"The Penguin book of New American Voices" by Jay McInerney (ed) (Penguin, 1995)

Short stories by Jennifer Egan, Donna Tartt, David Foster Wallace, etc - all people whose career started in the 90s. In his introduction, McInerney writes

• "The aesthetic battles of the sixties and seventies had perhaps their final shootout in a debate between John Gardner and William Gass in the mid seventies. In a series of essays and a book, Gardner attacked the metafictionalists and numerous straw men of letters, arguing for the eternal verities, for character-based, naturalistic fiction which deals with moral issues. Gass elegantly sneered at this reactionary didacticism, and argued that literature was made of words, pure and simple, and had nothing to do with the world" (xiii)
• "in the seventies ... the short story flourished by virtue of being far more teachable than the novel. At the same time, the university itself, and the thousands of trained readers/writers it was producing, became the primary market for this new product, a kind of literary perpetual-motion machine" (xvi)

The editor adds "I was not seeking a politically correct diversity, nor trying to make a case for multiculturalism".

• "The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven" (Sherman Alexie) - Working in - and using - 7-11s.
• "River of names" (Dorothy Allison) - What happen in big familes.
• "Her real name" (Charles D'Ambrosio) - I liked it. A man who's just left the navy picks up a girl from a filling station. He comes to realise that she's dying. They stay on the road for 5 weeks, using his money up -
  • "When the road-signs flashed by, luminous for an instant, Jones felt as though he were journeying through a forgotten allegory"
  • "the unnatural blue of a swimming pool shimmered without revealing any depth in the morning sun. A slight breeze rippled the water, and an inflated lifesaver floated aimlessly across the surface"
  She quickly deteriorates. She thinks her step-father (whose church made a miracle happen, causing the cancer to go into remission) is after them. She wants the man to pray with her. An alcoholic ex-doctor helps them, giving them morphene. At the end he weighs down her body and buries it at sea - "all this would one day break from its deep hold in the sea, wash to the surface, the bumper stickers from Indian battles, the decals commemorating the footpaths and wagon trails of exploreres and pioneers, the resting places of men and women who'd left their names to towns and maps. And then the girl herself, identified by her remains, a story told by teeth and bones"
• "Granny Myna tells of the child" (Robert Antoni) - parts confused me but I wasn't interested in re-reading it - "I answer him that this frogchild have make he brain viekeevie now for true, because is no me a-tall to touch that crapochild". A deformed child is born to Barto and Magdalena (who isn't his wife). The child is bottled and carried to water - it's still alive.
• "The Stylist" (Jennifer Egan) - disappointing. A stylist sleeps with the photographer on a photoshoot in Africa, the new young model fancying the photographer. The stylist, 36, has few photos of herself - she preferred travel to marriage, She advises the model
• "Capricious Gardens" (Jeff Eugenides) - I didn't see much in it. It's set in Ireland. Rich Sean (43) with friend Malcolm find young Americans Amy and Maria who've been travelling for 5 weeks. Plain Maria wants to sleep with pretty Amy, who wants to sleep with Sean. Malcolm tells them about his recent suicide attempt. Maria saves Amy from Sean.
• "Cowboys are my weakness" (Pam Houston) - Homer is the narrator's friend with benefits. He inspects ranches and takes her with him. She's on the look-out for the cowboy of her dreams. Maybe Monty is that cowboy. David the ranch-owner likes her. Homer says he intends to propose. She leaves the ranch early, heading home.
• "I was infinitely hot and dense hot (Mark Leyner) - Even in small doses I'd have trouble with passages like - "At the end of the bar, a woman whose album-length poem about temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ) had won a Grammy for best spoken word recording is gently slowly ritually rubbing copper hexafluoroacetylacetone into her clitoris as she watches the hunk with the non-Euclidian features shoot a glob of dehydrogenated ethylbeneze 3,900 miles towards the Arctic archipelago"
• "Crusader Rabbit" (Jess Mowry) - Raglan goes round with a 13 y.o. junkie Jemery. They survive by recycling stuff they find in dumpsters. They find a dead body (baby? junkie?) in a dumpster. Raglan found Jeremy when he was nearly dead. Jeremy's soon going to give up injecting completely. He thinks Raglan might be his father - why else would he help?
• "Letters to home" (Robert O'Connor) - it begins with rather too much detail about injecting, but romps along after that. I liked it.
• "F**king Martin (Dale Peck) - I like this. The gay narrator's oldest intimate friend Susan wants to get pregnant again with his help. His partner has died of AIDS. He recalls his history of love and sex - S/M etc. "he undid the buttons one by one, his fingers working down his chest, a V of skin spreading behind his passing hand like the wake of a boat"
• "Alana" (Abraham Rodriguez Jr.) - Alana had been a sex-worker living with her sister until her friend Wanda suggested that she try to hook up with rich drug-dealers. "Alana had been deeply grooving to her own inner vibe when the prettiest little boy she had ever seen strolled right into view, tall and sleek, with dope threads". But her new partner beats her. He passes her on to another man (he lost her in a bet). The other man is kind, and might punish the first man.
• "Totally nude live girls (Gail Donohue Storey) - Beyond me - e.g. "She danced into the end of tradition/era. She went right up to the end of (    )ess, (   )ton, and possible (   )tion. ... We make ourselves a small thing. Poppy was our red name, our now name is Aureole. Aureole had a brotheress" etc.
• "Sleepytown" (Donna Tartt) - During childhood she spent 2 years drugged up on medicines thanks to her great-grandfather. She lived with her mother and old relatives. She thought she'd die before her great-grandfather. Much later she read De Quincey.
• "The blue wallet" (William T. Vollmann) - It's introduced as a true story. It's about skinheads - mostly females - and Korean racism. Jenny loses her blue wallet - "If this had been a Chekhovian story, or a tale from de Maupassant, the blue wallet would have turned up eventually, proving by its determined refusal to be elsewhere that all suspicions had been reified to the point of logical and moral death, so that now, as all the thought-chains strained inside our brains, and the little homunculi downshifted the thought-gears to provide maximum mechanical advantage in their futile attempt to drag the blocks of leaden trust back to safety ...". I don't get it.
• "Forever overheard" (David Foster Wallace) - A boy spends his 13th birthday at a public swimming pool. He queues for the high board. There are 2 dark footmarks at the end of the board. He enjoys the new sensations from this elevated, detached viewpoint. Finally, "The board will nod and you will go, and black eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-blotched sky, punctured light emptying behind sharp stone that is forever. That is forever. Step into the skin and disappear. Hello."

