The Scattering -A Collection of Short Stories by Jaki McCarrick - A Post in Observation of Irish Short Story Month

The Scattering - A Collection of Short Stories by Jaki McCarrick (2013, 235 pages)

March 1 to March 31

Jaki McCarrick

Dundalk

Posting on a collection of short stories presents more of a challenge, to me at least, than posting on a novel.    For me I find the best way to write about a collection of short stories, both in terms of assisting  possible readers or buyers of the collection and respecting the writer, is by  posting in some detail on a representative number of the stories and then make some general observations on the collection and offer my thoughts to prospective readers.

  For those in a hurry, I will say The Scattering - A Collection of Short Stories by Jaki McCarrick is an amazing body of work, withing shimmering and incredibly entertaining stories that go deep into the heart of many of the issues facing contemporary Ireland.  This book deserves tremendous success and a very wide readership.  It both confirms and rises above the common elements of the Irish short story I have spoken about this month;; the weak or missing father, the presence of the stage Irishmen, the uneasiness of the relationships of men and women,  the heavy reliance on alcohol, the temptation toward arrogance as a way of dealing with the humiliating consequences of colonialism, the obsession with death, and the false rebellions of posers of all sorts.  

"By The Black Field"

"There were times when Angel thought that the land
communicated with him. He knew that this was irrational, and
probably due to overwork, and to the fact that he had not yet lost
his city-born infatuation with green fields (and also, possibly,
because he’d spent his childhood summers in this place and had
fond and lively memories of it). He imagined that after a few
more years on the farm he’d be as hard nosed towards the land
as every other farmer he knew. Still, he could not dispel the sense
he had that wherever he went on his six acres he was not alone."

"By The Black Field", the lead story, gets this collection of to a marvelous start.  It is set on a six acre farm in Ireland, up near the border with Northern Ireland.  Angel not to long ago inherited the farm and he and his wife not to long ago moved back there from London. Angel loves working the farm but he misses the excitement of London and his wife misses it more than he does.    As the story opens he is building a fence on some wet land and he is thinking maybe he should have built a stone wall.  He and his wife live in an old cottage but all their neighbors live in modern houses.  This is a story, in an oblique way of how a returning exile feels a deeper connection with Ireland than those who never left.  (You can see this some of the better short stories of George Moore also.)  Like any short story  master McCarrick gets us interested in the people in the story (there is something different about them and I loved how this was slipped into the story so subtly), we learn a bit about their life history, a sort of conflict with a neighbor the man does not like, she reminds him of the things he does not like about London, then something big happens. We are left with a mystery as to exactly what did occur but that just makes the story all the better.  "By The Black Field" is a wonderful story, it also give you a kind of feel for what can be the darker side of Ireland, never far from the surface.  Death has been my constant companion this month as I read Irish Short Stories and he is with me today.  I do not mind him so much as I once did.  

"The Badminton Court"

"She says little at breakfast. The evening before she had been
on fire. Rapid, erratic thoughts, unfinished sentences, sentences
that unravelled, ending in lacunae, gibberish. She had been
rude, her inhibitors obstructed by that thing, growing,
multiplying inside her. Tumour talk, Frances calls it."

"The Badminton Court" is a very moving story about a debt repaid through service to seventeen year old Miranda, dying of a brain tumor. It is a story of the memories of twenty two years ago when the narrator never dreamed these would be her happiest times.  Her father is rich and always away on business trips an her mother is simply gone and no one ever speaks of her.  There are two people taking care of Miranda.  One is Francis, a household servant of long standing and the other is the daughter of a man who was in debt to Miranda's father for some dubious business deals and somehow the debt is being paid by his adult daughter being Miranda's final companion.  This is a tale which can only end one way or another in death.  It is also about how happiness comes often from small seized moments of joy as shown in these wonderful lines spoken twenty years after an amazing act of kindness and cruelty is committed.  We never quite know why but that works perfectly.

"Once he asked if I was happy. Before I had the chance to
reply, he said his own life had been good and prosperous, but
hardly happy. Mine was the same, I said. What is happiness? he
asked, as if I knew any better than he. I pondered on this. For
me, I said, happiness is two girls playing badminton under an
azure sky with clouds that are bird-shaped. Those summers
were best, he replied, when I used to watch you play. It occurred
to me then, that for nearly a quarter of a century we had both
been sustained by a few intoxicating memories squirrelled from
our youth. I told him it was high time we lived a little. He agreed
and told me then of his plans to flatten the court."

"The Scattering" 

"Further along the beach he saw a car parked above the dunes.
A woman was standing by the edge of the dunes looking at the
sea. She was holding a blue plastic bag tensely against her
cream coat. He thought of turning back as he was now alone
on this stretch and did not want to alarm the woman, who had
begun her descent to the beach. Suddenly a dog came
bounding towards him. He had seen the exuberant three-legged
collie on the beach many times, always alone, absurdly oblivious
to its missing limb."

"The Scattering", the title story of the collection, like the two prior stories I have posted on have death at its core.  The "plot action", not a phrase I am crazy for, is fairly simple. A man has died and following his wishes his ashes have been scattered in the ocean.  A quick look at images of the Ireland seacoast in Google will reveal lots of dramatic sea shore cliffs that would make an excellent venue from which to scatter ashes in the water.  I suspect this is what often leads to the request.  Maybe it also the fulfillment of a wish while living, to throw oneself in the water.  It is the story of contrasts of two scatterings, one with a large respectable number of people and one with just a woman with a blue plastic jug and a three legged dog for her company.  There is a great deal in this work and I hope you will be able to read it for yourself.  


