"Surge" (Brandon, 2014)

Short stories by Irish Creative Writing students and their teachers.

• Birthday boys (Fergus Cronin) - He returns for Xmas to Ireland where his 2 brothers still live on the farm. They're all single. He's been in London for 40 years. Their father's long dead. Their mother died 10 years before. Each year they've been bringing their share of her ashes, without telling each other. This year they finally spread them.
• Undocumented (Mary Morrissy) - Shay's been living illegally in New York for 12 years. He manages a bar. His girlfriend (also without a permit) is pregnant without having asked him first. When an invitation arrives for his brother Brian's 50th birthday party in Ireland (a surprise one organised by his bossy wife Fee. He's "loyal as a kicked dog"), he uses it as an excuse to escape. His other brother Dec, quiet (he helps run the family hardware store with Brian), has a new dishy partner, Colette. Their parents are dead. Shay hadn't returned since he left - not even for their father's funeral. Upstairs at the party Colette and Shay suddenly have sex. They slip. She might have broken her nose. She's quiet about the incident. He half-confesses to Brian. Fee plays it down, saying the Colette is pregnant. He's thought of running away back to the States but might now decide to stick to his plan to stay. [the sex seems too unlikely]
• Goldfinch in the snow (Eilis Ni Dhuibhne) - Davina's a young foreigner in Dublin. A taxi driver rapes her - though she was drugged(?) so she doesn't recall much. She recalls moments from her childhood. Less than 7 pages. My favourite so far.
• No one knows us here (Claire Simpson) - John's been conscientiously working as a gardener for 15 years. He has a work friend John. He recalls when he was a new soldier and had to kill. Marcus, John and Robert's ex commander in the army is rumoured to be in town. Will he find them? John gets drunk - unusual for him. Maybe he had saved an enemy woman years before.
• Cleanliness is next to godliness (Darran McCann) - Terry gets messy when helping his kid eat breakfast. He goes to his high-security job - monitoring suspects. He flirts with a colleague and has a good day - he catches some bad people on camera and calls the heavies in, and gets one over on his younger boss. He apologises to his wife for neglecting her. [caring domestic life contrasted with work]
• Charcoal and lemongrass (Ruth Quinlan) - Billy Larsen had been a young soldier in Vietnam when he'd saved a Vietnamese girl. When he later fell into a trap, she tried to save him and was shot by one of his colleagues. Old now, he's returned to Vietnam, married a local, and repeatedly draws the girl who tried to save him, whitewashing the drawing each time.
• Country feedback (Mike McCormack) - A milk lorry crashes. The milk flows into a river, killing most of the stock of fish that he and his wife Eibhlin have been building up for years. She says it could be worse - the lorry driver might not survive. She consoles him with sex. She injects herself in her stomach. He offers to help but she says there's nothing he can do. In the evening he plays in a pub band. It goes well. When he gets home he wants her to play a tune. She cries. She's had another disappointment. Is she trying for children? Or does she have life-threatening problems?
• Celestial orbit (Bridget Sprouls) - Trevor's 8 years younger than wild sister Celeste, who's come home for a while. They live with their mother who regrets turning down a life-changing opportunity in her youth. Celeste's short of money - she can't hold down a job. Trevor mistakenly accuses her of stealing his credit card, telling his mum - he's been saving to buy a surfboard, to change his life. Celeste has brought back her paintings, which are grotesque. Mum cries, having failed to find a place that will try to sell the paintings.
• Yehudit (Paula McGrath) - Chicago. Judy's star piano pupil Kane, 6, is too poor to fulfill his potential. She's well off, married to a car dealer. Her son had that potential but his father made him do sport instead. Now he's a farmer who doesn't visit often enough. Yehudit was 6 when she arrived in the States with her mother, unable to speak English. At school they called her Judy. When her mother became ill she stopped school and sold house items to survive. She married after her mother died, got sad when she was childless, was given a piano by her husband, then became pregnant. Judy teaches a useless pupil then waits for Kane who doesn't turn up for his lesson.
• Paprika (Frank McGuinness) - The first-person persona's a 50+ opera singer singing Otello in New York. Someone said sprinkling paprika on food would make him lose weight. It made him fatter, and sing better. He believes that the stage is the only place for emotions. He's given up sex and alcohol. He prefers nougat. He passes a young couple in the couple. She tries to hug him. He sprays paprika in her eyes.
• The Letter (Colin Corrigan) - James is writing a suicide letter. He works at Dublin Modern Art museum. He doesn't like the job or the Art. His mother's long-term boyfriend Derek got him the job. In the gallery he meets Annie, his girlfriend from university. She has twins of about 5 now. We learn that he had a nervous breakdown while doing a Theology PhD. He tells her that he's going to kill himself. A year earlier he'd started his letter - 179 pages long. He burned it. He writes a short one - we see it 6 times in different fonts. His mother books a therapy session for him. She has a heart attack and dies. He burns the latest suicide note and says he doesn't need therapy.
• Quality Time (Madeleine D'Arcy) - He's paralysed in an Irish hospital after a stroke. His daughter Trisha arrives from London. He's not seen her since her mother left with her 30 years before. She's about 40 now. She tells him that her mother died 2 years before. She rages at him for abusing her and her friend. She gets scissors out, threatening to cut his tubes or his genitals. After she leaves, he's rather impressed by her verve.
• The Late Bite (Gina Moxley) - Mr Holmes is 85 and has 6 months to live. His 4 children take turns to visit, making it look random. They're already wondering about who gets what. His wife died 8 years before. Jimmy, in his 30s, turns up. They'd taken him in when his single mother died. He'd been in prison - Holmes had visited him there 12 years before, the last time they'd met. Holmes goes to bed, thinking about changing his will while Jimmy mows the neglected garden.
• Heroes (Sheila Llewellyn) - Moscow, 1998. The first-person protagonist has been 2 months in Moscow, teaching students. He's friendly with a Russian mother and grandmother. In 1960 he was 12. His father had fun in the West Indies, sending his son to school in England, dying when his son was at Manchester University. His uncle was a Trade Unionist, supporting Russia. He recalls Gagarin (a hero), The Cuban Crisis. Dashed hopes.
• The Gravedigger (Helena Kilty) - A young mother digs her grave at an Irish farm and spends a night in there, during which she recalls significant events, most notably when a man wandered in front of her car and she killed him. Next morning the farm owner helps her out to start a new life.
• The Healer (Derek Flynn) - Junk collects in a heap on a beach - a subject of village gossip. Overnight it becomes a hovel. A man there cures first Joe then other locals of their ailments. When outsiders come for help he ignores them. He disappears. The hovel becomes a shrine for outsiders. It burns down. One day he returns. He offers Joe more medicine for his gout. Joe turns it down. The healer apologises for the disruption he's caused, then walks away.

