SHORT STORIES
LETTERS FROM KLARA by Tove Jansson (Sort Of Books £8.99)
ToVE JAnSSon is best known for her charming Moomin children’s books, where the inhabitants of Moominvalley find themselves in peculiar predicaments.
Here, the grown-up characters of these delightful stories are beset by similarly uneasy emotions in odd situations — from querulous encounters with old school friends to the purchase of extravagant hats and the tip-tilting sense that romantic relationships aren’t all that they might be.
Jansson is by turn funny, melancholy and slyly mischievous — qualities brilliantly evident in the titular story, where an elderly letter writer offers some gloriously tailored observations to her various correspondents, including a non-apology to her friend Matilda, whose ‘ ancient birthday’ she has forgotten, and an encouraging missive to her godchild, Steffe, who has sent her a present of a ‘handsome’ bark boat. Wonderful.
LISTENING IN by Jenny Eclair
(Sphere £12.99) CoMEdiAn and author Jenny Eclair delves into the minds of some 20 women who have collectively reached the end of their tether. Some characters are struggling — with motherhood, ‘every sinew of your heart is worried sick every minute of every day’, with the work environment, or with wedding dresses.
others find the experience liberating: in Points, gail heads out in her duplicitous husband’s BMW X7 and, donning a deerstalker and a cavalier attitude to the speed limit, exacts a particular kind of revenge — ‘if he wants to visit his little girlfriend in future, he’ll have to catch the bus’.
Meanwhile, in Sitting, a widow gleefully imagines her bossy son’s reaction to the news that ‘every Friday afternoon, i like to take my clothes off for gin money’ as a life model at a local art class. Funny, poignant and insightful.
THE DINNER PARTY by Joshua Ferris
(Viking £14.99) in THiS egregiously entertaining collection of short stories, Ferris tackles the most enervating range of emotions — despair, doubt, anxiety, humiliation — as his doleful characters trawl new York.
They second-guess their motivations, cheat on their partners, feel that something essential is missing and are victims of their own ‘looping, destructive, gnawing’ thoughts: ‘Here was the underworld of the city’s infinite offerings: snags, delays, bottlenecks, the growing anxiety of never arriving at what was always just out of reach.’
in The Pilot, social anxiety at a glitzy party leads a sober TV writer to down whiskies and adopt an embarrassing fake persona.
While in the brilliant More Abandon, an office worker re-arranges his colleagues’ desks, leaves a love confession on his married co-worker’s voicemail and naps on the floor in a darkly comic look at working life.