"The Burning Woman"

"Despite his name, Quigley claimed
no Irish heritage, and John’s Irishness was meaningless to him
as he had left Limerick at fourteen and had never returned. To
find as neighbours two young Irish ‘artists’, was, John told me
later, an enormous relief to him. We gave him hope, he said, that
a gay man with no interest in hurling, in Leinster vs Munster, or
the Irish language, might be able to go home one day without
fear of being strung up. On the basis of our mutual disregard for
any particular nationalism, we four formed a strong friendship,
avoiding Irish haunts in London like the plague despite his name."

I really liked this story.  It begins with an invitation to a funeral.   Sometimes people say they going to someone's funeral means you won and they lost.   The deceased is an artist, from Ireland who moved to London in a time when he had no way to make a living in Ireland.  He made it big time as a painter, living out the dream of the crazy artist, his description makes it seem he looked a bit like Aleister Crowley.  There is just so much to like in this story.  In the figure of the man, who they have not seen or heard from in decades, John, we have the crusty embittered writer raging at the world for its failure to see his genius.  We also have occult elements, pentagrams, paintings of burning women and such.  I do not have a way to talk about what happens in this story without trivializing it so I won't.  It is about exile, about wanting to forget your are Irish, about why Jack Kerouac still matters, about what London means to the Irish, about failure of nerve.  In this  story I came to see the full power of McCarrick, it is deeper, danker and darker than the first three works I spoke about. 

"Blood"

"What are you researching, Lara?’ he asked.
‘Oh. Settlers to this area in the fifteenth century.’
‘From Britain?’
‘No,’ Lara replied, scanning the huge ivory pages. As she did
not elaborate, and as he was afraid to enquire further, Fred
turned to his wastepaper basket and began to sharpen his
pencils. The room seemed to fill with small, intrusive noises:
the trembling chalky sound of the ivory pages being turned, the
pencil shavings hitting the screwed-up balls of paper like rain,
the swish of Lara’s dress each time she moved, her assured slow
breathing."

Like "The Burning Woman", "Blood is in part about an Irish writer.   I have come to see this as kind of a license for eccentric behavior sometimes accompanied by the arrogance mentioned above, almost as if it were on loan from W. B. Yeats and James Joyce to name but a few exemplars.  

One of the characteristics of a society in which the old certainties are dying is a preoccupation with non-standard accounts of history,  occult systems.   One saw this in Ireland when for a time leading figures flirted with the theories of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Waite Tarot and such.  Knowledge of arcane systems brought with it a feeling of superiority a smugness made all the more annoying as it was parasitic upon the backs, the blood of others for whom they claimed to speak but for whom they had contempt.  There are two on stage characters in "Blood" a simply marvelous, very smart, very funny story that helps explain why vampires are central to Irish culture and why they always seem to be so elitist acting (Carmilla this means you.)  We have Fred, he is a 30 year old who has never done anything but go to school.  His aunt is a world famous researcher into middle Eastern culture  and is often away at international conferences.  She has an incontinent cat and in exchange for taking care of the cat, he gets to live in her mansion.   The mansion contains a library of rare books and manuscripts and Lara has a letter authorizing her to use the library.  She is also female, something Fred has had no personal knowledge of for six years and sees as way to complicated a topic.   He will stick with academia.   Besides the cat, they are the only ones in the mansion so of course they talk.   I want you to read this story (and the whole collection) without it being spoiled for you.   I will just say it is flat out hilarious and you will marvel at the close.  

"Trumpet City"

"There was a danger to what he could smell in the
music, and he liked that. He liked that a lot."

I have recently started reading, after hearing it was chosen as the One City One Book selection for April James Plunket's classic novel set in Ireland in 1913, Strumpet City and I am betting this title is a play on that account of the mean streets of old Dublin.

The crazy musician seeing more in the world than the mundane people of the world do is a standard character in lots if novels and short stories.   This story does a great job with that idea.   The trumpet player dreams of playing in New York City or New Orleans, the holy cities for jazz music.  I believed in his love of music.  The story is also about the changing times in Ireland, the hard times where it is not easy for an aging musician to make a living.   A very good story.   

"The Hemingway  Papers"

"She felt it would be
like reminding him of his enormous failure as a father. That
he’d neither seen to the removal of their furniture from London
to Ireland – nor to the transportation of his own things, that
he’d hung back in London while her mother had reared her and
her siblings alone and that he’d only holed up with them years
later when he’d run out of money. That was the truth of it and
Clare knew that somewhere inside her father, he knew it. But
there was no point in going through all of that again. They had
rowed about it for too many years – about his drinking"

"The Hemingway Papers" is a very good story and almost a text book illustration of the extreme importance of the weak or missing father to Irish literature.  It also is about a man who hid behind drinking and his ability to be a good friend to other men, if not a good husband or father.  Story telling, whether real stories or made up lies also is a big factor in the Irish short story.  Another one is the complications involved in the relationships of adult children to their parents.  In this story the father is in a hospital ward.  For thirty years now he has been claiming he had an extensive correspondence with Ernest Hemingway.  He  had sent Hemingway a number of short stories to read and he had told the father to submit them to his publisher and he will try to help him.  Of course the man never followed up on it and he always told the family he left the letters and stories in a box in an apartment he illegally sublet to somebody when he lived in London.   The daughter somehow tracks down the man who now has the box and she brings it back (spoiler alert) and yes the father was actually telling the truth all those years.  The big story of his life was true. The ending is very suspenseful and I will let you have the pleasure of reading it yourself.

I totally endorse this very Irish collection of short stories with themes that are universal and people that those far from Ireland can see as totally real.