Goldfinch in the snow and Yehudit may be my favourites.

Other reviews

• Sarah Gilmartin (Dead voices often control the living ... Violence is commonplace in these stories)

"The machine stops" by E.M. Forster (Lits, 2010)

An SF story from 1909. On an Earth where everyone lives underground in little cells and has a Book, people no longer travel much because everywhere's the same. The Machine looks after everything. Kuno video-calls his mother, Vashti, asking her to visit. She gave him away at birth, like she did her other children, but she goes all the same, in an old air-ship. He tells her that he'd redeveloped his sense of space as preparation for visiting the surface. He was brought back by a machine but not before he saw other humans in the barren, poisonous wilderness. He's been threatened with Homelessness. Vashti returns home. Then the Machine encourages Religion. Before long things stop being maintained. Pain, which used to be unknown (thanks to domestic auto-doctors and euthanasia) returns.

Too long, but advanced for its time - I didn't know about it.

Many typos.

"The waterworks" by E.L. Doctorow (Picador, 1995)

Martin, freelance reporter, had an immoral, slave-trading, rich father Augustus Pemberton who died in 1869. Martin was disowned by him and hence was poor. In 1871 he tells people that his father's still alive. Martin had a fiancee, Emily, and an artist friend Harry. He disappears. The first-person persona, McIlvaine, is an editor of the Telegraph. He's looking back at these events. He's a bachelor. He investigated Martin's disappearance. He talked to Emily, to Sarah (Augustus Pemberton's 2nd wife, Martin's step mother, who wasn't left money by Augustus. She had a 9 y.o. son Noah), to Charles Grimshaw, an 1850s abolitionist pastor and friend of the Pemberton family and to Edmund Donne, an honest cop. When they talk to Harry he says that he and Martin dug up Augustus' grave and found a child's body inside. Donne becomes friendly with Sarah. After investigations he decides that Augustus and Martin are both alive.

