"Granta 68: Love stories" (Granta 1999)

• Call if you need me (Raymond Carver) - Dan (his first-person) and Nancy have a son Richard about to go to college. They've each had recent affairs (he with Sue). Richard goes to stay with his grandmother while Dan and Nancy go to a rented cottage for the summer to save their marriage. On the first day they see a hummingbird, decide to fish and to get a dog. But by evening she thinks it's hopeless. She wants to see Richard and her mother. She goes to bed. When he sees a herd of white horses in the front garden he calls her. She's as awed as he is. They have a good night and sleep together. Next morning he gives her a lift to the airport. Dung and hoofprints are in the front garden. He phones Sue.
• Habibi (Ruth Gershon) - 45 pages. Hannah (a nominal jew) works as a lecturer in London. She has grown children. She lives alone. On a stay in Tel Aviv she starts living with Yussuf, an Arab. The sex is good. The jew/arab mix complicates social/admin activity. She misses him when she returns to London for the term. He doesn't reply to letters. She goes back. They argue. They make up. She realises how lazy he is. She leaves him for good. [Given the length, doesn't do enough]
• Famous people (Orhan Pamuk) - 1958. A couple plus their 2 young sons (one the first-person PoV) live in Istanbul. "Staring out of the window was such an essential habit that when television finally did arrive, people started watching it as if they were still looking outside". The boys collect cards of famous people from bubble gum packs. The persona catches his father trying to secretly leave - to Paris he says. The mother asks her mother if they can live with her. She refuses. The persona loses most of his cards in a game with his brother.
• Fit mother (Peter Ho Davies) - America. She and Bill were addicts. When she got pregnant, she stopped. When she had the baby, social services took him away saying she had 6 months to prove she was a fit mother. She went to collect her mother from far away, bringing her back to help. They hadn't met for years. Bill's arrested for selling drugs. The social worker's impressed by how she's turned her life around but says that her mother's dangerously senile. So she takes her mother back to where she has friends.
• Then and now (Daniel Meadows) - Rephotographing "ordinary" people photographed 25 years before as part of a project [Non-fiction]
• Exchange of pleasant words (Aleksandar Hemon) - The Hemon family trace their ancestor back to the Bible and Iliad. The family-council organise a "Hemoniad", inviting a lost branch of the family, the Hemuns. Videod for posterity.
• Uncle Ed (Keith Fleming) - The author when 16 went to live with his uncle, the openly gay author Edmund White. [Non-fiction. An interesting and entertaining read.]
• Going abroad (W.G. Sebald) - He goes to Vienna, having lived 25 years in England. He wanders all day, thinks he sees Dante. He spends a day with an old friend who'd been institutionised for decades. Then he catches a train to Venice. He gets a train to Verona. He thinks he's being followed. He escapes to Innsbruck. The piece includes graphics - photos, tickets, receipts.
• The furnace (Lydia Davis) - A married daughter, emotionally constrained, tries to communicate with her ailing father. They discuss their furnaces. He sends her crime cuttings from his local paper.
• Closer (David Malouf) - 6 pages. Amy, 9, belongs to a strict pentacostal family. Uncle Charles, from Sydney (Sodom) isn't allowed close. She dreams about him. [Not for me. Too much is about pentacostal oddness]
• Asking for it (James Hamilton-Paterson) - 4 pages. A British man is gang-banged by 5 Arab men in Libya. He didn't report it to the embassy or the police. He thinks it was more a political than an erotic act. [Non-fiction?]
• First cut (Jonathan Kaplan) - About becoming a South African surgeon during apartheit. His first patients were rioting students. It was difficult trying to be a neutral doctor. [Non-fiction]

"Weirdo" by Sara Pascoe

An audio book. The narrative is interrupted by school reports, letters about her debt, etc.

The narrator Sophie, 32, works as barmaid in Essex. Chris, an ex-colleague who she fancied, comes in with a girlfriend, Ella (who's in a relationship with Steve). Sophie hasn't seen him for 3 years. When Chris went to Australia she'd followed him so she could bump into him by chance - after which nothing happened except a kiss. Partly because of that holiday she's over £10k in debt. She says wacky things to mates which they laugh at because they think she's making them up.