There are eleven  other marvelous stories in this collection, each one a delight to read.   



I want to share the description of the book from Seren Books, the publisher of this and lots of other great books.

The Scattering is a collection of 18 stories, many set on the Irish border, where this London-born author currently lives. These stories explore states of liminality: life on the Irish border, dual identities, emigration, being between states - certainty and doubt, codependency and freedom. Some explore themes of catastrophe and constraint. All explore what it means to be alive in a fraught and ever-changing world. This first collection from prizewinning author and playwright, Jaki McCarrick explores the dark side of human nature, often with a postmodern ‘Ulster gothic’ twist.

One of the stories ‘The Visit’ won the Wasafiri Prize for new fiction, and many have been published to much acclaim in literary magazines.

Author Bio

Jaki McCarrick

Jaki McCarrick lives in Dundalk and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, gaining a Master of Philosophy Degree, Creative Writing – Distinction. Before this Jaki gained a BA Performing Arts, First Class Honours Degree at Middlesex University. She has also completed an RNT Directors Course, 2001.

Jaki is a playwright and short story writer who is also working on a novel. She has won many awards for her work including: Winner of the 2005 SCDA National Playwriting Competition for The Mushroom Pickers; Shortlisted for the Sphinx Playwriting Award 2006, Bruntwood Prize 2006, Kings Cross Award 2007 for The Moth-Hour; Shortlisted for the 2009 Adrienne Benham Award for Leopoldville and the 2009 Asham Award for short fiction for The Congo – in this collection. Most recently her short story The Visit, included in the Badlands collection, won the Wasafiri Prize for New Writing in October 2010 and Jaki was declared the first ever winner of the Liverpool Lennon Paper Poetry competition, which she was awarded by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Another story from the collection, Hellbores, was recently shortlisted for both the Fish Short Story award and Bridge House Publishing's World Stopping Event writing prize. Bridge House want to publish that story in a new anthology and it has also appeared in the Irish Pages journal.

Jaki McCarrick's blog jakiscloudnine.blogspot.ie

I hope to read and post on more of her work in the future.  She has kindly agreed to participate in a Q and A Session for Irish Short Story Month so please look for that.

Mel u

Pelt and Other Stories by Catherine McNamara (2013)

World wide health issues have halted most global travel plans.  In the marvelous stories of Catherine McNamara we can continue our journeys, in great company.  

Website of Aussie Reads 2020

Gateway to Catherine McNamara on The Reading Life.  Including a very wide ranging Q and A Session 

Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney and studied visual communication and African and Asian Modern History before moving to Paris.

She worked in an embassy in pre-war Mogadishu and later lived in Accra, Ghana, where she co-managed a bar and art gallery. She moved to Italy ten years ago, where her jobs have included translating welding manuals and modelling shoes.

Catherine is the author of the erotic comedy The Divorced Lady’s Companion to Living in Italy (Indigo Dreams Publishing) and wrote the children’s book Nii Kwei’s Day (Frances Lincoln Publishing).

Pelt and Other Stories was a semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize 2011.

Posting on a collection of short stories is to me more challenging than posting on a novel.   Pelt and Other Stories by Catherine McNamara, her debut collection, is a very powerful, thoroughly captivating collection of stories most of which center on the post colonial world of central coastal West Africa. The  subtlies and levels of irony in these stories show a very great insight into how cross cultural encounters impact all parties.  The people in the stories range from European hotel owners in Ghana, famous art photographers, mistresses of Europeans, drivers, and village people.   The stories are mostly but not all set in West Africa.  One is set in the very worldly city of Sydney, some in Italy.   The stories are about 

relationships, McNamara knows white men can do things in West Africa that they cannot or will not

do back home.   The stories are miniature marvels in showing us the manifestation of orientalizing of the African not just by Europeans and Americans but by returned citizens.  The stories show us how hard it is to return home unchanged.   These stories are not about ignorant hateful prejudice.   McNamara is too knowing and intelligent for that.  They are about the very great difficulties of escaping from our deep conditioning, our unseen frames of reference.   The stories are also fun to read.  Lots of interesting things happen, there is some sex, women eyeballing each other, and a strong sense of humor and fun.  

I totally endorse this collection of short stories to all lovers of the form.  There are eighteen very diverse stories in the collection. I will talk briefly about several of them to help give potential readers a feel for the collection and help me increase my understanding of the stories.  I also include a few quotes so you can sample her marvelous prose.

"Pelt"

"Other girls say the same thing about their obroni men: when their old wives turn up they become little boys."

Set in Ghana, the title and lead story of Pelt and Other Stories, is told in the first person by a woman who progressed from working for a white man, an obroni, to being his mistress pregnant with his baby.   She lives in his house.  Up until now his wife has not been there for a long time.  The power in this story is in seeing how the local woman relates to the wife.  She knows the woman at least suspects her relationship with the man.   She is self conscious about her pregnancy.  When she notices the wife looking at her bloated breasts, she wants to tell her how her husband liked sucking on them.   She also knows the other women who work in the house will see she has fallen down in status now that the wife is on the scene.  There is a world in these magnificent lines:

"One of the girls – Comfort – asks me with a giggle what is to be prepared for lunch. Their assumption is that the real Madam has turned up, and I am just another hussy-made-good carrying a milky baby. No doubt this will be the speculation of the day".

There is much in this story that illuminates the sexual aspects of colonialism.  