Other reviews

• Hugh Barnes (In what may be seen as a backlash against the elitism of Donald Barthelme and other postmodern miniaturists, the stories in this collection focus on the burgeoning American underclass, with its drug culture and violence. ... So much for the American dream, you might think, and you'd be right, because the one thing McInerney's cowboys, indians and commuters have in common is first-hand experience of a contemporary nightmare. ... And yet, for all the variety of accents and idioms in this volume, there is a worrying sameness to much of the material, a dazed fugginess)

"Second Place" by Rachel Cusk

An audio book.

A monologue addressed to Jeffers.

She (M) met a devil on a Paris train while away from husband and child - a man with a much younger girl. The night before she'd been chatted up by a famous author. She was flattered. He didn't ask her to spend the night with him. She saw a retrospective exhibition of an artist's work. He's only 45. She felt a rapport with his work, especially the landscapes.

15 years later she lives with Tony on a farm in the marshes. He's dark-skinned unlike the locals. Adopted. She'd always felt that her life would be better were she male. She'd thought herself ugly. They invite artists to stay for a while. Tony distrusts chat. Many of their guests do too. She invites the exhibition artist, L. She wants to see the marsh landscape through his eyes. Justine (her daughter) plus her partner Kurt are staying, both currently unemployed. She confuses Kurt with Justine's father sometimes. Justine treats him rather like the narrator treated Justine's father.

Before L's delayed arrival she confides in Justine about her earlier life. L arrives with a beautiful girl, Brett, which irritates the narrator. She'd hoped to use him to improve her self-image. Is he using Brett as a shield? L and Brett stay in "the second place". Brett tells Justine that she was a ballerina, that she'd gone to medical school, and that she'd sailed across the Atlantic. She asks the narrator if she fancies L. She says that she and L no longer have sex. He's worried that he's getting old. She thinks her next career might be painting. Al left home in mid-teens, became famous early. He tells the narrator that he never wanted to be whole or complete.

