My short story diet this week has been An Elegy for Easterly, the debut collection by Petina Gappah, published last year and winner of the Guardian First Book Award. The thirteen stories, set in Gappah’s native Zimbabwe, are portraits of a foreign place full of familiar people.

The Zimbabwe of Ian Smith and Robert Mugabe is there in the background of these stories, a country in turmoil, plagued by hyperinflation, corrupt politicians and propaganda-filled newspapers, but these are tales about people, not politics. The stories are sad, angry and funny, focusing on sharply drawn characters and suffused with love for Zimbabwe and frustration at its failings.

It takes a couple of stories to get properly immersed in the atmosphere and emotional turbulence of the collection. The first, At the Sound of the Last Post, told from the point of view of a disillusioned wife at the funeral of her politician husband, is rather a cold opening, and the eponymous second story, dealing with one woman’s desperate need for a baby and the illicit pregnancy of the local madwoman, is perhaps one of the least subtle in the collection. But after this the stories rapidly become deeply moving, full of emotional truth that leaves you breathless.

The stunning endings of stories such as Something Nice From London, in which a family await the arrival of the body of their youngest son from England, and My Aunt Juliana’s Indian, about a the relationship between an Indian shopkeeper and his Zimbabwean employee during the struggle for independence in 1980, stick in the memory. These are stories with twists, but they are twists of feeling, of despair, of fate, rather than of plot.

Gappah’s prose is sparse and economical, pared down to almost the barest observational essentials. But the thoughts and dialogue of the characters are a lyrical hybrid of Zimbabwean Shona and English, making the words on the page dance with life.

It is often the world of African women that the stories inhabit: wives, mothers and daughters tied to husbands, sons and fathers by love, money, tradition or family history. The women in the stories are often trapped in positions of dependence: a maid in a wealthy household, a rich woman with a cheating husband, a student sectioned in a mental hospital. There seems little chance of escape from these confinements, but these women are resilient all the same. They recount stories, pass on traditions, tell jokes, laugh. The voices are angry but never bitter, humorous but never mocking. These are gentle stories full of hard themes, and they will stick around and mutter in your ear long after you’ve finished reading.

Emily

My regular stint on the Litro blog comes to an end this week, although I hope to chime in now and again with occasional pieces.  So for this last post I hope you’ll allow me the indulgence of talking about my favourite short fiction, and picking out five examples.

I guess the thing that appeals to me most in fiction is an emphasis on expressionism: the literary equivalent of (bear with me) the German Expressionist painters from the start of the twentieth century.  Those painters broke with realist ways of depicting subject matter so that they could better convey emotion.  Think of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.   It’s not a realistic depiction of a man screaming, but nor is it some kind of fantasy.  Munch has altered the way a screaming man would realistically look in order to try to convey a more realistic expression of a scream.  To try to say this is what a scream feels like using colour and shape.

My favourite kind of fiction is anything that does a similar thing, albeit with sentences and paragraphs instead of oil and canvas.  Prose that breaks with reality in order to address it in a way that can carry more emotional weight than straightforward realism, especially in the shorter form.  Just as expressionism in painting can take many shapes, so too can expressionism in literature.  I’m not trying to lump the following too closely together, but they all have this common: they break realism’s hard and fast rules to better convey human feeling.  There are so many brilliant examples I could pick, but these five seem like quite a balanced bunch, ranging from the light-hearted to the heavyweight literary classic.