Her father's in Australia, evading taxes. She currently lives with Ian who fears her sexuality. It's not love. She used to live with James who got her pregnant. She had an abortion. James is about to marry her sister Dayna. On New Year's Eve, Chris is at her bar. He takes her home. When they have sex he tries to be considerate. It doesn't work. He mistakes her cries of pain as excitement. She discovers he's soon to marry his Australian boyfriend. In the days after she feels she's finally achieved her aim. She discovers she's pregnant. She's happy. She thinks destiny has planned things that way. She miscarries. She leaves Ian. Ella (who Chris exploited the same way he exploited Sophie) leaves Steve and as sex with women.

3 themes emerge -

• She has disassociation issues, feeling that her character isn't part of her, etc. She thinks she could be an experiment, a brain in a jar, and "not even the most important brain in the jar". She read Camus' "The Stranger". She thinks she may be a non-violent psychopath. At school she was clever but caused trouble, having fantasy/reality issues. She tries to show the emotions that people expect. Ian blames it on her cold mother. When Sophie's pregnant she feels that the baby is taking her over.
• She thinks she's a twin, lacking a spiritual partner as in Plato. She sees Dayna or Ella as her twin.
• Destiny: fate works in mysterious ways.

I like -

• She has an idea of marketing Smart Scissors - scissors that won't let the user cut their own hair if they currently have low self-esteem.
• She says that some films are much sadder the second time around - it hurts to see the characters oblivious to the trouble ahead.

The internal monologue is too mundane and needs editing. As a psychological profile it fails - it needs to be more forensic. If she falls in love with men who love her because she wants to be loved (self-validation), then the Chris obsession is odd, and her response strange. As comedy it's not funny enough.

Other reviews

• Ella Risbridger (There’s a touch of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time here; plus, perhaps, a very funny, candid smattering of Louise Rennison’s beloved teen diarist Georgia Nicolson. Pascoe has written about her adolescent love of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, and it’s not hard to draw the line between his naive, careful philosopher Sophie and hers. If you combined those three teenagers, and aged them up 15 years, you might find something of her narrator’s pure, strange tone.)
• Hephzibah Anderson (Just how far from “normal” is Sophie? Her paranoia suggests she’s not merely kooky but needs real help, and this can make for uncomfortable laughter.)
• Annie Kapur (I would definitely call this book a failed attempt at stream-of-consciousness because none of it really comes together. ... I know she states that she wants to keep these things for her future biographer because she is a narcissist, but I cannot help but think that these debt letters do nothing for the overall story. She tells us she is in debt many, many times, we do not require actual physical proof of that. ... I genuinely don't care about her dating life because her professional life is so badly put together I cannot fathom how anyone can stand her even as a friend, let alone a romantic partner.... All in all, I found the characters of this book simply too insufferable to read. It wasn't funny but it was faux-quirky and got tired very quickly.))

"Ripening: NFFD 2018 anthology" by Santino Prinzi and Alison Powell (eds) (Gumbo Press, 2018)

The National Flash Fiction Day anthology with the theme "Food". Flash and a few micros.

Favourites were "Famous last meals" (Nan Wigington), "Milk and Eggs" (Megan Giddings) and "Attack of the Robot Grannies" (Angela Readman)

"Mouth to mouth" by Antoine Wilson

An audio book.

The narrator is a married American father. He's on his way to Berlin where his publisher is trying to make him into a cult author. Waiting for a delayed plane he bumps into Jeff who he knew at college. Jeff's monologue takes over. 20 years before he saved a man from drowning. After, he tracked the man, Francis, down and found that he was a rich art-dealer who'd married an artist, Alison. Francis wasn't a nice person - he exploited customers and staff. Jeff got a job at Francis's gallery. He dated Chloe before finding out that she was Francis's daughter.

Jeff says he has 3 galleries, including one in Berlin.

When it was revealed that Francis was having an affair with an art student, Francis organised a European skiing holiday - he and Alison, Jeff and Chloe. He got Jeff to help him win Chloe over. Chloe resented this. Francis (a good skier) took Jeff (who struggled) to a very steep descent. Francis collapsed, and Jeff continued down to get help. Francis was dead when the rescue team arrived. Jeff married Chloe and took over the business.

