One of my very first reviews on Paperback Reader was of First Love by Ivan Turgenev and soon after I was gifted the complete Penguin Great Loves boxset.  When the Classics Circuit announced a tour of Imperial Russian literature, I was given the opportunity to read further about Russian love from the collection by opting for A Russian Affair by Anton Chekhov.

I have read Chekhov’s plays in the past and some of his short stories here and there; one of the stories, “The House with the Mezzanine” I read last year in the anthology, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off: Love Quarrels from Anton Chekhov to ZZ Packer also appears in this brief collection.  Consisting of only five short stories -all about love- A Russian Affair is a bite-size taster of Chekhov’s mastery of the short story form.  As a classic Russian writer, Chekhov can intimidate but he is surprisingly accessible and I am a great fan of his style; in the fashion of my favourite short story writer, Katherine Mansfield, Chekhov’s short stories are perfect little pieces of art.

Reading “The House With the Mezzanine” a second time in this volume was enriching; the first time it didn’t make a strong impression on me but rereading it I realised how powerful an evocation of first love it was.  An artist’s story, narrated in the first-person with hindsight, he recalls visits with two sisters seven years previously; he quarrelled continually with outspoken Lida whilst shy Zhenya was compliant and admiring of both her older sister and the artist.  Like the first story “About Love”, it is not about unrequited love but about love that is not acted upon, that haunts in its intensity and regret.  These first two stories struck me as being reminiscent of Turgenev’s First Love and wondered how much Chekhov was influenced by his successor; I also checked to see whether they perhaps had the same translator, but they did not share similarities in that technical way but more fundamentally in tone.

Also in included in this collection is one of Chekhov’s more famous short stories, “The Lady with the Dog”, which is the adulterous Russian affair to which the title alludes; this story moves from young love explored in the earlier stories to the more difficult, all-consuming love.

A Russian Affair provides an insight into Chekhov’s writing style, is easy to read and makes for romantic reading with emotional depth.  With only five stories, it is a mere sample of what Chekhov has to offer, but it is enjoyable glimpse of his work that draws you in with its exploration of the emotional complexities of love.

Foster by Claire Keegan is an extended and amended short story being released by Faber later this year; a shorter version with the same title is available to read here on The New Yorker.   I am posting my thoughts on the proof copy so far in advance of its publication (September in the UK) to urge you to read the online version first of all -whilst it is available- and follow it up with the revised edition when you can.  There are enough differences between the longer and shorter stories that it is interesting to read both to analyse Keegan’s writing development between the two and the changes she makes.  I am also posting about it now because this is one of the best short stories I have read for some time and I am an immediate fan of Keegan’s writing, seeking out an earlier collection, Walk the Blue Fields, upon closing the back cover.

The proof copy stands at fifty-seven pages, which is long for a short-story, of course, but short for a stand-alone book; apparently the non-proof copy will have a lengthy introduction but, currently, it is the shortest book in my collection (even surpassing this book, that I love).  It also has a beautiful front cover, albeit interpretative of the title and not entirely reflective of the content.  Keegan’s work has been critically-acclaimed and she the recipient of a number of literary prizes with the original “Foster” winning her another.

Set in rural Ireland, a young (nameless) girl is sent to live with foster parents whilst her mother gives birth to another child in an already large family; the girl is unaware of when she will return home.  The foster  family know her parents, with inferences to them being her mother’s people, but they are strangers to the girl.  The relationship that the girl builds with the Kinsellas is touching and poignant; they show her more love and pay her more attention than she has ever received before, which makes her feel guilty upon her return to her parents, a return that is heartbreaking.  At times the relationship appears insidious but the power of this story is how open to interpretation it is; in the extended version there are several points where I felt confused by events but in an entirely good way as Keegan shows but never tells.  Of course, what she shows is through the eyes of a child and is all the more powerful for it; she subtly infers but never, ever clarifies.

The subtlety though is so subtle that it may not be picked up by every reader and is entirely subjective.  I think Keegan plays with expectations and toys with the reader wanting more, expecting more.  It is a exceedingly gentle story with not much in the way of events; instead it explores the experience of the girl staying with the Kinsellas and what it means to both parties.  Keegan evokes the conflict of a child craving more attention from parents with other children vying for their focus; as the eldest child, she is rather neglected but the Kinsellas are very affectionate towards her and nurture as a child should be nurtured, no matter how many to a family.  The story concerns the emotional connection between the girl and the Kinsellas and the conflicting emotions she experiences comparing her own parents with her foster ones.  I also found allusions to being an only child opposed to one with siblings (as someone who was an only child for a long time before a much-younger sibling joined me, I can empathise greatly with these emotions) in the text, deepening my emotional connection to it and the girl.

