has often seemed like a foreign country, a place where I've so often felt a bit cheated out of that full length novella.
Mea Culpa and now I'm really starting to sense what I may have been missing.
Looking back the first story in Balancing on the Edge of the World really does seem a lifetime ago, yet it's only nine days but in that time Elizabeth Baines has led me through a myriad of seemingly ordinary moments and invested them with extraordinary power.
Take Compass and Torch.
A young boy is off on a camping trip with his estranged father leaving his mother and step-father at home.In just six pages I had learnt more about the vulnerability of a child's emotion in a situation like this than any full length novel. Seriously, I still wonder how a man getting out of his car and opening a gate onto the moors can be of such significance, but on his success at doing it properly, timing the swing so the gate stays, rest all this little boy's hopes in his dad being the man he desperately wants him to be, and him trying so hard to be the son he thinks his dad might want him to be.
A dad who gets things right.
A son who is straining with all his might to be loveable and wanted.
I defy anyone not to well up as this boy tries to interest his dad in the things which matter to him.
Then pace your way slowly through the myriad lives as you meet the humiliated wife who gets her revenge, the writer desperate for recognition, the confident and assured teenage boy about to be changed forever, the children of the divorcing parents, the depressed mother, the one page story that perfectly defines the dilemma of 21st century parenting and know that you will have met a great cross section of life today.
It is the microscopic quality of Elizabeth Baines' eye that make each and every one of these stories so special. I read Compass and Torch early one morning and went off to work pondering the hidden depths of that single story as it popped into my mind constantly throughout the day.
I have now scoured my shelves for unread short story collections because I'll panic if I don't have another 336 to see me through the year. I'll share my ongoing selections later this week.
Meanwhile can you believe I have never read The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald?
Elizabeth Baines may feel slightly nervous sandwiched inbetween Grace Paley and Penelope Fitzgerald in my short story-a-day reading, but be assured, she has nothing to fear whatsoever.

Daily Paley

I meant to tell you that in amongst all this travelling I'm making time to nip over to New York once a day at the moment.
Just occasionally I heed what Susan Hill says and read one of her recommends...just occasionally.
Ages ago there was a fine anecdotal tribute on her blog following the death of Grace Paley and I took note.
One thing leads to another.
That chance e mail from Glad Day Books offering a book to review.
I followed it up and the copy of Edges O Israel O Palestine by Leora Skulkin Smith arrived in a huge lorry via Fedex .
These FedEx lorries make such an effort to find us I feel duty-bound to return the effort by reading the books they deliver.Cheery drivers who are way off their normal routes but never moan, unlike others who greet you as you open the door with some remark about 'the middle of bloody nowhere this'.
Background reading on Glad Day Books and with it the information that they had been backed by Grace Paley.
I really should read her short stories I think.
So on January 1st I embarked on a Paley-A-Day and they have proved the perfect counter-balance to any over-indulgence in Max Sebald or Joseph Roth melancholy, in fact one a day is hardly enough because they are often side-splittingly funny.I want to gorge on the complete top tray and sneak the caramels off the bottom tray too, but I'm being very very good and sticking to the prescribed one a day and it keeps me chuckling until the next one.
Sticking in my mind the The Loudest Voice, Jewish immigrant children in New York all cast in their school's nativity play. Shirley Abramovitz gets the lead role because she has the loudest voice and her mother Clara can't quite decide whether she's proud or peeved over it all as she discusses it with Shirley's father Misha,

'You're in America! Clara, you wanted to come here.In Palestine the Arabs would be eating you alive. Europe you had pogroms.Argentina is full of Indians. Here you got Christmas...Some joke, ha?
Very funny, Misha, what is becoming of you? If we come to a new country a long time ago to run away from tyrants, and instead we fall into a creeping pogrom, that our children learn a lot of lies, so what's the joke?'

But proud enough to shut the window at night just in case Shirley were to catch tonsillitis and be unable to perform.
Grace Paley says about herself,

'I was a woman writing at the early moment when the small drops of worried resentment and noble rage, were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my usefulness in this accumulation'

So when you come to a story that begins,

'My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn't right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly.'