One of Martin's sightings of his father, in a passing coach, was by a reservoir where a library now is. They look for Eustace Simmons, Augustus' factotum. A man (Dr Sartorius, Augustus' last doctor?) is buying 5-10 years olds off the street. Donne raids a new orphanage. They find Martin in the cellar, and the coach he saw. Simmons escapes. When Martin recovers he said that he had tracked down Simmons, asking about his father. He was forced into a carriage and taken to a sanitarium run by Dr Sartorius, a genius. His father's there. Sartorius invites Martin to stay.

Donne organises a raid on the Reservoir buildings (he'd guessed that the sanitarium was there, secretly funded). They find nurses dancing and 5 dead old men. They find Sartorius and take him to an Asylum. Donne and McIlvaine rush to Augustus' mansion. He's dead. Simmons is dead, having slipped while tried to escape with Augustus' money. Sartorius is killed by an inmate. Martin marries Emily. Donne marries Sarah.

I like the writing style. E.g. Early on, New York had many fires.

Naturally it was the old city that tended to go up, the old saloons, the hovels, the stables, beer gardens, and halls of oratory. The old life, the past. So it was a pungent air we breathed - we rose in the morning and threw open the shutters, inhaled our draft of the sulfurous stuff, and our blood was roused to churning ambition. Almost a million people called New York home, everyone securing his needs in a state of cheering degeneracy. Nowhere else in the world was there such an acceleration of energies. A mansion would appear in a field. The next day it stood on a city street with horse and carriage riding by.

There are sections where he uses ellipses. E.g.

I had staked out my claim to a story, in effect negotiating with the police for my rights in it ... but after all, how phantom it was ... no more than a hope for words on a page ... insubstantial words ... phantom names ... its truth and actuality no more than degrees of phantomness in the mind of another phantom

And there are flash-forwards - "I should also say, in abhorrence of suspense, that I think now, if I wasn't the only person to visit Sartorius, I was certainly the last before his murder at the hands of a colleague in criminal insanity a few days later".

Other reviews

• Sam Jorison (Waterworks has always received a more mixed reception than the majority of EL Doctorow’s work)

"Really Good, Actually" by Monica Heisey

An audio book.

Toronto, 2019. Maggie (first-person, an over-thinker who's a lecturer) was a plump teenager who suddenly over-dieted before meeting John when they were 19. They married. Now, at 28, he's moved out. Nobody's fault really, it seems. Her supportive friends are Amira (in a year-long partnership, still a flirt), Clive (gay) and 2 Laurens, one of them emotional. She has a sister Hanna and divorced parents. She lists the things she and John did together, the things they disliked about each other, the things that happen in films to divorcing couples. John takes their cat.

She makes friends with Amy, a divorcee. She considers cosmetic surgery. She binge-buys (we get another list - she likes lists and listacles) and moves into a cheaper place. She's curious about how John's getting on. His friends let slip that he's dating again. A barista rejects her. She "flirted like a baby deer learning to walk". She lets mutual friend Kalvin stay the night. No touching, but it was nice. She reckons she's 30% gay and starts sleeping with both genders. She sleeps with Kalvin after all, then doesn't see him again. She meets a new man, Simon, then breaks up with him after an argument about his trust in therapy and her difficulty with being pitied. We learn that she's been phoning/texting John at least daily even though he's not been replying for several months. She very much wants him back.

Her life's a disaster, she thinks, but her tweets about it are doing great. She tries, half-heartedly, a threesome. She thinks about getting back with Simon, though when he phones she says she needs space. She stays at her father's. She helps at a dog shelter. She and Amy share a place. She feels happy being single. Simon txts to wish her a happy birthday. She's happy about that too.

There are several smart one-liners - e.g. "a level of fun I've never met outside of an advert for a chain restaurant"; "you cannot spring a goatee on someone!" - but the plot-trajectory is no surprise. Her range of distraction activities seem to work in the end - they're entertaining enough, though there are sections that don't seem to do much. It feels like an overlong book.