The brevity of Foster is not an issue; there is both powerfully moving subject matter and stunning prose.  Keegan’s writing is beautiful with each and every word weighted and evocative of Ireland.  My grandparents are Irish and I recognised tone, expression and culture that is indicative of the Ireland I know and its people.  This Irish writer displays astonishing emotional-depth in this haunting story. Foster, for all these reasons is something read that will not be forgotten; I will be thinking of this short story for a long time. Please read it.

Angela Carter was enthusiastically involved with Virago Press and collected and edited two volumes of short stories for the publisher of books by women: Wayward Girls and Wicked Women and Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales; the former is the book I wish to discuss today.

I have reviewed a few short story collections in the past ( you can click on the short stories tag to view) and an issue that I have with them, whether they are anthologised or a volume by the one author, is that they can be uneven, which is of course the hazard of short stories as the quality will naturally differ from story to story.

I read Wayward Girls and Wicked Women pre-blogging and I think my mistake was reading the stories consecutively, as opposed to dipping it and out of it (another great volume of short stories by women, also published by Virago albeit now regrettably out-of-print, that I simply must recommend for reading sporadically is this one. I can’t recommend the superiority of this volume enough, especially to those readers with modernist sensibilities).  I fully admit to getting bogged down in reading this volume and should have spaced out the stories; collecting eighteen short stories by different female authors, it is quite the undertaking to read them all at once.  That is not to say that I did not enjoy the stories, because I did, but I recommend the collection with the reservation to read them slowly and savour the stories one or two at a time.

To begin with, from the contents page, this volume collects stories from three beloved writers: Katherine Mansfield, Colette,  and Angela Carter herself (“The Loves of Lady Purple”; their inclusion alone should have ensured that I loved this and I do hold it dear, willing to read closely from its covers in short spurts in future revisits.  “The Rainy Moon” by Colette is more of a novella and one that I own in several collections (mainly Colette ones); it is a story that showcases its writer’s immense talents are their finest.  If there is anyone whose rich and lush writing Angela Carter’s could be compared to then it would be Colette.  If you know little of Colette, or even if you do, then please read this excellent essay about her written by Angela Carter; it makes me want to instantly reach for the books I have by Colette and not come up for air until I have read her very last word.

In Angela Carter’s own words, this is a collection in which the title is ironic and the tales subversive; “Most of the women in these stories, even if they do not prosper exceedingly, at least contrive to evade the victim’s role by the judicious use of their wits, and they share a certain cussedness, a bloodymindedness, even though their stories are told in an enormous variety of ways, and come from all over the world”.  Leonora Carrington’s riotously funny “The débutante” in which the eponymous (anti-)heroine persuades a hyena to take her place at a ball, is a highlight but there are several stand-out stories.  Reading Wayward Girls and Wicked Women has made me seek out other work by some of the writers, some of whom were new to me and others I have been meaning to read for some time; you can expect me at some point to share my thoughts on my extended discoveries of Elizabeth Jolley; Grace Paley; Djuna Barnes; Bessie Head (who will be re-issued by Virago later this year); Jamaica Kincaid; Frances Towers (a collection of whose stories are published by Persephone Books).

]]> http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/04/17/wayward-girls-and-wicked-women-by-angela-carter/feed/ 12 http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/04/13/black-venus-by-angela-carter/ http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2010/04/13/black-venus-by-angela-carter/#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:13:24 +0000 Paperback Reader http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/?p=1986

Black Venus was Angela Carter’s third collection (the fourth, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders was published posthumously in 1993), published in 1985 (it is entitled Saints and Strangers in the U.S.).  I like it more than the early, experimental Fireworks (reviewed here) but less than the inventive, fairy-tale dependent, The Bloody Chamber. Black Venus is a mature work and some of the stories are imaginative portraits of real people: Jean Duval, the black mistress of Baudelaire; Edgar Allan Poe; Lizzie Borden; others range from a re-envisaging of the Peter and the Wolf tale and an overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream that features a hermaphrodite named the Golden Herm.