You start to realize you are in for a treat and can't wait to get onto the one that begins

'There were two husbands disappointed by eggs.
I don't like them that way either, I said. Make your own eggs.They sighed in unison. One man was livid; one was pallid'

Then suddenly in the midst of it all a story, just two pages long and doused in sorrow,

'Two weeks before Christmas, Ellen called me and said, 'Faith, I'm dying.' That week I was dying too.'

But like all of her writing, nuggets of life with that kernel of Grace secreted right in the centre.No matter how dire the situation you know that Grace Paley always allows herself that nod to the funny side of life, and you are allowed to smile in spite of it all.

Erica Wagner gets the back cover quote on this Virago edition and I like it, she says of Grace Paley

'the rhythms of New York City pulse through her writing...she listens to literature and street language, and she blends them perfectly.'

For those of us who have never visited New York City other than from an armchair, but will one day, this book is a fabulous treat and is making light work of my 'short story a day' resolution for this coming year.
Where I go once these are finished is anybody's guess but it might just be Russia.

Dahl-a-day

Short story collections have defeated me on many occasions in the past as you know.
I made such a good start with Flannery O'Connor recently and things were zipping along nicely, a story a day while the bath was running, another over a cup of tea in the morning.
Individual microcosms of life in the Deep South and then I had a problem.
I came across a short story that wasn't a short story, it was more a small novella and I couldn't read it in the time it took to fill the bath, even slowing the taps to a trickle. Suddenly it wasn't a short story any more, it was like any other book.
So I lost my way and haven't returned.
I loved what I read but my Flannery moment has temporarily passed, Clare Wigfall has been in and sorted me out and now I'm onto Roald.
Collected Stories by Roald Dahl arrived in the most wantable-must have Everyman's Library edition with silky ribbon.
Having read the introduction I was intrigued all over again by Roald and back in Form Vc's classroom as the one copy of Kiss Kiss doing the rounds was being fought over. The school library held nothing so interesting and it was something I read in the introduction to the Everyman collection that made me realise why.
We were the generation of Marty Feldman and Monty Python humour, we swooped on it and embraced it wholeheartedly. Our lives revolved around it and to miss an episode was to find yourself living on another planet at school the next day.
Why is everyone walking funny?
Dead parrots? Pining for the fjords?
Dead bishop on the landing? Bruce? Lumberjacks?
Jeremy Treglown's introduction suggests this about Roald Dahl
" the moral revenges of his fiction bring an enjoyable ruthless comic order to a confusing world"
and then
"Dahl's effects often involve making readers uncomfortable about going along with what they are enjoying.His work is part of the mid twentieth-century revival of gothic, particularly the vogue for 'sick humour'"
Sick humour, there you have it and we adored it from within the tight and constricting stays of the 1960's girl's Grammar school environment, where to rebel meant trimming your velour hat with pinking shears and folding it into four when it got soaking wet in the rain to make it look as tatty as possible.
Wearing the brim down would take you to the very brink of risky behaviour.
Straw boaters in summer loathsome and much less vulnerable to attack and customisation, there was no known way to rebel over a straw boater unless you followed Marjorie Smith's example and allowed it to blow under the wheels of a 408 double decker bus.
If I've embarrassed a child today then I should do the same to myself, this picture should convey what I was up against and yes, it did give me a terrible headache.
So a Dahl-a-Day is the current way and I'll report back on how the sick humour stands up some forty years later, bearing in mind that we now have plenty more to compare it with.