Other reviews

• Shahidha Bari (a book full of millennial witticisms and reliably regular deadpan turns. But the seemingly tireless facility for jokes and comic self-deprecation can also be wearing ... There’s certainly a breezy confidence to Heisey’s mode of storytelling via text messages and Tinder correspondence, but quickfire DM exchanges in an age of internet dating can also read like comedy sketches, obstructing the possibility of real insight.)
• Sarah Collins (I am a fan of complicated female characters, but I needed a bit more depth here, I needed more development, and I needed a bit more of a plot, ultimately that’s why this fell flat for me.)

"The well of Saint Nobody" by Neil Jordan

An audio book.

They first met when she, Tara, was a piano player, 15, and he, William, nearly 30, was a music judge. He commented on her small hands. They briefly met 6 years later in her post-punk years, then at Brighton (no details provided at first - later we learn it was a one-night stand). Years later, during Covid, in a county Cork coffee bar, he puts up an ad asking for a housekeeper. He's over 70 and has moved into the Rectory. He has psoriasis making his hands bleed. She starts the job. He doesn't recognise her. She helps him unpack - unpacking his life, she quips. There's an old well in the garden. She gets Peter (a clingy ex) to clear it. She provides a legend related to it, about healing, and indeed his bleeding hands are healed by the moss. He starts playing again. She thinks the well's being fed by the sea. They start sleeping together. When she tells him that they slept together in Brighton, they separate for 3 weeks. She doesn't tell him that she had a child who might well be William's.

2 junkies are in a Cleethorpes caravan. One of them has OD'd. The other takes his name, Alistair, and credit card. He was adopted. The new Alistair tried to find the biological mother. He watches Tara, looks around her house. He fishes while squatting in a caravan. They talk. He says that he'd been an addict, that the therapist had told him to find her. She decides to tell William about Alistair but he's not in. She tells her story down the well. Alistair breaks into William's house and looks around.

Later William sees Tara and "Alistair" on the beach, thinking that Tara's found a new boyfriend. William's moved - "It came to him, like all emotional things, too late to be of any use whatsoever". He's relieved when Tara says he's her son. "Alistair" tells Tara he's not her son and never pretended to be. She pushes him down the well. William and Tara eat 4 fish from the deep freeze - given by "Alistair". The well gains a reputation. People visit to be cured.

Alistair hadn't died. A year later he arrives in a wheelchair, still recovering. He stays. Eventually he's able to play the piano again, one-handed.

The author uses "she thought to herself". Fair enough. Jemery and ex-wife Suzanna (a literature lecturer) seem part of a detachable side-plot. The book has the coincidences of fairy tale, but I had the most trouble believing in Tara's feelings for William.

Other reviews

• John Banville

"three-toed gull" by Jesper Svenbro (Northwest University Press, 2003)

Poems from Kenyon Review, Parnassus, Chicago Review, etc. Most are at least a page long.

The Postscript by the co-translator Lars-Hakan Svensson is revealing -

• "The Starlings" ... begins with the speaker watching a swarm of starlings ... in Rome ... as [] the starlings settle down to sleep the speaker is reminded of a famous passage in Virgils's Aeneid that compares the souls of the dead to birds ... this association momentarily results in writer's block dispelled by the sudden appearance of a soldier who ... comments ... "They certainly know how to look after themselves!" ... the speaker imagines that the birds [dream of] a beautiful October afternoon ... This ... vision conjures up another presence ... that of a deceased friend ... Ludovica Koch, who was a connoisseur of ... Gutar Ekelof who, in his turn, wrote magnificant poems about Italy ... in the final lines ... flying up from a field, the starlings cause the two friends to "look into the sun" . [This poem] contains several features of Svenbro's mature manner (p.121)
• In the late 1960s and 1970s strong political pressures were brought to bear on Swedish poets (p.123)
• Svenbro had discovered Ponge partly through ... Printz-Pahlson ... who taught Scandinavian literature for many years at Cambridge University (p.124)
• Svenbro's discovery of contemporary Italian poetry, which after decades of restraint underwent a remarkable metamorphosis in the 1970s: suddenly it was possible to write "orphic poetry, political poetry, narrative and gestural poetry" ... A Roman poet Valentino Zeichen [] alerted him to various ways in which linguistic material of a supposed nonliterary kind could be incorporated as poetry (p.124)
• the previously restrained or concealed autobiographical impulse emerges as the dominant force, relegating the metapoetic or mimopoetic (p.125)
• Regrettably, neither Svenbro's very early work nor his most recent book is included, as they pose difficulties that the translators have not felt able to master (p.126)

A number of the early poems are what the Flash world would describe as braided pieces - 2 narratives are interlaced.