The narrator's written some "little books". Kurt decides that he's going to be a writer. At an evening soiree he bores people with an hour-long reading. After, he tells M that L wants to destroy her, and that L wanted Kurt to do the opoosite of what Justine wanted.

We learn that a month after returning from Paris, M lost her home, money and friends. She thinks that "my individuality had tormented me my whole life with its demand to be recognised". On her way to being L's model, wearing her wedding dress, Tony angrily calls M back. She walks on, sees that L's doing a painting of Adam, Eve and the snake where she's Eve, then turns back, only to find that Tony has driven away.

He returns. L has a stroke that affects his right hand. Brett leaves, and Kurt goes with her (she knows publishers). M's wary of helping L. Tony and (mostly) Justine do it. He starts doing self-portraits, which later will trigger his revival. They're death-haunted, "Death our only God".

M believes in the plot of life - destiny. L had come to represent for her an escape from that. He hates her, says that all her goodness has been passed onto Justine. His friend of 20 years (Arthur, an ex studio assistant) turns up, offering help and money. He (40ish) tells her not "to kept a snake as a pet". Later, Justine and Arthur get together.

M and Justine forget their swimwear and end up swimming naked. It's the first time for many years that they've seen each other like that. It's a moment that lasts forever. L might have been watching. L suddenly leaves for Paris, dying soon after he gets there. He left Justine a painting, making her the richest person M knows. "True art means seeking to capture the unreal," he wrote.

There's little description, and it could all be symbolic. The meanings of the symbols are pondered over. There's little dialectic - people don't come to a conclusion; individuals don't tackle an issue from various viewpoints before reaching a conclusion.

Other reviews

• Anthony Cummins (an intimate psychodrama in the shape of a social comedy about the hazards of hospitality, ... with the novel’s diction caught between the lecture hall and the analyst’s couch. ... An endnote advertises the novel’s debt to the bohemian socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos, about DH Lawrence’s chaotic stay at her artists’ colony in New Mexico ... Luhan addressed her memoir to the poet Robinson Jeffers, but does that justify Cusk having M continually address a never-explained “Jeffers”?)
• Miranda Popkey (Presenting only the premises and the conclusion means asking your reader to take you on faith; but start walking her through Cusk’s arguments and before too long you find you’re merely rescribing the novel itself. ... 'The rigorously trained fingers of the concert pianist are freer than the enslaved heart of the music-lover can ever be.’ Cusk has rigorously trained her own fingers; she cannot play a false note. But how quickly the music, the transcendent music, fades into air.)
• Sam Byers (It is through these differing relationships to property that Cusk slowly, agonisingly, reveals the wound implied by the novel’s sly pun of a title: the uneven, contested, deeply gendered experience of freedom. L, the epitome of the arrogant, entitled, unconstrained male artist, experiences property not as a place or possession at all, but “as a set of inalienable rights attached to himself. His property was the radial sphere of his own persona; it was the environs of wherever he happened to be.” For the narrator, it is all so much more fragile, more tenuous, both hard won and easily lost.)

"The mission house" by Carys Davies

Hilary Byrd, 54, getting hot in India, heads to tea plantations, staying in a missionary bungalow though he's not religious. Priscilla, the deformed cleaner, was found as a baby in bullrushes. The Padre might be trying to find a husband for her. Hilary is single, escaping mental problems caused by his UK library job where they introduced community hub activities. He stays in touch with his sister Wyn back in England. Jamshed drives him around after he has an accident. His cousin Ravi can speak English and makes use of the extra money to further his hoped-for country western music career.

Byrd reads about the English development of the town. He learns about the local religions. He confides in Jamshed about his past - how Wyn had to look after him for a while. He knits and makes cakes with Priscilla, falling in love. Meanwhile Priscilla spends time with Ravi (who's bought a horse). She makes herself a cowgirl outfit. When the padre seeks a christian man for Priscilla, Byrd starts going to church and grows a beard. Henry Page, a young handsome missionary, offers to marry Priscella. Byrd doesn't realise that his barber (Ravi) is friends with Priscella. He decides to leave. On the day of his departure, Jamshed locks him up to miss his train. Meanwhile Henry and is about to fly over from Canada when he meets a pretty girl and changes his mind. That night, 5 religious terrorists who blame Christians for the weakening of their religion, enter the bungalow and ask the man there if he's "Henry Page". After some thought, Byrd replies yes and they kill him. There was some foreshadowing of the crime.