"The Coptic Bride" 

"My mother adored Laila. Halfway through the afternoon she called to anoint me with her unqualified joy. I suspected it was hardly Laila she adored, but the prospect of a brown daughter-in-law and exotic grandchildren requiring the occasional visit to New York. Mother,"

Set in Sydney, Austraila, one of the world's most cosmopolitan of cities, a long absent son has just returned from Ethiopia with an Ethiopan fiancé, a Coptic bride to be.   Everyone in this very educated family is curious about her.   They discretely scrutinize and analyse her appearance and try to discern why the brother likes her. The story is really about orientalizing those different from us.  

"The Clock Tower"

"There was an answering service with the message in English, in Flemish and then in French, as was the way in this city. The English message said: Hello, you’ve reached Toby Vlaminck but I’ve taken off again. I’ll be in Ghana until November so I guess it’s not worth leaving a message unless it’s October twenty-something. Oh, and Didier’s still with M.S.F. in Rwanda"

"The Clock Tower" is a very interesting, closely observed story about how a too young to have this happen man adjusts when his wife and young son did of cancer within a three week period.   The man is acutely self-aware and is fascinating to follow his stream of consciousness.  

"Claudia Cardiales Flesh Colored Lips"

"Marina came in when he was eating grapes in front of an old Claudia Cardinale film. Unannounced, since last weekend had ended in a cloud of mutual, unrepenting bad will. Sebastien Tempels wanted to hear how she would get around it.

‘Her breasts look like a pair of Tupperware containers,’ she said as she tossed her bag."

I like this opening line as I see it as the sort of thing my wife would say if she walked in on me watching a Claudia Cardinale movie. I think younger readers not into Italian cinema may not know who she is so a pic is needed (OK I want a pic of her on my blog)

The story line of this well plotted work concerns the relationship of a medical student and his girl friend.it is a very subtle account of a complicated fragile reationship.

"Nathalie"

"But outside Nathalie looked so much older. The lines Mona had never noticed on her face had become grave and hard. Her eyelids were fallen, discoloured furrows below them, and the cheeks were those of a gaunt woman whose good health had been stolen. Mona was silent. Everything had been taken from them. This was the day that would never pass."

"Narhalie", like several of the other stories in the collection, centers on a person returning to their ancestral home after a long absence.  In the "The Coptic Bride" the city was Sydney, here it is Lome, the capital of and largest city in Togo.   Returning home is not easy.  It is often fraught with guilt, a struggle to return to old relationships with parents, siblings, and old friends.  Often people leave as one person and return as another seemingly more worldly and sophisticated idividual.  Things are not as they once were and maybe never will be.  These themes are very skillfully developed in this story.  I do not wish to spoil the plot of this story.  The close is very moving. 

"Gorgeous  Eyes"   

"I turn the book around to her. In her grasp it falls open on the page of a young Somali bride, modestly dressed, surrounded by pugnacious sisters.

‘Do you see?’ I say. ‘This book is a glossy celebration of Africa’s cruelty. That woman is about to be raped by her fifty-year-old groom. She has been circumcised by those women surrounding her. She will know pain for the rest of her life.’

My wife looks at me with horror. She shuts the book."

"Gorgeous Eyes" is narrated by the owner of a hotel on the west coast of Africa.    One of the dominant themes of the collection is about European spectatorship of Africa.   It is also about returning Africans trying to see their culture through the eyes of Europe.   This story is a brilliant account of orientalizing, of turning people into art objects.  As the story opens a well known "art" photographer arrives at the hotel.   She is there to take pictures of tribal people for high end coffee table books.  The portrayal of the photographer is very subtle.   We wonder about her intentions.   Is she a kind of parasite or is she a great artist cherishing a dying culture or is she both?   There are some very interesting plot turns in this powerful story. 

""innocent"

         "Innocent" is about a chauffeur of that name.   He works for an expat woman.   The story is set in in Sefwi Awiaso, Ghana.   In just a few pages we are shown how the driver is infantilized by his

employer, as if his biggest desire in life is to have a new pair of Peter Fonda sunglasses every year.

He has gotten a woman in his home village pregnant and his boss tells him to marry her.   The girl is 

sixteen.   She took an herbal drink that is reputed to cause a miscarriage but it did not work.  

Innocent fears if he does not marry the girl, her father will kill him.  The interest in this very

subtle story is in seeing the patronizing way Innocent is treated by his employer.  

I greatly enjoyed this collection and I recommend it without reservation.  I hope to read more of 

Authors work soon.

Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney, ran away to Paris to write, and ended up in West Africa running a bar. She was an embassy secretary in pre-war Mogadishu, and has worked as an au pair, graphic designer, gallery manager, teacher, translator and shoe model. 

Praised by Hilary Mantel, her short story collection The Cartography of Others (May 2018, Unbound) was a Finalist in the People’s Book Prize 2019-20, was awarded Grand Prize in the Eyelands International Book Awards (Greece) and listed on the Literary Sofa’s Best of 2018 Reads. Her book Pelt and Other Stories (2013) was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Award and semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize. Her short stories and flash fiction have been Pushcart-nominated and published widely in the U.K., Europe, U.S.A. and Australia. Her flash fiction collection Love Stories for Hectic People is out in autumn 2020. 

Catherine speaks Italian and French and lives in Veneto, Italy, where she hosts summer retreats for writers and artists in her African-art-filled farmhouse. She is an online writing mentor and coach

Author's  blog

Mel u

Midwife to the Fairies New and Selected Stories by Eilis Ni Dhuibhe (2003, 12 short stories)

Eilis Ni Dhuibhne (1954, Dublin) is one of the recognized masters of the contemporary short story.  I have previously posted on two her novels and several of her short stories.  She is a highly regarded academic folklorist and ancient myths often structure her stories.  This is a delightful collection and might be a good place to start reading her.  