Although these stories are seemingly disparate, there is a cohesion to the collection; the themes of each may not be in tandem but there are recognisable motifs and repeated phrases and images throughout.  Considering that these stories featured in separate publications during the late Seventies and early Eighties, before being collected in the one volume, it is interesting to chart Carter’s similar thought-processes throughout.  As in the majority of short story collections, there is an uneven quality to those collected with some far more engaging and memorable than others; the vivid use of language and literary subject in “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream“, a precursor to the bawdy Shakespearean romp,  Wise Children, is far superior to the more pared-down (not that Carter ever fully pared anything down), less richly imaginative, stories.  Of course, the stories also resonate more for those who have prior knowledge of the people Carter writes about or the literature she writes about; the title story, about Jean Duval, didn’t work so much for me as I’m not that familiar with Baudelaire.

What Black Venus does have to offer is one of my favourite Carter stories, “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe”. Carter’s writing is richly imbued with literary allusions and there several made to Poe (I said here that I would reveal the connection between Carter and Poe).  In her novel Love, for instance, the main characters are named Annabel and Lee and there is a Gothic preoccupation with vagina dentata; in her non-fiction essay, “Through a Text Backwards: The Resurrection of the House of Usher”, Carter argues that Poe’s “The Philosophy of Compisition” should be retitled “The Philosophy of Decomposition” as he had a predilection for dead and dying women.  “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” -a play on the title of the 1920 German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari- is very much about Poe’s obsession with dead and dying women (and the beginnings of his fear of vagina teeth) beginning with his own mother.  Yes, those who can recognise the nods to Poe’s famous poem “The Raven” and his biographical details will benefit more from this story but I also think it is engrossing, illuminating, and also wickedly dark and funny, regardless of whether you are a Poe fan or not (although I very much am).  Undoubtedly one of Carter’s literary influences, this simultaneous tribute to and send-up of Poe is abundant with camp Gothic and Hammersmith Horror elements with a back-drop of the theatrical and performative; for me, “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” exhibits most of what I love about Carter: her decadence; her lush writing; her rich literary allusions; her love for the macabre; her love for the theatrical; her interesting absence of mothers (all of these elements -minus the macabre- feature in my favourite Carter novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, and are the reasons why I love them both).

I have one copy of Black Venus courtesy of Vintage Books to give-away to someone who can tell me which writer they would love to read a short story about.  Open worldwide until Wednesday 21st April at 12pm BST.

Carter wrote that “In Japan I learnt what it was to be a woman and become radicalised” and that self-awareness of her gender and her new-found feminism can be best seen in my favourite story from the volume, “The Loves of Lady Purple”.  The story  is one that Carter herself chose to collect in Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, a Virago anthology of short stories written by women that she edited; “The Loves of Lady Purple” is a story about a marionette who comes alive and wreaks revenge on her puppet-master (reminiscent of The Magic Toyshop).

Personally I don’t find much cohesion in the grouping of the stories and think that the later The Bloody Chamber is a far stronger collection; however, I do recognise Carter’s common themes of mirrors/reflections; incest; rape; alienation; absent mothers; puppets; doubling and duplicity; subversive reworkings of fairy tales and use of fairy tale motifs.  Carter deals with dark subject matter but her stories are surreal and she is a great proponent of magical realism.  As for the profanity alluded to in the title, the sexual content is at times graphic; at other times it is implied through intense suggestion and lustful imagery as in the  Eve-myth inspired “Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest”:

The dark pool reflected her darkly, like an antique mirror.  She raised her hand to part the leaves in search of a ripe fruit but the greenish skin seemed to warm and glow under her fingers so the first one she touched came as easily off the stem as if it had been brought to perfection by her touch.  It seemed to be some kind of apple or pear.  It was so juicy the juice ran down her chin and she extended a long, crimson, newly sensual tongue to lick her lips, laughing.

Although not my favourite Angela Carter book, the writing is of course stunning as in all of Carter’s prose; it is always rich and allusive, “starry” in Sage’s words above, and breathtaking to read.  I have four copies of Fireworks to give-away to anybody that is interested.  To enter please tell me which Angela Carter work you are most looking forward to reading about during Angela Carter month.  The draw is open worldwide and will close on Friday 9th April at 12pm BST.

For further thoughts on Fireworks, to whet your appetite, read this review by another cookie crumbles.

The thirteen stories are mainly set in Zimbabwe (or concern Zimbabweans living elsewhere, as Gappah herself does) under Robert Mugabe’s regime and have been lauded with praise, with An Elegy for Easterly considered an inventive, stunning, masterful debut.  I must be missing something because they didn’t work for me.  Some of the stories are emotive, the title story and “The Cracked, Pink Lips of Rosie’s Bridegroom” are the ones that made an impression on me, that I found disturbing and that still resonate weeks later; the remainder are forgettable.  My issue with the stories is that I found no cohesive theme and no distinct narrative voices.  To begin with, reading the first three or four stories, I thought that there was a symbol of nameless female narrators -named as mother to or wife of- and even though the were indistinct from one another, I was excited because I thought I recognised the pattern early on and that the women were universal representations; I then realised I was wrong and I became bored by the randomness of the stories and their dull content.