The tragic character portrait of Byrd (his past, his nostalgia for an older England (which he finds in India), his friendship with Jamshed, his willingness to change) and the counterpointing comedy of the affair between West[ern] oriented Ravi and Priscella (one expects them to marry) seemed to dawdle in places, key points being repeated.

Other reviews

• Tanjil Rashid (The brand names around Ooty (“Modern Stores”, “Global Internet Cafe”) parody perfectly that postcolonial insecurity about being “backward”. ... Byrd is like so many others, from beatniks to empire loyalists, who form a connection not with real Indians but with a fantasy of India fashioned out of their own ideological prejudices and psychological needs.)
• Susan Blumberg-Kason

"Fair Play" by Louise Hegarty

An audio book.

Benjamin's birthday is New Year's day. As usual, his sister Abigail has organised a Mystery Murder Night for New Year's Eve. This year, post-Covid, she's hired Yew Tree House, AirBnB. She arrives early to hide the clues - the murder weapon's a champagne bottle. The theme is The Jazz Age. Steven plays the detective. Cormack and Olivia are the only couple. There's Margaret and Barbara too. It takes 2 hours to find the clues. In the morning Ben's dead in a locked room.

Part 2 begins with a cast list - Auguste Bell (detective), DI Ferret, a butler, Docus (maid), an aunt (sister of Abi's dead father, a mistress) and the characters from the modern case. We're presented with 3 sets of rules for writers of detective novels, from 1928. They include items like "No Chinamen"; no use of the idea that a dog didn't bark because it knew the intruder; the wish that the reader and the detective should have the same chance of solving the case.

Bell arrives. It's a locked room case. The doctor's convinced that it's a suicide. After their father died, Ben looked after the family business while Abi looked after the house. Barbara is a secretary at the company. Margaret is a jilted lover. Declan has gambling debts that Ben had stopped helping him with. It's not suicide because that would break Van Dyne's 18th commandment - we're advised to go back to the lists of rules because we probably skipped them. We're told that Sakker "serves an important literary function", giving us a chance to find out what Bell's thinking without him having to soliloquize - he lets Bell "Watsonize". Bell collects clues - noises in the night; a missing screwdriver. Was it a botched burglary? Bell has previous books - as an author? or is he a character in them? Bell tells Ferret that if he hangs on until chapter 16 he'll learn more. Bell finds a book of the case. At the end there's a clue-index. He and Ferret look back at their story.

While all this is going on there are sections that return to 2023. Abigail deals with the funeral. She returns to work. There's a set of rules about how the fridge and kitchen at work should be used. Abigail gives multiple statements about how she and Ben spent Xmas - or several Xmases. She's fed up with friends. She complains to HR about how colleagues are trying to help. When Steven asks for help, she says she expects help from him. He plans to leave Ireland. She talks to Ben's friends and colleagues to discover more about him.

Bell tells the assembled suspects in the drawing room that (he refers back to Ch.13) Steven is the murderer. This "reveal" scene is enacted several times with different outcomes each time. In the final one, Abigail is accused.

In the final section Ben is 8. The family go to the beach. Ben and Abigail play on the beach, making sandcastles.

Hegarty is a literary writer. I've read (and liked) short stories that she's written. On www.writing.ie she writes "Detective novels of that [Golden] age, and their authors, were concerned with a fairness that could never exist in the real world. ... it is also interesting how little our coping methods have changed since then: sales of Agatha Christie and “cosy crime” have peaked once more since the start of the pandemic. ... Abigail dips between real life and the imaginary world of the detective novel. In both worlds she is looking for answers – for clues – to understand her circumstances. The murder mystery provides her with a familiar pathway amidst the unpredictability of real life and also much-needed comfort in her time of grief. In a detective novel, we know that as each chapter goes by, we are getting closer and closer to a conclusion "

If I had a printed copy I'd go back through to see if a therapist had suggested to the 2023 Abigail that she should use writing as therapy. The framed whodunnit suggests that there were many possible reasons for the suicide (and the whodunnit might reveal what Abigail thought about friends) but in the end Abagail blames herself - as the bereaved sometimes do.

