"Attrib. and other stories" by Eley Williams (Influx Press, 2017)

Stories from Ambit, The Lonely Crowd, Structo, The White Review, etc.

In "The Alphabet" the female narrator says "I completely lost it (the plot, not the glasses - they're only mislaid) about two weeks ago around the time that I mislaid you. If you were here you would have a filthy joke about my use of that word, about you being miss laid. Scratch that, then. Screw it or unscrew that word out of place." (p.12). Later we discover that on her first date she was asked what her favourite word was ("pamphlet") and her favourite letter. When she suggested Q, he pointed out that Q needs U to be useful. Later they go through the alphabet - "the rugby goal of H ... R is a thrown magnifying glass embedded in a wall". She's diagnosed with aphasia. "Good thing there's a word for it" says her boyfriend. The piece could be read as charting a relationship using aphasia as an analogy.

In "Swatch" 2 boys stuck in a cupboard playing "hide and seek" pass the time with stuffing their mouth with as many marshmallows as possible and naming paint colours. It shouldn't work, but for me it does.

"Attrib." begins unexpectedly

I held the rib up to the microphone and opened my mouth. 'Dvořák,' said my neighbour's front door. Its pronunciation was very clear. Not quite sure who to blame for this. I narrowed my eyes at the rib. 'His and hers?' asked my computer's cooling fan. 'Lament,' said the tree branch

The (female?) narrator is adding sound FX to an audio guide of a Sistine Chapel exhibition. She notices that Eve's depiction is far less dramatic than Adam's. The penultimate paragraph ends with

I looked a final time at the picture of the naked couple and their clothed onlooker. I thought about the cracked plaster of my bedroom ceiling, and the lack of my name in the production credits, and I did not feel ashamed.

"Smote" was the first piece I didn't care for ("to hold you here is a game of chess on a grumbling crumbling glacier, the gambit's gone your way and I am bishop-fumbled rook-to-h8, stalemate giddy, I might as well be kissing you through a trellis" (p.50)). "Alight at the Next" was the most experimental piece so far.

"Concision" is another piece where a break-up causes a dash into etymology - "An exclamation mark is a full-stop with a cockatoo's crest. Full stops, three full-stops. Had you been waiting for me to finish your sentence and to join the dots? Lichtenstein or Seurat" (p.72).

I'm impressed by "And back again". The narrator imagines going to Timbucktoo to prove her love - "The overhead fan might slice the air into swallowable rashers and this world i'm imagining would be divided into a million squares through the grill of my mosquito net." (p.78)

"Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan" is original, but not entirely successful. "Synaesthete, Would Like to Meet" doesn't work for me. "Bulk", about a beached whale, does. In "Platform" the narrator's blown up a photo of the moment when her boyfriend left her. She's noticing details in the background. It's another story I like. But the remaining stories in the book I'm not keen on.

More than enough good or interesting stories to be a good read.

p.s. I try this style sometimes. Here's an extract of an unpublished piece I wrote many years ago where two wordsmiths meet -

I lack confidence sometimes. Or is it confidance? That would be more logical. I decide to take the plunge. "You haven't told me your name." "Lee." Lee? Her breasts. Milk. Dairylea. Will it work? Will I remember her name? "Lee Franc. Well officially Lee's only my middle name. Actually I'm Brutta. It means ugly in my father's dialect. He came from a little village in Hungary. You know, like A Boy Named Sue. But I didn't want to be Brutta Lee Franc all my life."

Other reviews

• Cal Revely-Calder (Emotions are delayed, figured in a hundred different ways, and their lateness turns them accidentally into secrets. But that’s what makes these stories shine: if there were more dialogue, the words would fumble, and lose the delicacy their shyness lends them.)
• Thomas McMullan (The rippling of these distortions throughout the collection works brilliantly in places, but sometimes runs the risk of overpowering the stories. ‘Synaesthete, Would Like to Meet’, which follows a synaesthete during and after a date, is full of evocative juxtapositions, but feels unnecessary given the subtler attention to sensory description elsewhere. At other times, the anxiousness to flip and examine each word feels a touch performative, jolting the reader out of the characters’ lives to watch Williams the linguistic lion-tamer. Not that that’s a bad way to spend an afternoon – nearly every sentence here dazzles with somersaults – but some of the book’s most outstanding moments are those that give their images room to breathe.)