Hold the emails, I have some reading to do.

Decisions, decisions.

As the working year comes to a close, I’ve got a stash of books saved for the occasion. Not sure which one I’ll choose first. Here follows a brief summary of the seven distractions vying for my attention – a dazzling predicament indeed.

Love is BlindWilliam Boyd

A young Scottish writer, Brodie Moncur, finds himself in Paris. There’s a love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano. The blurb promises ‘a sweeping tale of love, revenge and music.’ I very much look forward to another book by William Boyd, having recently finished Sweet Caress and recalling a favourite from back in 2002, the wonderful Any Human Heart, a journey through the twentieth century.

The OverstoryRichard Powers

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this was the novel heavily backed to win – pipped at the post by Anna Burns’ Milkman. Nine Americans, their stories interwoven in a multi-narrative ecosystem, are brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe. A paean to the grandeur and wonder of trees. The Overstory explores the essential conflict on this planet: the one between humans and the natural world. This then is an epic novel making a last stand to save our planet. A timely read, then?

The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story Philip Hensher

A collection of short fiction from the last twenty years. V.S. Pritchett, Irvine Welsh, Neil Gaiman, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and more. Philip Hensher, editor, describes the collection thus: ‘…both raucous and withdrawn, preposterous and precise, hilarious and sumptuous in sentiment, vulgar or correct to the last degree. It was hard not to conclude that British writing is addicted to the extremes.’ This is a book one can dip in and out of between longer format stories. Like a kind of literary sorbet between dishes.

In the Garden of the Fugitives Ceridwen Dovey

Hard not to be seduced, initially, by the beautiful cover – the floral arrangement woven delicately among the typography. ‘A novel of obsession, guilt, and the power of the past to possess the present.’ It’s a story of a revived friendship. Royce, one time benefactor to Vita, contacts her after a gap of some twenty years. The intervening years are shared via parallel narratives that travel through Boston, South Africa, Australia and Pompeii.

November Road Lou Berney

‘A great read, combining brutal action with a moving love story; gorgeous writing, too.’ So says one of the masters of crime writing, Ian Rankin. The assassination of JFK is the backdrop for this crime novel. Frank Guidry, mobster, knows too much about the president’s death, and, meanwhile, dead bodies are turning up around him. He’s worried he might be next and hits the road. We follow him as he travels across 1960’s America with his hunters hot on his trail.

Less Andrew Sean Greer

Winner of the 2108 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which puts him in the company of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. A failed novelist, Arthur Less, is about to turn fifty when he receives an invitation to the wedding of his former lover. He contrives a way to avoid the wedding by instead accepting invitations to a string of literary events around the globe. Hilarious. Playful. Sly. Observant. And a quote from the book: ‘Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.’

Snap Belinda Bauer

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Belinda Baur is twice winner of Crime Novelist of the Year. This is the story of a teenage boy’s hunt for the killer of his pregnant mother. Crime-genre novels don’t tend to be considered for the Man Booker. The judges justified its inclusion, describing it as ‘an acute, stylish, intelligent novel about how we survive trauma.’ Elsewhere, I heard it described as ‘dark, atmospheric and bleak…the darkest of fairytales.’

In Search of Ryan’s Daughter

Tralee Golf Club, designed by the late, great, Arnold Palmer, is situated in County Kerry on the west cost of Ireland.

It’s a most spectacular stretch of links golf, the verdant dunes meeting the Atlantic coastline along a fringed stretch of eternally wide open white beaches.

Walking the course for the first time a few months ago, I sensed an urgent familiarity calling to me: I’ve been here before, surely?

Then the penny dropped: this stunning coastal landscape was the backdrop to one of my top ten favourite films: David Lean’s 1970 classic, Ryan’s Daughter.

I had to stop and take a breath.

On these shores, the languorous, quietly spoken school teacher, Robert Mitchum, and his young bride, the tragically naïve Sarah Miles had strolled along as Rosy Ryan (Sarah’s character) came to terms with the constrictions of her too hastily conceived marriage.

Ryan’s Daughter is a complex film that traverses a broad landscape: love story, political struggle, betrayal, rite of passage – it explores the innocence of a small town affair measured against the judgemental lens of a cynical world with historically entrenched attitudes.

Poor Sarah Miles, the eponymous Ryan’s Daughter, didn’t stand a chance. Fate had her doomed from the moment she set eyes on the broken shell of a man, the PTSD affected English soldier, Captain Randolph Doryan.

Long Live the Short Story

Short Story Collections

On occasion, I decide against picking up a new novel and opt instead for a selection from a book of short stories. I pondered recently, why do I make that decision? Before committing to the longer format of a novel, with its necessary complexities, there’s something refreshing about entering the concise dynamic of a shorter read. You become rapidly immersed in the fabric of a good short story, drawn in by its condensed intensity. The short story typically encapsulates a moment, a microcosm, a tiny world unto itself. V.S Pritchett described short stories thus: ‘Something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.’

Different writers have their own idea of what constitutes a short story. Edgar Allan Poe declared that ‘a short story is a brief tale which can be told or read at one sitting.’ I did some investigation into the average length of short stories and they vary dramatically from writer to writer. Alice Munro’s stories have an average word count of 10, 215 words. Whereas Raymond Carver works to a more modest average of 4,263 words, perhaps explained by his theory on writing short stories: ‘Get in, get out. Don’t linger’. Many an aspiring short story writer might have dreamt of being published in the New Yorker – where the criteria for submissions is that the story should range from 2000 words to about 10,000.

I came across a very short story; a mere 500 words or so. But, wow, what a complex world was packed into this concise piece. The story is called ‘It’s Beginning to Hurt’, written by British author, James Lasdun. (Click on the link below for the story). James Lasdun theorises that perhaps the short story is appealing for readers ‘because it’s short, it’s quick and people have limited time and short attention spans. One would think it would fit right into the habits of mind that people have in this era.’ He reasons that writing short stories is more like poetry ‘because it’s so much about economy and trying to do many different things all at the same time.’

But I suspect the appeal of the short story is not merely the fact it can be consumed quickly, it’s the power that can resonate from such a brief encounter. Spanish writer Juan Benet nails the best definition of the short story I’ve read:

Something that can be read in an hour and remembered for a lifetime.

– Benet

It’s Beginning to Hurt. James Lasdun

http://www.theshortstory.org.uk/stories/downloads/lasdun.pdf