When the narrator reaches Berlin, he finds that he doesn't have much of a chance as an author. He checks on Jeff's story, which seems true except that reports say that Francis died because he was hit by a skier.

It's a short novel. I like the phrase (not original) "Like God in plain clothes". The narrator barely features - I'm unsure why it needs to be a framed stor. The given reasons for Jeff telling his story are unconvincing. When Jeff was questioned after the skiing incident what did he say? Seems like I like the book a lot less than others do.

Other reviews

y

• Anne Logan (I became frustrated by Jeff’s ramblings, and I wanted to know more about our narrator. But once I realized the narrator is irrelevant and the whole point of the story is Jeff’s weird experience, I settled into the story. ... These subtle observations about each character (everyone but the narrator) brilliantly uncovers the life of the internal; all the critical elements of this story happen beneath the surface.)
• John Gu (At every moment, in Wilson’s story, the reader is ready to rush onward to find what will happen next. This makes for great readability, but what is gained in speed is sometimes lost in depth. The novel suggests more than it can flesh out in its 200 pages, and though Wilson spares us red herrings, false starts, and dead ends for the most part, you can see that there are some diversions he could have taken to give us a more complete picture of the world he has constructed.)
• Carr Harkrader

"Granta 148: Summer fiction" (Granta, 2019)

• The spread (Ben Lerner) - At an interscholastic debating competition, teams use a tactic to "spread" opponents, introducing many issues as fast as they can. It's taken over from standard debating, as it has in the real world. Senator Bob Dole hands out the prizes. The final paragraph begins with "Now I am going to show you a picture and I'd like you to make up a story about it. We call this the Thematic Apperception Test or TAT. A story with a beginning, a middle and an end."
• Innards (Magogodi oaMphela Makhene) - A black South African dies. We get the tribal history - choosing abattoir hearts; rusty bicycles, etc.
• The Line (Amor Towles) - In the last days of the final Tzar, peasant Pushkin and his wife, childless, move to Moscow to join the revolution. She progresses in a factory. He gets sacked and spends hours queuing for food. He's good at it, enlisting help from about a dozen boys. He queues from someone wanting an exit visa and ended up, after 18 days with a pass for him and his wife to New York. His wife looks upon it as a way to spread Communism. When they get there she goes to a factory, leaving him. He queues at a soap kitchen.
• Quantum Displacement (Nuar Alsadir) - 3 pages of left-aligned prose that uses "^" and " " instead of punctuation. There's a margin note too. [No]
• Longshore drift (Julia Armfield) - Alice and Min, both 17, sell ice-creams from a van. Neither have had friendships with boys though they're probably straight. A group of boys flirt with them as they get ice-creams, not paying. They swim together among basking sharks - scary but not dangerous.
• Charles Parker plays Bossa Nova (Haruki Murakami) - The narrator wrote a spoof music review for a student magazine. 15 years later in New York he sees the record. He doesn't buy it because at $35 dollars it's too much. Next day he goes back. The shop assistant says the record was never there. Then the narrator dreams that Parker thanks him. [No]
• Field notes on a marriage (Te-Ping Chen) - In the states, a male lecturer born in China suddenly asks to marry a female lecturer he's become friends with. They visit her parents who still live on an alfalfa farm. He doesn't want to take her to his boring Chinese town. He hasn't been home for years. He's rather detached. He tells tells her that at his school in China, a clever, poor boy died when a prank went wrong. 2 years into their marriage he hasn't made much academic progress. He hangs himself. She visits his parents, who hint that their son was the killer. On the way back to the airport they pass a block of flats due for demolition. The tenants are refusing to leave. Neighbours are bringing them food.
• Providence (Sara Majka) - 3 pages. In New York a single mother (the first-person narrator) becomes friends with a man whose wife has left him, taking their daughter. When the wife returns, the man gives the narrator up. [No]
• Good Progress (Jem Calder) - The narrator's mother's just been told that her breast cancer is terminal. The narrator (who's generally inhibited) hasn't told their friends, not even their flatmate Roos. "For motives that remained predominantly unclear to me, I had ...", "for no reason that I could have explained if called upon to do so ...". They go to a party. They think about telling people
• Visitors Welcome (Thomas Pierce) - A church buys a Jesus AI hologram. It challenges the congregation to be better christians, then somehow walks away.
• Vows (David Means) - The narrator's married to Sharon and has a son Gunner. They've both been unfaithful. They decide, after much discussion, to renew their vows and have a second honeymoon in Dublin. He thinks that much of what he's done is cliché. At the end it's a year since he held Sharon's hand as she died in hospital. [There are many flashbacks and flashforwards - e.g. "On the night of the party, months after the ceremony, Ted's loss of his son in Iraq was five years away, still up in the vapors, and he had no idea that it was ahead of him, and I had no idea that someday I'd look back and see both of us as we'd be years later and filter our relationship through that particular moment"]
• Schenectady (Adam O'Fallon Price) - Allison Blakely, the narrator, is in Schenectady teaching screenwriting to gifted high-schoolers, telling them how characters [i.e. herself] must change. The text is addressed to David, her ex. She's middle-aged, childless, and into drugs. Leonard, 13, invites her to dinner with his nearby gran. She takes the class to a shopping mall to do observation. High, she buys a remote-controlled helicopter. A few days later he shows her his screenplay about a women with an alien insid her. She asks if it's about her. He says yes, a little - his mother has problems too. She takes him on a night walk to a waterfall and shows him how to control the helicopter, which hovers like magic. [I like the symbolism and much of the story. I think there needs to be a stronger reason for buying the helicopter]