1. Dan Rhodes – Don’t Tell Me The Truth About Love.  Although it wasn’t his first to be published, this is the first book that Dan Rhodes wrote.  It contains seven exquisite love stories, each altering reality to express more poignantly or more humorously the feelings of the lovers they concern.  A stand out story is The Violoncello, in which a man takes it upon himself to transform into a cello to be played by the hands of the woman he loves.
2. Stanley Donwood – Slowly Downward: A Collection of Miserable Stories.  Stanley Donwood is probably best known as Radiohead’s in-house artist and designer of their record sleeves, but he is also a writer of short stories.  You can read most of his work on his website, or order it there in print.  Be warned, this stuff is as dark as midnight on Friday 13^th, but it’s full of striking, nightmarish imagery that cuts straight to your spinal chord.  Fingers is a good place to start.
3. Jorge Luis Borges – The Book of Imaginary Beings.  There are several beautifully illustrated editions of this book that it would be worth investing in, but the words themselves will paint the brightest pictures.  Borges’ playfully academic style is the perfect medium for this tour-de-force of creatures drawn from the strange depths of human imagination.  You can fill a spare minute by opening it to a random page and reading about a weird and wonderful animal, or you can read the book in its entirety and immerse yourself in the monsters of humanity’s subconscious.  Either way Borges’ conviction is clear: these made-up animals are an important part of humanity’s expression of itself.  ‘Necessary monsters,’ he calls them.
4. Tim Burton – The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories.  This one is just plain fun (and it makes a good present if you’re ever stuck for an idea).  It’s a collection of simple, rhyming poems about children with magical and ghastly problems.   The Girl who Turned Into A Bed and Stick Boy and Match Girl in Love are two examples where the title says it all.  The book is as much about the accompanying cartoons as the poems, but set aside half an hour to read it in one sitting and you’ll be left with that glorious, pleasantly disturbed feeling unique to Tim Burton.
5. Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis and Other Stories.  What can I say about this?  Metamorphosis is the best short story I’ve ever read, and is justifiably as famous as it is.  But the Other Stories part of this collection is remarkable too.  I like dipping into the tiny pieces that make up Meditation and A Country Doctor (among these The Sudden Walk is a choice example, and Kafka in his less-publicised uplifting mode), but the dark masterpiece of the book is, for me, In The Penal Colony, in which a government inspector visits an isolated colony and is given a guided tour of the most elaborately grotesque execution contraption you’re ever likely to come across.   The sense of horror as the machine is described is compounded by the pride its operator feels in it.  So proud is this operator, in fact, that he is determined to demonstrate the machine’s virtues to the inspector, even if that means offering up his own body for a test run…   A perfect moment of expressionist literature – Kafka’s loathing of bureaucratic systems given mechanical form – but not for the faint-hearted.

I hope you enjoy checking out some of these short works if you decide to do so.  Likewise if you have any recommendations along these lines, please do post them below.

With that, it remains to thank you for reading this blog.  See you anon. 

Ali

Litro steps into the billiard room and brandishes the lead piping for its crime special this month, and it’s appropriate because in the last couple of weeks there have been a few allegations of that great literary crime: plagiarism.  I thought it might be interesting to round up some the culprits in this blog post, so here’s the suspect line-up for your own investigation.

The most widespread piece of news has been the case being brought against J K Rowling by the estate of the late author of Willy the Wizard.  It’s the latest and possibly most absurd in an occasional series of claims that the Harry Potter books have taken scenes or concepts from other books in the teenage witch/wizard genre.  In my opinion the case doesn’t have much to stand on.  All of that genre fantasy stuff is so widely used that nobody can claim they invented any of it (including J K Rowling).  The only people who might be able to bring a successful case of plagiarism on these grounds are Merlin, King Arthur, and perhaps the ghost of JRR Tolkien.

A more complicated case from this month is that of Helene Hegemann, a seventeen-year-old debut author from Berlin, whose has been accused of lifting entire chunks of other authors’ work to include them in her novel Axolotl Roadkill.  Hegemann’s defence is that she was carrying out the literary equivalent of musical sampling, and that she belongs to a generation who do this consistently.  In that case she should probably have written her novel under the name of Hegemann feat. and then a list of the authors of these samples, but when you think about it her argument does have some strength.  Is there really so much difference between mashing up the out-of-copyright works of a literary heavyweight with your own prose (see Pride and Prejudice with Zombies) and mixing a contemporary’s writing with your own for artistic effect?  Although the question of openness remains, the act itself is technically the same.  Interestingly, Hegemann does include a kind of equivalent to the sampler’s feat. in her novel itself, she just leaves out the name of the person she’s sampling (although new editions will include it).  This from one of her characters:

“I help myself wherever I find inspiration and ideas: Films, music, books, paintings, poetry about sausages, photos, conversations, dreams … Light and shadow, precisely because my work and my theft become authentic the moment something touches my soul. Who cares where I get things from? All that matters is what I do with them.”

It’s possible that Hegemann has touched there on an inherent conflict between creativity and things like structure, order, legality, etc.  Another interesting plagiarism story comes from the tail end of last year, where software developed to enforce the legality of authorship – specifically to spot plagiarism in the essays of students – helped unexpectedly to uncover the authors of a sixteenth century play.  The software checks the text for signature turns of phrase and grammatical style, and is able to then compare these characteristics with the stylistic fingerprints of multiple authors.  In the case of the play, The Reign of Edward III, one of these fingerprints turned out to be that of none other than William Shakespeare.

Speaking of Bill Shakespeare, Robert McCrum recently wrote a very interesting article for the Observer that highlighted how the world’s most famous author cribbed from all over the place.  A fellow called Robert Greene laid out the accusations in a 1593 pamphlet, fantastically titled A Groat’s-worth of Wit Bought With A Million of Repentance.

