LITERARY FICTION
FOX 8 by George Saunders
(Bloomsbury £9.99, 64 pp) FIRST published in 2013, George Saunders’s short story about a talking fox was, until recently, available free online. Now, with sleigh bells (and cash tills) ringing, it’s being re-released as an illustrated hardback to trade on the American author’s newfound recognition after winning last year’s Man Booker for Lincoln In The Bardo, his ghost story about Abraham Lincoln’s son.
Another high-concept tearjerker, Fox 8 is narrated by a fox who amazes his peers by learning the ‘Yuman’ language.
Things go wrong for him when, witnessing our capacity for thoughtless destruction and cruel violence, he learns a bitter truth about humankind, to whom the fox directs his mournful tale.
It tugs the heartstrings, yet I can’t help feeling that the gimmicky phonetics (‘one nite I herd something that made me think twise’) work overtime to keep this treacly parable the right side of trivial.
Not for nothing did Saunders omit it from his celebrated collection Tenth Of December.
E.E.G. by Dasa Drndic
(MacLehose £14.99, 400 pp) A NIGHTMARISH excavation of 20th-century bloodshed, the novels of Croatian writer Dasa Drndic — who died this year aged 71 — make tough reading in more ways than one.
Like her previous book, Belladonna, E.E.G. follows Andreas, a Croatian psychologist still crossing Europe while meditating on World War II and its aftershocks in the Baltic and the Balkans, ravaged by the Soviets as well as the Nazis.
His brutally relentless monologue digs into his family history while circling the question of how far occupying forces were aided by collaborators, or ‘spinelessly loyal humanoid lice’, as he says in one typically caustic phrase.
Sometimes, the rancour can be blackly funny, but overall, the book is deliberately comfortless, the effect of Dasa Drndic’s narrative style, a little like overdosing on Wikipedia.
Pelting us with a blizzard of real-life atrocities, it almost dares you to zone out, which perhaps only goes to show — with wicked neatness — how such horrors might occur in the first place.
THE LITTLE SNAKE by A.L. Kennedy (Canongate £9.99, 144 pp)
ANOTHER teeny-tiny hardback eyeing its way into this year’s Christmas stockings is this playful novella-length homage to Antoine de SaintExupery’s classic 1943 French fable The Little Prince.
Set in the present, in a never-named city of extreme wealth and poverty, A.L. Kennedy’s reboot features a shapeshifting snake, Lanmo, who befriends schoolgirl Mary.
When he’s not looking out for her by transforming into a skipping rope to teach playground bullies a lesson, he’s roaming the planet as a kind of freedomfighting Jolly Reaper, sinking his fangs into a cruel millionaire tycoon and a rabble-rousing autocrat.
As Lanmo watches Mary grow up and fall in love, Kennedy’s fable skips lightly across some fairly daunting terrain, from social inequality to the inevitability of death.
Sweet, sad, but always a hairsbreadth away from whimsy, it’s told in a soothing tone that, for better or worse, makes you feel as if you’re sitting cross-legged on a classroom carpet.