• In the history of the human voice the tendons of the skeleton/ form the sinews, the abutments of different vowel systems/ articulated around a constantly variable/ yet incorruptible consonant; the skeleton itself (p.7)
• So the poem is only the shroud left on the ground/ where its miserable crumpled heap is only a measure/ of victory announced by the butterfly's wings/ now ablaze in the sun when it finally flies out of language/ affirming its brilliant and dizzying love (p.10)
• The incident of the Soviet submarine in Goose Bay/ raises the issue of how we want our archipelago poetry to look ... Swedish literature's long-standing prioritisation of the air-force/ has gradually resulted in a visually advanced poetry (p.11)
• Seeing that so-called nature poetry ever since Romanticism/ is best defined as a thoroughly realized simile/ whose epic context simply has gotten lost,/ we repeat on this winter day the experiment/ of taking our stand in a simile near the middle of the Iliad (p.22)

I find some of these pieces interesting, and some other fragments (like "For a moment I am a prisoner/ of the poem I am writing", p.118) interesting but I can't bring myself to like any of the poems. "The Starlings" comes closest.

"Eurotrash" by Christian Kracht (Serpent's Tail, 2024)

25 years ago the narrator (now 41) wrote a novel, "Faserland" that ended in Zurich. He's been visiting his mother there monthly. Now she's phoned to ask him to come straight away. She's 80+, and had been in a psychiatric ward. Her father had been in the SS, then in a denazification camp, and had been into S/M involving young Icelandic women. The narrator's godfather had been into expensive S/M. His father, Christian Kracht, rich, is 10 years dead. The narrator saw George Clare in Suffolk to find out about his father's war history.

On her 80th birthday his mother told him that a bikeshop owner raped her several times when she was 11. He was raped when 11 in a anadian Boarding School. He was eccentric as a young man, wearing make-up until at 27 he wrote his novel with the PoV of an autistic snob. He's lived in New York, Tibet, Bangkok, etc. He thinks his father was autistic. He wonders if his mother was ever mad.

While with his mother he suddenly decides to take her on a holiday. He discovers that she has a colostomy bag. She used to (and still does) pretend to be dead. She drinks. She takes out of the bank the money she gained from arms investment, planning to give it away. People try to steal their money. We're told random facts about his life with elaboration - he's married, he'd set his Elementary school on fire, Bowie's his hero, etc. He hopes the holiday will be cathartic for him.

They argue. He comforts her with stories. She says she's had a life of disappointment, that's he's a bad son and that he writes badly.In the dark they look for Borges' grave (a novel of his ended like that) They're stuck in a cable car for 2 hours and she has to change her bag.

He'd promised to take her to Africa. In the end they mostly go around Switzerland seeing places from their past. When he returns her to her home (she's been asleep during the journey back) he says it's Africa and she plays along?

Other reviews

• Marcel Theroux (Eurotrash is a knowing book, with excursions into German history and allusions to Shakespeare, myth and pop culture. Part of its charm is the voice of its narrator, a self-aware snob-insider who is anatomising the avarice and insecurity of the privileged class he was born into. ... What stops the book from being just smart-alecky is the profound tenderness and insight it brings to bear on the mother-son relationship at its heart.)
• readingmatters (I have seen other reviews brand Eurotrash as auto-fiction, but I don’t know if that is true or whether it would be more accurate to describe it as meta-fiction)
• Jason Williamson (While Kracht’s life no doubt shapes the story, the narrator is nonetheless unreliable—as was the case in Faserland—often admitting to memory lapses or by getting facts wrong, such as the title of David Bowie’s final album. Thus, while the text regularly suggests a certain autobiographical authenticity, it then undercuts its own veracity, leaving the reader to decide what to believe.)
• Mphuthumi Ntabeni (This novel is in dialogue with its predecessor, Faserland. ... For example, he artistically personalises an abstract idea like Gedächtnislosigkeit (lack of memory) by making the mother of the Eurotrash narrator an alcoholic who is addicted to drugs that suppress her memory.... The stoma bag plays a metaphoric role in Kracht’s clever writing, as if she is dragging around the stink of personal and national history that he, as her son (progeny), must learn how to clean and change. ... Each time they try to give away some of the money she has withdrawn from her private bank, something comes up to distract them.)