The issue with many short story volumes, even by the best short story writers, is that certain stories are better than others, just as novels in an author’s oeuvre can never be equal in accomplishment; that is certainly true of Gappah’s stories and I found some quite weak in comparison to those that I did like.  I was unable to fall back on the writing when the content didn’t interest me (as I was able to do for Jhumpa Lahiri or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) because I didn’t think that it was particularly good, technically or in its evocation, characterisation and imagination.  I fail to see what is above-par about An Elegy for Easterly, let alone exceptional; for those readers who have read it, perhaps you could illuminate for me? I didn’t learn anything about life under Mugabe that I didn’t already know nor the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the country; “The Cracked, Pink Lips of Rosie’s Bridegroom” was effective because it uncompromisingly tackled the epidemic brutally but excluding it and “An Elegy for Easterly” I felt no emotion.  Some of the scenes of mental illness and subsequent shame were done well in “The Annexe Shuffle” but it didn’t bring anything new and I struggled to identify with Emily and any of the other stories’ protagonists.

The unrelenting tragedy of the two stories that I single out for me worked so perhaps I looked for emotionally devastating in the collection whereas it seems that Gappah tried to find the comic in the tragic in others; “Our Man in Geneva wins a Million Dollars” for instance, about a Zimbabwean working in Switzerland who is lured in by a phishing scam, didn’t make me feel much of anything … yes, I pity the victims of fraud but I suppose I am desensitised to everyday stories of this nature.  I felt disconnected to the harsh realities of the hyper-inflation and corruption and I do not think that was desensitisation but lack of connection to the short fiction.  I had hoped to enjoy these stories and to alleviate my disappointment I am reaching for some more fiction set in Zimbabwe -pre-independent Rhodesia- and picking up Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga.

After reading “Hell-Heaven” from Lahiri’s new volume of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, I knew that I loved her style; her writing is simple yet nuanced and her stories are rich and powerful. Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 and I wish I had read it earlier. Very accessible, these stories are a delight to read and riveting in the Bengali Indian experiences (native Bengalis, Bengali immigrants to America and second generation Bengalis) that the stories evoke. Some of the stories are about assimilation into American culture whereas the title story is about a Bengali man encountering an American woman in his own county and others are about young married couples. As with all short story collections some stories are stronger than others but all of Lahiri’s resonated; with some I have been left with a profound feeling of sadness and sympathy for the characters depicted. There is a sense of being disconnected from the characters at times but I think this was intentional, especially in those stories where the protagonist is struggling to fit in and feel distant themselves from their Indian home and from the culture surrounding them; moreover, the characters often feel distant from one another, most often in their marriages.

My favourite stories (from nine)

“A Temporary Matter” is by far the strongest story in the collection, the first and my favourite. The temporary matter refers to an electrical outage that will affect the house of married couple, Shoba and Shukumar, but that temporary matter becomes to symbolise more. Since a tragedy befell them, Shoba and Shukamar have been unable to communicate more than superficially but the blackout allows them to speak to one another again and freely they begin to confess things unknown to the other. This story is profound in its exploration of what couples leave unsaid and what they say to hurt one another. Its play on silence and communication is accomplished.

“This Blessed House” is a story I read in a short story collection recently about lovers’ quarrels and I did prefer the stories about the younger married couples than I did some of the others. Twinkle and Sanjeev had their marriage arranged and barely know one another; the story charts their growth as a couple and how they begin to understand one another and the compromises they make.

“Mrs Sen’s” is one of the stories I found the saddest as Mrs Sen’s loneliness is palpable. Mrs Sen is a tragic character seen through the eyes of eleven-year-old Eliot, who stays with Mrs Sen after school whilst his mother works. Tradition is a huge part of Mrs Sen’s reason for being and her traditions aren’t always feasible in her new surroundings, especially when it involves learning new skills such as driving. Like most of Lahiri’s stories, food is a central component to the plot: the ingredients and preparation, the eating and the senses it evokes.

]]> http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2009/12/09/interpreter-of-maladies/feed/ 23 http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2009/10/24/lets-call-the-whole-thing-off/ http://www.paperback-reader.co.uk/2009/10/24/lets-call-the-whole-thing-off/#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 08:00:00 +0000 Paperback Reader http://paperback-reader.co.uk/?p=884