SHORT STORIES
EITHNE FARRY
WORLDS FROM THE WORD’S END by Joanna Walsh (And Other Stories £8.99)
JOANNA WALSH’S stories are playful and perplexing, delighting in wordplay and sly little puns, but are sometimes so enigmatic that it’s difficult to glean their meaning.
The opening story, Two, in which a woman spruces up a paired object, in order to let it go, and wonders what her ‘arms, stretched from encircling them for so long, will do without them’, is elliptical and mysterious.
So is the never-named, ever- diminishing cargo in Travelling Light, which begins the journey ‘too bulky to carry on the Eurostar’, but ends up a speck in a hotel’s ashtray.
Unsettling and often strange, these stories hint at impending doom — none more so than the titular tale, where communication is out of fashion, words are in terminal decline and speech has been replaced by an ominous ‘new silence’.
A LIFE OF ADVENTURE AND DELIGHT by Akhil Sharma
(Faber £12.99) THE characters in Akhil Sharma’s wonderful, melancholy, funny collection of short stories are floundering: lost, lonely, at the mercy of their own emotions and their experiences of a world that is difficult to read and open to misinterpretation.
Caught between cultures, and an awkward mixture of arrogance and vulnerability, they attempt to negotiate a way through, their soft corners continually caught on the sharp edges of reality.
In Surrounded By Sleep, Ajay, whose brother Birju is brain-damaged following an accident in a swimming pool, half-heartedly prays for him, but mostly escapes into fantasy novels, although slowly he comes to realise ‘that the world was always real . . . and that it eroded you every day’.
In Cosmopolitan, divorced Gopal attempts to glean seduction tips from a glossy women’s magazine to woo a disconcertingly honest neighbour. Yet it is sadly Anita, in If You Sing Like That For Me, who understands that the limitations of her arranged marriage mean the end of her dreams.
BASKET OF DEPLORABLES by Tom Rachman
(Riverrun £8.99) TOM RACHMAN paints the post- truth world in broad brushstrokes in these five loosely connected stories. Opening at a Manhattan party on election night with a gathering of liberal media types eating expensive canapes and cheerleading Hillary Clinton, he skewers their expectations of victory and reveals the dark secret that the hosts have hidden for years.
This very much sets the tone for the rest of the collection: spry observations of (mostly) larger-than-life characters who represent the angry, bewildered citizens of a divided America, embodied in the warring Pilczuk brothers — Glen, who works in Starbucks, loves acting and reluctantly organises a memorial service for his criminal brother Fleming, whose nefarious activities were revealed by a massive data breach, where hackers ‘downloaded each personal message ever archived, posting the whole lot online’.
This makes dating an impossibly fraught enterprise, as revealed in Leakzilla, where everything is knowable and incriminating.