Perhaps it would be interesting to know whether the software found Shakespeare guilty of some of these crimes.  Perhaps Axolotl Roadkill should be run through that software.  Perhaps all new fiction should be checked in that manner.  But that would of course create a horribly suspicious atmosphere in the publishing industry, which would do no one any good at all.  The fact is that authors are professional liars, trying to make us believe that fiction is fact.  And that’s a great thing.  If we start holding them to account over issues of truth-telling we run the risk of destroying their output.

I hope Robert McCrum wouldn’t consider it plagiarism to end this post with the last few paragraphs of his article (but do go and read the preceding paragraphs here).  He concludes far better than I ever could, with a mention David Shields’ Reality Hunger.

“Bestselling writer David Shields has just published Reality Hunger, a passionate, ultra-hip manifesto on behalf of what he calls “appropriation art” in contemporary music, design and literature. Shields has several thrusts against copyright law which, he says, has protected “the creative property of artists”, but obstructed “the natural evolution of human creativity”.

He writes approvingly of the music business, in which “you steal somebody else’s beat, then – with just turntables and your mouth – you mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at”.

Stripped of its excitable rhetoric, Reality Hunger is really a cool restatement of “anything goes”, literature’s oldest, and most golden, rule. Whatever medium you choose, it’s still as difficult as ever to be truly original.”

Ali

For the last two years, the Lazy Gramophone collective have been collaborating on this combination of writing and artwork that shares Litro’s ethos: the championing of short fiction, poetry, and images – bitesize works full of flavour.  This is The Book of Apertures, compiled under the theme of the unexplainable.  As the blurb on the back cover puts it, “As children particularly, we have all used our imaginations to conjure up explanations for the things that we didn’t quite understand, and so, in creating this book, the writers and artists were asked little more than to develop this idea.”

Indeed, many of the stories in this book can be best described as resembling children’s drawings.  That isn’t to say that they lack sophistication, but that they feel unfettered and are full of bright lines and novel shapes.  There’s a dreamlike feel to everything in here.  For example, Terra Quod Mare by Stacie Withers is the tale of a girl transforming slowly into an island, while Sam Rawlings’ Upon The Burrator Valley Floor is a treatise on the customs and behaviour of a race of intelligent creatures no bigger than ants.  The rest of the works are as diverse a collection as you would expect from the let-loose imaginations of fourteen different human beings.  Sure, the range of styles and subjects will mean that not everything is to everybody’s taste, but keep an open mind and most readers should find something to intrigue them in The Book of Apertures.

The stand-out stories for me were Abby Stokes Is Going To Die by Charlie Cottrell and State Jam by P X Amphlett.  Cottrell’s story is a neat exchange of dialogue between the titular Abby and an unconventional grim reaper come to collect her soul.  The reason for this exchange is thanks to a brilliantly funny moment on the second page, but I’d spoil the joke for you if I told you what it was.  Suffice to say that the story is a touching look at ordinary human feelings, and is funny without satirising its characters. 

State Jam seemed to me the most sophisticated piece in the collection, both in terms of concept and quality of writing.  It has a shade of the science fiction of Philip K Dick or J G Ballard about it, gritty, hard-boiled and brimming with ideas.  Its premise is that the music industry has discovered a means to make music heard inside people’s heads: “Your favourite tunes, direct into your auditory centres: ‘Loud as you want, and no hearing damage!’ went the ads.”  Unfortunately, the government has got involved with this new technology, censoring certain kinds of music that it deems unhealthy to be played on-loop direct to the brain.  The story that ensues from the premise manages to be at once lightning-paced and lucid as it outlines the details of the conceit.  Amid all this, Amphlett finds the time to pack in vivid description and some great sentences, and I’m looking forward to whatever he writes next.

The artwork in the book is just as diverse as the writing.  Some of it is illustrative, other parts just thematically similar.  It’s hard to convey what art is like with words, so I’d urge you to simply pick up a copy of the book when it comes out and take a look.  Highlights are Dan Prescott’s illustrations for Matt Black’s The Magpie King (picture a gnarled, leafless tree above which flies a sphere of silhouetted birds, so that together their shapes make up the missing foliage of the tree) and Tom Harris’ picture at the end of Joanne Tedds’ The Apple Tree (another tree picture, splendidly composed – on the right hand side of the page, at the foot of a bare tree trunk, a man squats with his head in his hands.  As the trunk rises it bends to the left and droops its branches to form an arch above and to either side of the man.  From the lowest of these branches – the ones that scrape the floor to the man’s left – an apple grows, as if the tree itself is offering it up to him).

I could go on, but hopefully you by now have a sense of the range of material packed into this volume.  In a time when publishers are taking fewer and fewer risks on unknown writers, Lazy Gramophone are to be applauded for giving their collective a chance to shine.  I’d recommend grabbing a copy when it comes out on April 5^th.

Ali