The blurb says it's "For fans of Anthony Horowitz, Tana French, and Sally Rooney", which is optimistic. The whodunnit takes up a large portion of the book. Could it stand alone? It has multiple, unresolved endings. Characters refer to the book version of the events and to the Golden Age rules. It's framed by a story that has its own challenging elements. In one section, "my brother is dead" is repeated dozens of times because that thought is always on her mind. The repeated statements about Xmas day are more puzzling. And the final section - an account of an idyllic childhood beach outing - appears out of the blue.

On Goodreads the book gets 2.8/5. Some people don't like meta-murder-mysteries. Some do, but feel there's a glut of them currently, or that this isn't a good example of its type. What is its type? Though the whodunnit fills many pages, I'd say it's literary, barely mainstream.

Other reviews

• Ray Palen
• josbookblog (The raison d’être of this second narrative isn’t immediately revealed, but I thought it was both clever and original when its purpose became clear. I felt patronised as a reader. [when] the author adds “I would like to ask the reader to turn back a few pages and read through the Fair Play Rules which you probably skipped earlier”. ... To make things worse, the detective’s sidekick is described in those rules of fair play: “his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader”. I believe that Hegarty has grossly underestimated a reader’s intelligence, as Bell’s sidekick is, for want of a better term, an idiot. To claim that this individual is only ever so slightly below that of the average reader is, I think, insulting. Finally, I think that if you’re going to incorporate the rules of fair play into your novel that the reader should at least be able to expect you to abide by them.)

"This afterlife" by A.E. Stallings (Carcanet, 2022)

Selected poems, from "Poetry", etc. Several have been in "Best American Poetry". Many forms are used, though few involve letter-manipulation (i.e, acrostics, anagrams, etc - "OLIVES" being an exception). If you like tidy pieces with a sting at the end, if you admire technical mastery and aren't fooled by the easy reading into thinking there aren't allusions and hidden depths, you'll love this. UK readers might see similarities to the early Wendy Cope in poems like "Arrowhead Hunting" which begins with "The land is full of what is lost" and ends with

O hapless hunter, though your aim was true - The spooked hart, wounded, fleeting in its fear - And the sharpness honed with longing, year by year Buried deeper, found someday, but not by you.

There are lines to like (for a variety of reasons) in many of the poems. Here are just a few -

• "The dead ... pester you like children for the wrong details" (p.6)
• "reality, to poets or to politician/ Is but the first rough draft of history or legend./ So your artist's eye, a sharp and perfect prism,/ Refracts discrete components of a beauty/ To fix them in some still more perfect order." (p.9)
• "Who find their way by calling into darkness/ To hear their voices bounce off the shape of things " (p.55)
• "The sun's great warship sinks and burns" (p.79)
• "Tulips ... do not wilt so much as faint ... they twist/ As if to catch the last applause" (p.99)
• "As though a host of diacritical marks/ Swooped over the rough breathing of the sea,/ The swallows parse the brightness in dark arcs,/ Glossing the infinitive to be" (p.193)

When a poem fails for me it's not because I'm baffled, but because the poem doesn't do enough. "Jigsaw Puzzle" for example is a surprise selection. It has 5 short-lined abab stanzas, the first line being "First the four corners" - no great surprise. The ending is "Slowly you restore/ The fractured world and start/ To recreate an afternoon before/ It fell apart/" leading to the unsurprising final line "Where one piece is missing". The middle section from "Hapax" seems rather flat. The 18-page "Lost and Found" did little for me.

I most liked "The Man who Wouldn't Plant willow Trees", "Aftershocks" and "Like, the Sestina".