The Loudest Sound and Nothing

I mentioned The Loudest Sound and Nothing by Clare Wigfall as one of my sanity reads in the midst of Booker madness and as today is launch party day it seems an apposite moment to post my thoughts.
You may remember I loved the cover, some hate it, but in this world of ever more complex and garish look-at-me jackets this one has been quite a restful treat.
I am not the greatest lover of the short story in the world, in fact I give up on more collections of these than I finish. Once I get a whiff of that "this was a novel going nowhere" aroma, disillusionment sets in and I lose the will to carry on.I was therefore pleasantly suprised to find a collection that caught my interest on the first page, sustained it through to the last page and definitely had me wanting to read more.Each one beautifully complete and the sense that you had just read something as fulfilling as a 300 page novel.
These stories take you everywhere, across the boundaries of time, place and circumstance to the individual worlds of people "all searching for something missing". Nothing is quite what it seems and thus is life revealed to be the complex and strange set of events that most of us know it to be, but rarely is that rendered so carefully on the pages of a book.
Clare Wigfall has written her opinions about the short story here and as I read her thoughts, that each of these story titles held a specific memory for her, where she was when she wrote it, what was happening in her life, what she was reading when she wrote, it was but a hop and skip for me to the obvious analogy with making a patchwork quilt.
As you piece together all the separate fabrics to make a whole and then stitch what is happening in your life into a quilt, then it would seem perhaps a writer does the same with a collection of short stories and doubtless with a novel too. I'd never thought of it quite like that before and, now that I have, I think I am a born-again short story collection reader with a passion and will be looking for many more.
There's been precious little quilting on here of late (sorry been a bit busy) so here's that little wall hanging, 6" blocks and names based on the titles of books I was reading at the time, now tacked to its layers of batting and backing and marked up ready for a winter of quilting ahead.
Plus below, a list of the names of the blocks and the books the block names represented for me, not always obvious unless you've read the book it has to be said (starting top left and moving clockwise)
Lady of the Lake - The Extra Large Medium by Helen Slavin (I love that little piece of chocolate brown in there, perfect for drawing in the eye)
Wedding Ring - Adam Bede by George Eliot
Cat's Cradle - The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill
Magic Cross - My Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Ocean Wave - The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch
Maple Star - The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
Silent Star - The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Father's Choice - Room For a Single Lady by Clare Boylan

The Loudest Sound and Nothing

A truly beautiful book arrived from Faber this week and all I need to see is that address in Queen Square to remember the hundreds of times I walked through Cosmo Place into Queen Square, togged up in starched dress, silly hat, cape and fetching flat black shoes to go on duty at Gt Ormond Street, usually at crack of dawn or dead of night.
Mostly I was sleep-walking so I'm not sure I took much notice of the fact there was a publisher there and it was only recently I took the trouble to find out which Queen was being remembered.(Charlotte)
So The Loudest Sound and Nothing by Clare Wigfall arrived and immediately I love it, because just look at that cover, it's the Emma Bridgewater pottery of the book jacket world.
I read Em of Snowbooks blog post over at The Guardian this week on book jackets and how right she is

"For a subjective market like novels, everything will come down to the reader's personal taste; you can't state "you will like this book" and expect to be universally right."

But I adore Emma Bridgewater pottery even if I can't afford it, and the handle came off the one mug I did have on Day Two and now it's a pencil holder.I don't know why I love the idea of a plain white butter dish with "butter" written on it but I just do.

Em at Snow again,

"The best you can usually do with matters of taste is draw a comparison to something people already know about and leave it up to them to decide how they feel about it."

So although I think Em probably meant this in relation to other book jackets I've now realised that if you make a book jacket look like Emma Bridgewater pottery I'll love it.
Clare Wigfall's short stories The Loudest Sound and Nothing, so already I've bonded with the book and I still haven't opened it.
Short stories?
Hmm, not a huge success in my reading life, perhaps I have a long attention span and I feel a bit cross when things grind to a halt after sixteen pages or so just as I'm getting into my reading stride.
But something funny happened with these because you get to the end of each one and you feel as if you've read a novel.
Not a word wasted, nothing to excess, complete and condensed into sixteen pages but you emerge with the same sense of fulfillment and reading pleasure as if you'd read a whole novel. I'm about half-way through and will report back on the stories themselves soon, but so far I get the feeling these are very special.
I don't get that indescribable feeling very often, but when I do it's all wrapped up with that sense that a writer is speaking to me and me only and I'm completely tuned into the immediacy of the words on the page.
So special that in fact that I'm going to do something very rash and put the name of Clare Wigfall in the same sentence as Penelope Fitzgerald and I don't do that lightly or very often.
If that doesn't convince you then all I can do is revert to fall back position; if you love Emma Bridgewater pottery then I'm sure you'll love this book and look, when you take the dust jacket off you've got the night time version.