SHORT STORIES
EITHNE FARRY
MEN WITHOUT WOMEN by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker £16.99) The men in these seven short stories are lonesome, perplexed and lost, pondering the unaccountable sadness of their lives through the bottom of a whisky glass.
Women are at the heart of their troubles — ‘ You love a woman deeply, and then she goes off somewhere,’ the narrator dolefully explains in the titular tale.
The middle– aged actor in Drive My Car, who’s still coming to terms with his dead wife’s infidelities, and the unraveling Kino, who upends his life follow ing his wife’s betrayal with his best friend, are in a similarly pensive mood.
The tales are simply, sparely told, but curiously uninvolving — there’s a meandering explanation of how things are, how unknowable women can be, and how it all adds up to existential angst, but there’s too much emotional disengagement to make them a satisfying read.
THERE ARE LITTLE KINGDOMS by Kevin Barry (Canongate £8.99) KEVIN BARRY heads into the hinterlands, both geographically and emotionally, in this hugely original, entirely addictive collection of stories, where everything is overcast and brooding, but described with a vividness that makes even the most melancholy situations glimmer with light and dark fun.
James, a swaggering youngster in a makeshift pool hall in a small town, holds all in thrall to his showmanship in Atlantic City. In Ideal homes, twins Donna and Dee rob a local blind shopkeeper and purloin a JCB for a joyride, as they eagerly await the ‘ever spreading, quick approaching’ promise of a bigger kind of life in the newbuilds outside their small village.
And in Breakfast Wine, the morning drinkers have lives of such stunted sadness that they will chat about anything — ‘If a wall got a lick of paint, it would be remarked’ — in the haven of The North Star pub. Brilliant.
THE LOVE OF A BAD MAN by Laura Elizabeth Woollett (Scribe £9.99) HER stories are beautifully written — poised and elegant — but Woollett’s subject matter is decidedly unnerving, as she delves into the inner lives of women who have loved bad, sometimes evil, men.
In preparation, she read true crime books and biographies and watched home videos, then set about creating portraits of Myra hindley and eva Braun (hitler’s lover), who declares: ‘It’s so hard for me to keep track of what’s good and what’s bad, I’ve given up trying.’
Most unsettling is Charlie’s Girls, women who dedicated their lives to Charles Manson and justify their violence with a disconcerting intensity — ‘Because if Love has a human form, it’s him... the darkness of locked prison cells in his eyes’.
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