Other reviews

• Ethan McGuire (Stallings’ most common narratives have to do with the Greek Underworld, archaeology, heroines, and monsters, as well as such non-Greek literary figures as Alice in Wonderland and universal themes like motherhood, feeling foreign, and mortality. ... The Hapax section feels more personal, even occasionally bordering on the confessional ... In Hapax, Stallings’ verse craft has improved, but the Archaic Smile section contains better lines. ... Olives gives us our first real glimpse of Mother Stallings too, in such exceptional poems as “Pop Music,” “Hide and Seek,” “Sea Girls,” “The Mother’s Loathing of Balloons,” and my favorite of all her poems, the masterful “Listening to Peter and the Wolf with Jason, Aged Three,” ... As Stallings ages, her poems become ever more obsessed with time itself, as evident in poems like “After a Greek Proverb” (one of her best villanelles) ... Like is less self-serious than the previous sections but also occasionally too clever for its own good, as in the overworked “Like, the Sestina.” The section is overindulgent as well, a tendency that reaches its peak in the eighteen-page, thirty-six-part “Lost and Found.”)
• Erica Reid (In "Alice in the Looking Glass,” ... Stallings is actually using a full set of (what else to call it?) conceptual rhymes. In this case, “left” rhymes with “right,”)
• Jennifer Schuldt
• Tobias Wray

"Life ceremony" by Sayaka Murata (Granta, 2022)

• A first-rate material - Nana shows off her jumper made of human hair. It's normal to have human remains used in furniture etc, but her fiancé Naoki objects to it. He didn't get on with his now dead father. His mother gives Nana a veil made from the father's skin, showing a scar caused by Naoki. Naoki agrees to let her wear it at their wedding. She holds his hand, his skin not yet made into material.
• A magnificent spread - The narrator and her husband eat trendy "Space" food because he wants to. For years her sister Kimi has been preparing meals for herself that are eaten in a Magical City she believes in. She's engaged to Keiichi. The sisters, Keliichi and his parents have a meal - their first meeting. The parents bring a present of food from their region - worms. Keiichi likes a limited range of trash food. They talk about how you have to trust the person giving you food, how you need to buy into the culture. Can Keiichi and Kimi live together? The narrator's husband arrives, fresh from a multi-cultural conference and likes all the food.
• A summer night's kiss - Yoshina, 75, never even kissed her now dead husband. She had 2 daughters by AI. A friend says eating warabimochi is like kissing a boy. She gets Yoshina to eat one. [only 4 pages]
• Two's family - Yoshiko, 70, goes to visit Kikue (who has cancer) in hospital. They met at school and have been living together for 40 years, with 3 daughters by AI. They're not lesbians - Yoshina is shy; Kikue has had many male lovers and is still on the look-out. Do they love each other? Yoshiko has no-one else now the children have gone. Kikue writes poetry in a notebook. The final paragraph is "The snow grew heavier, painting the world white outside the window. "It's so beautiful, isn't it?" Kikue said, leaning forward like a child. In the moment, the indigo notebook slipped from her wrinkled hands and, as though slowly flapping its wings, fluttered under the bed"
• The time of the large star - she and her father move to a place where nobody needs sleep. She meets a boy and tries to get them to dream together. She suggests that they leave. He points out that they'll never need sleep again. She hopes that one day they'll faint together [3 pages]
• Poochie - Yuki keeps a pet, Poochie, in a hut up a mountain. She invites schoolfriend Mizuho to help with feeding etc. It's a man on all fours, their fathers' age. Yuki had found him in the city's business centre. He's not chained up. One day he disappears to the city and comes back.