I like "Vows" most. "The line" does less than a story that long should. The other stories are mostly interesting enough.

"An honest man" by Ben Fergusson

An audio book.

Ralf is a geography lecturer, a parent. He grew up in cold war West Berlin. His mother was English, a psychologist working from home. His friends were Stefan, Petra and Maike (his girlfriend). His brother Martin is 4 years his junior. Ralph likes girls and (secretly) boys. He fancies their neighbour Tobias. He thinks Tobias is having sex with his mother. When Ralf's about to go to university he's befriended by Oz, 22, whose Turkish father is their landlord and runs a bookshop. Oz is an informant for the West. He's interested in Tobias (who he claimes is a spy for the East). Oz thinks that Tobias might be looking through Ralf's mother's files about her patients with sex problems (some from the British Army) so they can be blackmailed.

Ralf stays a night or so with Oz. Ralf's besotted. He passes for university but says he's going to take a gap year. Maike breaks up with him. He steals some of his mother's files for Oz. Oz begins to panic, thinking the Stasi are onto him/them - photos of the two of them together are left in his flat.

Oz and Ralf are attacked by Oz's brother and father. Ralf goes to Petra and tells her about Oz. When he gets home, Oz's brother and father are there. They say that Oz is psychotic and doesn't always take his drugs. When Ralf tells them about the espionage, his father says it's not the first time. Oz is taken to a clinic. A woman phones Ralf, saying she's engaged to Oz.

Oz disappears. Ralf realises he's taken a year off for nothing. He gets a shoebox of souvenirs from Oz's father, studies them for clues. It's 1989. His friends leave for university. Something in the shoebox makes Ralf wonder if his father is a Stasi spy. He challenges his father. Maike's mother dies. At the wake his mother appears and reveals that his father made her into a Stasi informant (they were in love, she was a socialist). They'd known what had been going on all the time. His father had had the photos taken. At that moment the wall falls. He goes to see what's going on. Oz is there. When he returns to his family they're about to leave for East Germany. They all go in the car until stopped by the police - Martin had phoned them. His parents are arrested. His father dies at 50.

Years later, Maike, Petra and Stefan attend his wedding.

I liked most of it - pacing was ok, and the facts about Berlin life were interesting. Sex/spy secrecy merges. Ralf was too head-over-heels in love with Oz for my liking.

Other reviews

• lonesomereader
• John Cook

"Modern fog" by Chris Emery (Arc, 2024)

Poems from Ambit, Bad Lilies, London Magazine, PN Review, etc.