There is not a bad story in the collection.  The most famous one is the title story.  The most darkly humorous story was "Fulfillment", about a dog killer.  Her stories flip back and forth in time brilliantly

She deals very much with lives of women, their internal conflicts. 

I have another of her short story collections Inland Ice and will start on it soon.  

Mel u

Dark Lies The Island by Kevin Barry (2012, 185 pages, 13 short stories)

Kevin Barry is a major fast rising star in the Irish contemporary literary constellation.   His novel, City of
Bohane, (Limerick) recently won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.   In the 80 Q and A sessions I have done with Irish writers many said that Kevin Barry was one of the very best contemporary short story writers.    I have previously read and posted on two stories from this collection, "Fjord of Killary" and "Beer Trip to Llandudno", both of which I greatly enjoyed.  

Many of these stories are very dark indeed.    One of, it seems to me, characteristics of a lot of the Irish works I have read is that they dwell on the limitations our circumstances put on our hopes.   With Bloomsday  approaching fast, it seems the melancholy of The Dubliners casts a very long shadow over Irish writers.   It may also instead be that the stories in The Dubliners are simply brilliant articulations of the national psyche.   

Several of these stories present horrible events and terrible people.  We meet two old ladies who snatch babies in one amazing story with as savage an ending as I have seen in a while. We see a mentally challenged person assaulted.    There is a lot of drinking.   Barry's prose is wonderful and his sense of place is very powerful.  

I greatly enjoyed this collection.  I must note with disappointment that some of the pages in this Vintage Press  publication fell out as I was reading.   Readers and Kevin Barry deserve better quality.  

I will soon, I hope, read Barry's first collection of short stories, There are Little Kingdoms.

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1982, 682 pages)

I try to organize my reading around projects.  One of my 2013 projects was to read The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.  Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, USA in 1909 and died their in 2001.  She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist's Daughter.   Welty never married or had any children.    She did travel extensively in the USA and Europe.   When asked in an interview who the writers who had most influenced her were she mentioned in order Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.    Welty was a very accomplished photographer and taught college classes in creative writing.     She was a friend of William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter.  She was a close friend of Elizabeth Bowen and stayed at her castle in Ireland.  

I am very glad I read this collection.  I read the Kindle edition which I found perfectly done.  These stories, with a few exceptions, are set in the world in which Welty grew up and spent much of her life, rural Mississippi.  The stories take place in a time when race was of paramount concern, many of the stories do reflect the speech of the times and use racially abusive expressions.  This simply true to life.  Some might see her as a kind of southern Gothic writer focusing on out of place people and that is not wrong.  If you were enrolled in a class in short stories of the American South, she would be assigned along with fellow Mississippi residents, William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter.   Of course I liked some of the stories more than others.  Among my favorite are "The Petrified Man", "Lilly Daw and the Three Sisters", "The Hitch  Hikers" and a wonderful set on a train in England taking people to a boat that will take them to Ireland story, "The Bride of Innisfallen".   Some may find the use of southern dialect tiresome but from Welty it is the real stuff.  The stories are very set in time and place, a time that is over and a place unfamiliar to most people.   These are set in small town stories.  I think Elizabeth Bowen said Welty's stories reminded her a lot of life in Ireland.  

Welty's standing is below that of another writer from the American South, Flannery O'Connor.  In the seventy or so Q and A Sessions I have done with Irish writers I asked every one to name some of their favorite short story writers, many mentioned O'Connor but no one mentioned Welty.  Maybe her stories are to set in a place, maybe teachers will not assign her work because of the racial terms the characters use.  

I am very glad I read this collection.  It took me several months of on and off reading to finish it but it was a very rewarding read for me.  

Mel u

No Paradiso by William Wall

No Paradiso by William Wall

March 1 to April 21
No Paradiso (A Collection of Short Stories)

William Wall
Cork

Author Bio

Born in Cork 1955 | Grew up in the coastal village of Whitegate | Educated at University College Cork | Degree in Philosophy & English | Married | Two sons

William Wall has won the Virginia Faulkner Award, The Sean O’Faoláin Prize, several Writer’s Week prizes and The Patrick Kavanagh Award.

He was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He was shortlisted for the Young Minds Book Award, the Irish Book Awards, the Raymond Carver Award, the Hennessy Award and numerous others. He has received Irish Arts Council Bursaries, travel grants from Culture Ireland and translations of his books have been funded by Ireland Literature Exchange.

He is not a member of Aosdána – if you’re wondering why, please read Riding Against The Lizard.pdf. His work has been translated into many languages, including Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Latvian, Serbian and Catalan. He has a particular interest in Italy and has read at several festivals there including the Tratti Festival at Faenza, the Festival Internazionale di Poesia di Genova and at the Pordenone Legge festival near Venice. He has translated from Italian. William Wall was an Irish delegate to the European Writers’ Parliament in Istanbul 2010. In March 2010 he was Writer in Residence at The Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco. He was a 2009 Fellow of The Liguria Centre for the Arts & Humanities .

A must read-Riding Against the Lizard-on the implication of government funds of the arts in Ireland

"In Xanadu"

"It was Dawkins’s lecture. You know. The influence of Beowulf on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or something. Jesus, I hate Anglo-Saxon. Anyway, he started off with the slides again. The whole place in darkness at the flick of a switch. Presto, like. A moment of awed silence. Then – the Ruthwell Cross."