• Life ceremony - Women hear that an ex-colleague has died and are invited to his funeral. The custom is to eat the dead person. The population is shrinking. At funerals it's become the custom to pair off and try to have a child. Public sex is the norm. She goes to the funeral with a male colleague who she smokes with. No sex. She thinks that morals are fake. He thinks the world is a delusion. He dies in a traffic accident. She helps his mother and sister with the life ceremony meal. He's left recipes including a meatball recipe unsuitable for gamey, human meat. The event goes well. She thinks she might come to like the idea after all. She takes left-overs to a beach for a picnic. A gay talks to her. He goes away and returns with a semen sample for her. On the beach several couples are inseminating. She walks into the sea and uses the sample. [42 pages]
• Body magic - Ruri and Shiho are school friends. Ruri is tall and has breasts. Shiho looks pre-pubescent, having sex with her cousin yearly - they plan to marry. Ruri reacts to rude schoolroom talk. Shiho rises above it. When Ruri describes to Shuhi a strange feeling she once had when asleep, Shiho explains to her what an orgasm's like. She tries to induce it while awake. To me it sounds more like a non-sexual peak-experience.
• Lover of the breeze - It begins with "Naoko calls me Puff, because I puff up in the wind and billow in the breeze". Naoko (female) brings Yukio to her room. They kiss. The curtain (it's his PoV) feels a breeze as Yukio moves his arms. Naoko and Yukio sleep together. When Naoko's out of the room, the curtain blows over Yukio. He thinks it's Naoko. Later Naoko breaks up with him because she's always liked someone else. She embraces the curtain. The curtain missed Yukio.
• Puzzle - At work, Sanae has a reputation for being nice to everybody. She's interested in people's secretions and excretions. She likes the fug of crowded trains. She feels lifeless, like a building - her heart feels like a separate creature; "All the people crawling around in the world were the shared internal organs of all the gray buildings like herself". She feels suddenly less alienated. People think she's in love. She helps Yuka who's just finished a relationship with an obsessive man. Yuka invites Sanae to her flat. Her ex turns up who tells Yuka that Sanae is wierd. Sanae thinks that he's her heart, and Yuka a walking stomach. She hugs the ex - "as long as the pieces of the puzzle fit perfectly together, we can all live together forever", even if the pieces themselves are strange.
• Eating the city - The hot office-block air reminds Rina, 26, of childhood summer holidays in the mountains where her father grew up, eating vegetables. She dislikes shop vegetables. Her friend Yuki is influenced by her nostalgia. Rina searches for fresh plants in the city, feels like a wild animal, sees people as "Two-legged animals", feels "the body heat of a vending machine". She becomes obsessed with digging up and eating dandelions. She wants to tempt Yuki into seeing the world in this new way. The penultimate paragraph is nearly a repeat of the story's second paragraph, without spaces. She's talking to Rina. "Little by little the memories slipped into Yuki's body and wriggled around in her innards ... we would start to live a wholesome existence together in this world teeming with life"
• Hatchling - Haraka (the 1st person PoV) is going to marry Masashi. At school she was teased for being clever, so she pretended to be a Peabrain. "at university, I realised that I didn't have a personality of my own", she recalls. Then she was treated as a Princess, then as a tomboy. She blended in, wanting to be liked. People who saw her in two contexts thought her two-faced. She asks her friend Aki, the only one who knows about her 5 personae, to speak at her wedding. She's worried that at the wedding her husband will see her 5 personae as she talks to different friends. She shows Haraka her 5 personae and asks him to choose. He's upset. She shows him a 6th, less pleasant persona prepared for her by Aki, one that says she didn't like herself, that she wanted to be loved and took revenge on the world, on Haraka. Haraka suggests that he change too. They're happy.
• A clean marriage - Having found a husband online 3 years before, the first-person woman, Mizuki (33), agrees to have a child with him. They have a clean relationship - no sex with each other, though they have sex partners. He dumps his lover who angrily, mockingly, phones Mizuki. The couple undergo a procedure. Her husband's urged to push out semen and is congratulated. She is impregnated. Afterwards he has something "just like morning sickness".

