SHORT STORIES
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Our Strangers by Lydia Davis (Canongate £20, 368 pp)
Our Strangers
by Lydia Davis (Canongate £20, 368 pp)
Lichens, tiny insects, solitary reading, train journeys, overheard conversations, dissolving friendships and matrimonial irritations make up the subject matter of Davis’s delicious short stories. She has a wonderfully economical writing style, brilliantly showcased in these 144 off-beat, drolly observant tales.
Even the slenderest (and some are a few scant lines) contain whole worlds of suggestion and feeling, displaying an absorbing inquisitiveness into the natural world and human nature that’s irresistible.
The longer offerings include the titular Our Strangers, which outlines the oddities, foibles and heartbreaks of neighbours, geographically near, but emotionally apart.
Pardon The Intrusion lists a community’s wants and needs, while the succinct Fun — ‘As we pick up the invitation and read it again, the morning after, the party still looks like fun, even though it was not fun’ — neatly sums up the disappointments of sociability.
The Pole And Other Stories by J.M. Coetzee (Harvill Secker £20, 272 pp)
The Pole And Other Stories
by J.M. Coetzee (Harvill Secker £20, 272 pp)
The limitations of language are a constant constraint here in Coetzee’s coolly austere novella and five short stories, as his intellectual, emotionally reserved characters contemplate art, ageing and death.
In The Pole we meet Wittold, a 71-year-old pianist from Warsaw, with a mane of silver hair and an unsentimental approach to the works of Chopin, who develops a passion for well-to-do 40-something Beatriz.
She disregards his infatuation: ‘An old man in love. Foolish. And a danger to himself’, but nonetheless embarks on an affair, conducted in stilted English, translated poems and much miscommunication.
The Glass Abattoir and Hope herald the reappearance of prickly Elizabeth Costello, (a familiar in Coetzee’s work), with her scratchy relationship with her children, her philosophical musing, her kinship with animals and her slow decline into dementia.
Girls by Annet Schaap translated by Laura Watkinson (Pushkin £12.99, 192 pp)
Girls
by Annet Schaap translated by Laura Watkinson (Pushkin £12.99, 192 pp)
Princesses are meant to be pretty, ‘proper and precise’, according to prim Lady Morsegat, governess to the loud, clumsy, hairy royal daughter who takes centre stage in Schaap’s wonderful tale, Monster Girl.
Like the rest of the heroines in this beguiling collection of beautifully translated subversive fairy tales, the girls here are all knees and elbows and expectations, determined to outwit the wishes of their parents.
Outcast by her family, marooned on a sea-swept island, Monster Girl finally learns to be comfortable in her own skin with the help of a cursing, tattooed, shipwrecked sailor.
Elsewhere, a girl in a fiery-red raincoat encounters a wolf trying to remember how to be wild (Wolf), a frog proves more kissable than a controlling regal boyfriend (Frog), and a murderous preacher gets his comeuppance (Blue).
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