"In Xanadu" is one of the best stories of the excitement of coming of age and college years stories I have ever read.  It centers on the relationship of three college students in Ireland.  Two of them, Kevin and Nuala are a couple and they live with the other man in his college flat.  If you loved everything about your college years (maybe filtered through memories of long lost friends with some things best forgotten) except the classes then this story will help you relive your experiences.  It is also about the power of sex, about turning the mundane into the sacred, about mythologizing your own experiences, about maybe knowing too young that your best times are behind you.  The action in this story is pretty much driven along by Nuala.  Nuala is sexually rather free with herself and does glory in the fact that in a world of college age men she is very much in demand.  The three friends have some very well done adventures though there is a tragic element here also.  "In Xanadu" is a very cinematic story about creating your own pleasure palace and the feeling for a short while in your life that it is all that matters. 

"The William Walls"

"There is, apparently, a sadistic and erotic element in much of his work, most notably (I have not read any of them) in The King Of The Lake, a fable in which a crippled dwarf harnesses two women. He retired from the position of Consul General in 1966 and died in 1989."

"The Williams Walls" is a fascinating piece. I admit I am not quite sure what it is, however.  It basically is an account of people with the name "William Walls" who have lived everywhere but Ireland, though mostly in the USA but with a very interesting account of a Wall who was a policeman in Singapore.  Some of the descriptions  of the William Walls sound perfectly plausible, others seem like products of the imagination but whom am I do say otherwise.  (The author has advised me that all of the people in this story are real.  The policeman in Singapore was the brother of his father.)

Fiction or family history or a mixture of the two, "The William Walls" is really a very succinct historically imaginative account of the Irish diaspora. 

"What a slim boy, O Pyrrha"

"The language they use is pure D.H. Lawrence. Because you are a ghost you are privy also to the man’s actual thoughts and I have given him certain phrases from Catullus and Ovid (we have already established that he is a classicist) which confirm the universality of the terms. But her thoughts are out of bounds because it suits the direction of the narrative to have an inscrutable heroine. She is always other in the story, an object of his thoughts, his memories, his fantasies. And yours."

"What a slim boy, O Pyrrha" is told by a ghost, remembering a charge a British major, who carried the Odes of Horace in his ruck sack, led while wearing only a helmet.  I remember the old English school saying that WWI was won on the field of Eton.  The narrator, a ghost of a man killed in the charge the major lead,  can see into the mind of the major and the author of the story.   He engages in meta-fiction conversations with the purported author.  He talks about how the war will change the major.   He wonders why the major sleeps in the nude in the trenches when all else sleep in their uniforms.   We learn the man is a classicist.  We begin to see that he can deal with the madness of the Somme only by in his mind recasting it as an ancient Greek Battle.  In Greek mythology, Pyrrha was the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandorra.  When Zeus decided to end the Bronze Age with a great flood, Pyrrha and her husband were the only ones to survive.   We are there when the Ghost witnesses a conversation of the major and his own Pyrrha.   There are further structural similarities to this story and Greek myths, both straightforward ones and ironic echos. There are also some interesting class notes in the story.    I found this to be a really well constructed story, I enjoyed the conversations of the Ghost about the story, sometimes that can be annoying but here it was not.   This is a very good story. 

"Dionysus and the Titans"

If the ending of this story does not completely floor you, have your pulse checked at one of those places where they do it for free.  As the story opens Semale, a woman living in Ireland but from the Caribbean has just gotten in a terrible car wreck. (There are a number of people from the Caribbean in the Irish short stories I have read this month, something to ponder...)  She is almost ready to give birth, her baby is born  in the wrecked car with the assistance of the police and she then dies.     Then Zoot her lover shows up, pretty much drunk, takes the baby and basically says "thanks a lot for dumping this on me".   We learn about the life of Zoot, a total slacker living from the dole, a system he has mastered.  Surprisingly he becomes a sort of OK father.  He says he will call the baby Dennis after his own father even though every body knows his mother had no idea who his father might have been.  Social Services wants Zoot to give up the baby.  They say it is best for the baby as he cannot raise it alone but he wants to keep the baby. The social services people are constantly spying on Zoot trying to prove he is a bad father. Wall does a great job of making us sort of like Zoot and root for him to keep the baby even though we know he will be a terrible father, but we never guessed just how terrible.  The ending of this story is so macabre and marvelous that I am going to tell any of it.  As I read it I exclaimed "what" to myself as I did not quite believe what happened.   All in all this was, in spite of the evident tragedies and deaths, a very entertaining story.   It deals with some of the leitmotifs of this years Irish Short Story Month-the huge impact of drinking on Irish society and the issues of the weak or missing Irish father.  

There are nine other stories in this collection, all of which I greatly enjoyed.  The stories are each unique though there is a bit of over lap of characters in a couple of the stories and several drawn upon classical mythology and ancient history.   These are the stories of very educated sensibility which uses deep learning to help us see through the rot of the contemporary world while not giving into romantic notions about the past.   Each one is a unique work of art created without compromise.

I completely recommend this work to any lover of the form.   Most of them are set in Ireland and there are "Irishisms" in the conversations but you do not have to be fluent in Hibernian-English to follow the conversations.  

You can learn more about the work of William Wall on his very well done webpage.  He has kindly agreed to do a Q and A session so look for that soon.

Mel u 

Tea at Midland by David Constantine

Tea at Midland by David Constantine (2012, 235 pages)

During my Q and A Sessions for Irish Short Story Month, I asked everyone who their favorite short story writers, contemporary and all time were.  From this I got an abundance of reading suggestions, I especially enjoy learning of new to me writers.  Guy le Jeune, author of "Jamsey" spoke very highly of the work of David Constantine.  I shortly Googled him and discovered he was the winner of the 2010 BBC Short Story Prize for "Tea at Midlands" which has been published by Comma Press   in a collection short stories by that name.  I discovered he was a highly regarded writer as well as an award winning translator of Goethe's Faust (a work maybe I will now feel I can read!).

