SHORT STORIES
EITHNE FARRY
YOUR DUCK IS MY DUCK
by Deborah Eisenberg (Europa £12.99, 240 pp)
The characters in Deborah eisenberg’s complex, compelling, subtle short stories inhabit a disintegrating world. There’s old age to contend with, fractured families, faltering relationships and a fierce fear for the planet where all this miscommunication and disconnection takes place.
In the titular story an insomniac artist, who’s the guest of rich couple ray and Christa, says: ‘It’s not so hard to figure out why I’m not sleeping. What I can’t figure out is why everybody else is sleeping’, a telling observation as she watches a marriage implode and ‘ravenous flames devouring ray’s eucalyptus, where there once had been small farms and living crops’. It’s smart, spikey and funny, shot with a persistent pessimism that sets the tone for the other stories.
In Cross Off And Move On, the much put-upon narrator deals with her mother whose difficult life and constant ‘gloating, doleful predictions’ provide an uncomfortable reminder of all that’s expected of her daughter.
While in the final story, the lovely, melancholy recalculating, a nephew discovers the truth about his uncle, ‘a secret person . . . who had just slipped right out of the family picture’, leaving behind the ‘uniform sunlight’ of the American West, where ‘it pleased God to monitor your soul for any fleck’, for the shadow and dazzle of europe and a different, fulfilling way of life.
FLY ALREADY
by Etgar Keret (Granta, £12.99, 224 pp) There are 22 stories in the enthusiastic Fly Already, translated from the original Israeli, an antic, anarchic collection that pitches yearning, bumbling, bamboozled characters into situations where salient life lessons are difficult to come by.
Bizarre events happen — but, with no handy moral attached, the characters are forced to fall back on a breezy, matter-of-fact acceptance of the inexplicable nature of their worlds. In To The Moon And Back, a beleaguered dad’s trip to the candy store with his small son turns sweetly farcical when the child demands the shop’s cash register as a gift and ends with the line ‘there’s nothing nicer in this stinking world than the sound of a kid laughing’.
In Ladder, a vaguely discontented and very bored angel tries to come to terms with heavenly serenity, all the while longing for more mortal pleasures: ‘the smell of sweat, of fresh laundry ...the sweet, scorched smell of cake left in the oven too long; the smell of something’.