Here's the start and end of "The Path" -

• All the no-shows picking their way/ through whin and leaf mould along the path,/ with England's wild attendance/ flinging or fleeing, will not remind.
• I have led you here through all possible music/ for something we cannot wholly know/ and you will pull up my hand and kiss it/ and carefully we walk on.

I don't understand all the first sentence - why "no-shows"? The final sentence's sentiment is repeated later. There are journeys, guides and things just beyond our understanding - "something lost" (p.14); "All that remains is absence" (p.12); "the dogs/ are astounded at the edge of what's never/ fully grasped" (p.12). Elsewhere the persona aims "to solemnise the marginal and lost" (p.61)

There's detail - universes in grains of sand. There are mere symbols (faded memories, souvenirs) of something that used to mean so much. I'm rather allergic to writing that's about things just beyond our understanding. Meditations aren't my thing either - which is maybe why "At St Helen's Ranworth" (a 12 part, 12 page piece) didn't grab me.

There are animals (dogs, marsh harriers, hare, fox, seal, etc) - observation, followed by a dream or their death. "Hares" is the easiest of these pieces.

Sometimes it's as if he feels the need to insert adjectives, so he scatters some in, hopefully. They work in "The lane tipped out beside dumped farm metal/ and plucked fields" (p.61) ("metal" is preferable to the more obvious "machinery". I've seen "plucked fields" before, but it's ok). I like "puffed vintage cloud" (p.47). In "we're out/ in cream air, old roads, lobbed estates seeping/ by the rim of each roundabout -/ the weedy local bypass, a single show house empty" (p.63) I like "lobbed estates" but why "seeping"? Some other lines have the sheen of poetry but I'm not always convinced -

• The dreamy sky is yellow, then russet under/an octave of stars (p.27). Why "octave"?
• I ask you if you/ understand the marriage of things when it gets dark,// you say the world belongs to itself for sure (p.27). Maybe. Borderline.
• No one told him he could make his deep mother/ from apple pips and spider legs/ in the latrine (p.31). Eh?
• We're taking pets from town to town,/ driving through thunderstorms/ in a garbage countdown/ to the metal noon. (p.32). Eh?
• Dawn's unlost loves/ curtained in sweeping hail. The slowest east./ Everything counting and counted that shoves/ from grey acres into one venal feast (p.74). Eh?
• all that sweet showiness we go through while May dies/ and another season crams its heat/ into the centre of you, grown so tall,/ then suddenly it is over (p.72, "Cow parsley"). That works for me.
• The government of my hours knocked back,/ staring at each maquette fried stiff inside its clock of limbs,/ the easel flayed with time and yet our sun-bare god had turned/ to spread new lies into each other (p.59). Eh?
• the dream so hot/ we formed a simple absence of ourselves/ in the reckless afternoon (p.50). Maybe, but by p.50 readers are overdosed on absences.
• He was slowly withdrawing from us/ nothing to clear the debris of him, the world/ relaxed into him with all its fiery prayer (p.53). Borderline but no - too keen to get "prayer" in.

I like the idea of "The establishment of the scene" whose last line is "Our end is your beginning. Titles. Snow". Mostly the book's line endings don't matter much though p.54 and p.66 nearly have full end-rhymes.

Other reviews

• Martyn Crucefix (The poems revel in describing aspects of this world and ... the occasions for such descriptions arise from journeys (often walking – the cover shows a hand-holding rambling couple) and the highlights of such journeys are frequently encounters with creatures ... There is more than a little of Philip Larkin in Emery’s work ... [In] The remarkable poem ‘Stags’ ... the momentary sighting of the creatures is (in the poem itself) now no more than a shaky memory, an ‘absence’ that stands ‘at the edge of what’s never / fully grasped’. But the recall of their passing still has a potency as a ‘store of grace and loss’ and is here declared ‘the last religion of these woods’.)
• Jackie Law (While the intended meaning of certain poems remained at times opaque, the language employed proved rich and pleasurable to peruse and attempts to unpick.)
• Jonathan Evens (The new themes he found included writing about spirituality, something, he once thought he would never do, and mystery – “the mystery of place, the mystery of the Other, the mystery of ourselves” ... The Path’ seems to sum up most fully the journey he undertakes in this collection)