I find posting on short story collections more challenging that posting on novels.  Many people who do post on short story collections write a line or two on a couple of the stories then generalize about the collection.  My procedure is to post at some length about enough of the stories to give a potential reader or buyer a feel for the collection and in the process I find my understanding of the collection is often increased and I am better able to recall it.   For those who want the bottom line first, Guy le Jeune was totally right when he spoke of the poetic brilliance of Constantine.  Each of the sixteen stories in this collection is a perfectly crafted work of art that appears to be the product of an exquisite sensibility and a drive to produce near perfect beauty.

"Tea at Midland"

"And the surfers skied like angels
enjoying the feel of the waters of the earth, they skimmed, at
times they lifted off and flew, they landed with a dash of spray.
She watched till the light began to fail and one by one the
strange black figures paddled ashore with their boards and
sails packed small and weighing next to nothing"

This story is set in the dining room of the Midlands Hotel on the coast of England.  It is a place of opulence with its beauty enhanced by its view of the ocean and by a frieze done by the artist Eric Gill. (I admit I did not know who Eric Gill was or why he is a controversial figure until I Googled him.)
A man and a woman, having an affair, are having tea.  The woman is fixated on the almost transcendent beauty of the vista of the ocean and the surfers. Suddenly this conversation occurs:

"So he said again, A pedophile is a
pedophile. That’s all there is to it.

She suffered a jolt, hearing him. And that itself, her
being startled, annoyed him more. She had been so intact and
absent."

 I admit I am confused but that was part of the artistry of this story, to make one wait to understand what the couple isfighting about.  I realize now much of the original audience for this BBC prize winning story story would have known they were talking about Eric Gill (1882 to 1940), the artist whose work famously decorated the Midlands Hotel as well as numerous other public buildings.  He was given the highest possible awards for an artist.  He became controversial after  death when it was revealed he had sexually molested his own children and was the worst sort of serial pedophile.  The man cannot respect his work, he cannot see beauty for its own sake.  There is so much in this five page work.  It is a coda on the nature of beauty and art and deals the liberating and escapist aspects of the pursuit of artistic perfection.  The quarrel between the man and woman is perfect.  At first I am tempted to think the man is just some kind of philistine but I think that is underestimating this story.  In a deeper way Eric Gill is almost like Poseidon or even John Bull reincarnated as a capricious cruel God destroying anything that gets in the way of imperial pleasure.  Maybe the man sees this and the woman is seduced by beauty and the need to feel  clever.  It would be hard to find a richer five pages than these.


"Strong Enough to Help"


"So he sat at the polished black table in the dining room,
among furnishings he had not chosen but had merely gone
on living with, and loneliness, hopelessness, deep deep sadness
possessed him utterly, froze him, the pen still in his hand, and
he seemed to be seeing the opposite wall and his father’s
copied painting of a painting of Wastwater, not just through
tears but through ice.
Then the doorbell rang.
The bell frightened him, it made no sense. In his own
house he was elsewhere, facing something he did not feel
equal to."

"Strong Enough to Help" is an amazingly profound story about a very lonely 55 year old man, living with the memories of his grandmother, mother and aunt.  He has always lived in his parents'i house.  He works as a file clerk in a hospital.  Every Saturday morning he gets up at 600 AM to write poetry for two hours.  His house is full of books of poems, he has been reading them all his life.  If ever a man lived the reading life it is him.  This Saturday morning he finds his mind is being inundated with the sayings of the women of the house, all deceased now.  Their words of wisdom and their homilies are overwhelming him.  He feels compelled to write them down.  Then Gladys from the Department of Culture is at his door and she wants to ask him some questions about his sports and cultural activities.  She has a lovely Caribbean accent.  She begins to ask him her questions. Do you do any sports?  Do you go to the  opera, the movies, musical shows, concerts or watch sporting events.  Everything is no.  Then she asks him if he uses the public library and yes he does it is central to his life.  (I felt more than a little sadness in this as I live in a city of ten million with no public libraries).  He loves reading poetry.  His reading is really his life.  You can tell he has been lonely so long he no longer even knows it.  In a way it is also a story about living among barbarians, among brutal fools who have never gotten up early on their day off to read, who look upon the reading of poetry as something for homosexuals, among morons.  I felt his deep pain and we know by now there is a man-child like quality to him when he told Gladys that once he liked a woman at work.  He gave her a book of poetry he had written and she told him to stop bothering her and he ended up being written up by the management.  

I have just touched the surface of this amazing story.  It is a classic reading life short story. This is the kind of story that keeps me blogging and reading on hoping to discover one more story that far transcends my ability to explain why it is so wonderful.  The ending of the story opens up some hope for the man.  I hope it happens for him.  As I read what his neighbors did to him when he asked them to just close their door as the noise they were making was making it hard for them to read, I wanted to get a bulldozer and flatten their house for their attack on a man I do feel a deep kinship for.  He is 55, he will always read and maybe as the story ends he will enter another phase of his life.  


"Lewis and Ellis"

"Then in half an hour, hurrying,
he assembled again the works he could not live without:
good editions of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare,
the King James Bible, and so on, to the Four Quartets. This last
he took with him and the rest, on his account, he had
delivered before sunset to 473 East Arboretum Street, and
arranged them chronologically around him. A week or so
later, sickened to the point of vomiting, he binned them all."