Bodies, secretions, depersonalisation, non-standard fertilisation, separation of sex from love; questioning Real Selves; the connection between Body and Mind, Body and the World, Mind and Others.

Other reviews

• Zachary Houle (Life Ceremony can be sometimes weird for weirdness’s sake, and some of the stories mine a concept but then does absolutely nothing with that concept)
• Alison Fincher ( “A Magnificent Spread” [] is the funniest story in the collection and almost certainly the least disturbing ... “A Clean Marriage” is maybe the most typical of all Murata’s work to appear in English. It takes up motifs that appear in her work again and again: sexless relationships, asexual reproduction, unconventional families, and a general willingness to defy society’s expectations.)
• Kathleen Rooney (Horror is a genre full of feminist potential. ... its plots often hinging on a disbelieved woman. The female protagonist is the only one who perceives how screwed up a given set of circumstances really is. ... behaviors and customs that their practitioners accept as solid and given are actually arbitrary and relational and could just as easily be seen as silly or abhorrent in a different context.)

"About time too" by Peter Robinson (Carcanet, 2001)

Poems from Cortland Review, PN Review, Prairie Schooner, Shearsman, Stand, TLS, etc.

It's not lacking substance and detail - there's observation and description using slightly elevated diction and sometimes stilted syntax, with quite a lot of (often loose) rhyme. However, much of the time I have trouble seeing beyond that. Here are some passages that caught my eye because of diction, synatx, etc -

• "As fading light impinged/ at curtains, what took shape,/ in the course of views exchanged/ between one who'd to go/ and another staying behind,/ moved on from its frame" (p.26)
• "From music school windows/ came phrases, tricky scales/ on disparate pianos/ practising western intervals.// A cornet joined them as I waited,/ discords struck with every note/ promising unstated/ concertos, but that bit more remote.". I can see that the 2nd stanza has an "abab" rhyme scheme. Because of that, I assume that this 1st stanza has the same pattern. I struggle to see a pattern of beats or of syllable count. But how do the rhymes help? (p.27)
• "Not long after the rainy season's start/ our breakfast-time weather report/ predicted a deficiency of sunlight/ - as if you needed to be told,/ with that patter interrupting grey quiet/ and every umbrella unfurled.". This is "aabcbc". Subsequent stanzas are "aabcbc", "abcbca", "abacbc", but it's a struggle - why "deficiency of sunlight"? (p.31)
• "Waking, twenty-six years later,/ I suddenly remembered one/ idyllic afternoon/ we wandered through Grass Woods,/ then paddled in the stream/ - all ruined when she lost her watch,/ though whether in the dense grass cover/ or smooth-flowing river/ (and we searched both bank and water)/ that present from her Gran had gone;". That is nearly all of a poem's numbered section. The rest is "the moment and the time had gone for ever". It would have had to be a good line to save the section. I don't think I know what it means, let alone whether it's good (p.35).
• "A thick mist on the Padana plain/ did away with distances/ that morning I took an early train;/ it seemed the chaces/ of following outlines of trees/ past farms and onion campanili/ had been stolen from me/ by the weather; still, possibilities/ hidden in years' silences/ might have waited to emerge/ with filter plants at a field ditch edge,/ though patches of the dewy grass/ is all there was to see". This is another numbered section of a poem. The rhymes are clear at the start, then get looser - perhaps because of the mist. Again, the set-up seems long-winded ("did away with" as well as "stolen from me"?) and I don't understand the punch-line. The past is being equated to distance, yes, but filter plants? (p.46)
• "Then came the simple problem/ of switches, someone's name/ gasped forgetting who I am,/ shadow on a wall, a windscreen/ wiper to put out of mind,/ each unfamiliar obstacle/ to overcome if we're to find/ the other in each other's soul". It might be "abababab". I have trouble parsing it. Why should the persona put a wiper out of their mind? (p.48)
• "Houses were raised from out its path". This is line 2 of an 8-line stanza. One line has 7 syllables; all the rest have 8. There's irregular end-rhyme, maybe "XabXcbca" (other stanzas have a different number of lines and different rhyme patterns). What I don't get is why "out" is in the line. In prose it wouldn't be there. What metrical constraint is it submitting to? (p.62)
• "In fields of rape, grain, cabbage, lucerne,/ the stubborn morning sunlight searches/ as if for a love's possibilities/ and how they illuminate things." This is the end of "Changing Lines" (50+ lines). At a little train station on the lowlands of the Po, possibilities don't emerge from mist, they need to be imagined. But some trigger is needed all the same - maybe the pigeons changing places in a campanile's apertures? This ending seems too easy though (p.77)

"The Bargain" (p.58) takes up a page. What don't I get? "At La Villetta" probably has something I'm missing too.

So in the end there's too much I don't understand, which is no surprise - he's an experienced, sophisticated poet and I'm not (though to be fair, I've been in Cortland Review and Stand too). Some mitigating circumstances -

• Several of the poems are set in Italy. I'm familiar with the settings - the empty train stations, the cemeteries, etc. Maybe the poems work better on people who aren't so familiar
• With the longer poems, I have trouble coordinating the numbered sections into some kind of collective experience. Too often I found myself wondering if a section deserved inclusion.
• I think I'm in going through anti-formalist phase. In this book, constraints are half-heartedly followed and yet sacrifices (padding, mangling, gratuitous line-breaks) are made in order to follow them.