"Lewis and Ellis" is another brilliant story.  This one is about two old men, Lewis and Ellis who both are residents in a cancer ward of some sort, waiting to die with no hope of a cure.  They are not really friends, neither is the kind of man to make friends easily.  Long ago I discovered that Samuel Johnson was right when he said the older you get, the harder it is to make friends.   The men keep each other company and they play chess.  They do not really have a lot in common.  One of them, Ellis, has always been totally into the reading life, we can see in the quote I used above the kind of works he loved, maybe loved is (OK it is) the wrong word but these books are a part of him.  This story is very much about the end of the reading life.  Only those not really into it will think the reading life is all about uplifting yourself with the great classics, it also can be a force that can overpower you, make you feel little else really matters.  I understand exactly why he threw out his beloved books.  I have thrown out books I loved for reasons that would make no sense to most people.  There is much more to this story than what I have said but I am not really wanting to explicate the plot.  This is a great story.  It is about deep loneliness, about how a life of reading the best there is impacts some people, I do not think it hits everyone as it did Ellis and if you do not understand why he threw out his books, it does not mean you lack knowledge, you were just impacted differently.  One of the themes this story and "Strong Enough to Help" have in common is how the reading life can produce a deep sense of being alone.  If you do not understand what I am talking about, just ignore me.  


"Mr. Carlton"

As the story opens Mr. Carlton is in his house in the company of his two adult daughters.  They have just returned from the cremation of his wife, their mother.  He tells them he is OK and they can go home.  Shortly after that he packs up his car, he notices a neighbor woman has seen him and he thinks "only one witness".  He send his daughters text messages, one at a time as he does not know how to send a group message saying he will be out of touch for a few days and not to worry.  That he did not know how to send a group message is a wonderful detail of a man trying to cope with a new world.  This is a strange and mysterious story. On his road trip, on a major highway, traffic is blocked in both directions and it looks like it is going to be a long time.  He decides to go for a walk.  Now this is for sure odd behavior for this very cautious man.  He comes upon an old house, he meets a pregnant woman and a heavy man.  He observes the garden like setting of the house and the old couple who live there.  He tries to reassure the pregnant woman.  Then it looks like traffic is moving again.  I like this story and am a bit baffled by the close so I will resist any facile conclusions other than to say this is a wonderful story about a lonely old man trying to deal with his fate.


"Ev's Garden"

"Ev's Garden" is another very interesting story that focuses on an isolated person.  Ev has been alone so long she does not even known she is lonely as she has never really experienced an alternative.  There maybe something wrong with her learning capacity or maybe because of the way she was moved around from one foster home to another she never received any real education.  When we first meet her she is working in a slaughter house.   Then the slaughterhouse closes down but in time a vegetable and fruit coop set up shop there and Ev goes to work for them.  From there she moves on to running a garden with the help of people required to work for the government in projects because of petty crimes they have committed.  So we go from slaughter house to vegetable coop to a garden, in a cemetery with law breakers helping Ev produce a beautiful garden. She is expelled from the garden.  The symbolism of the story is very powerful.  It is another case where a marginal figure in a story appears in a role that echoes the a central character of history, Eve.   There are many wonderful details in this story, what we learn about the people who help Ev in the garden is truly masterful.  This also is a great short story.

"Asylum"

"Asylum" is another great story about isolates, people who somehow lack  capacity to live in what some like to call the real world.  As the story opens Mr Kramer is visiting Madeleine in a confinement ward of a mental hospital.  She has been judged a possible danger to herself and others and a nurse is always present when they visit.   We never learn who Mr.  Kramer is to her-if he is an attorney, a social worker or there for his own reasons.  I have written quite a bit about the previous stories so I will just endorse this story as very high level work as are all the others.  Madeleine is somehow supposed to write as part of her therapy.  About half the story is taken up with a story she is writing about pirates that is a comment on her life and the nature of asylums.  When is an asylum a haven and when is it a prison?


"Alphonse"

A number of the stories in Tea at Midland are about older people, left alone by death or institutionalization.     In "Alphonse" a man has been placed in an old people's home.  We feel his anxiety and his hatred of the place, to lose his life time of autonomy is a terrible end game.  He cannot act or talk as a rational adult, he is forced back into the role of child.   Something fabulous and wonderful happens in this story.   If you want to experience it, then read this story.

"Goat"


"Always in the short story there is a sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society, superimposed on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echo-Christ, Socrates, Moses"-Frank O'Connor

"Goat" is a simply amazing story, incredibly creative.  The plot can be told in a few lines.  A Canon (a vicar) is on his way to distribute free soup to a homeless man living in an abandoned, soon to be demolished school.  The man is called "Goat" because he has two bumps on his head that look like they might be the start of horns.   The canon meets a woman named Fay and takes her with him to meet Goat.  When they arrive, he has taken up residence in the headmaster's old room, Goat screams out not to come in unless it is Fay.   Goat is filthy dirty, his feet are black.
Constantine is his magnificent prose makes us feel we are entering the underworld.  

"But so too was the river under its casing of ice, he felt
the sluggish flood still moving underneath over the ooze, the
mud and all the deposits of bikes and trolleys, bottles, knives,
angry women’s rings and bombs from the last war. All that
and more, but not just that, also the gnarled streams in the
frozen hills to the west, hardened, silenced, clamped into
inertia, set there waiting under the sheer ice of the milky way
and billions of sharp points of unimaginable cold".

There are at least six myths and religious overtures one can easily find here and I am sure others could find many more.  The structure of the story is the creation of a master of the art.  I really want you to read this incredibly powerful story. It will stay in my mind for a very long time, I hope forever.  


Obviously I greatly admire this collection of short stories.  These stories are finely crafted works of art of the highest quality, they are exquisite.  I know nothing of the work or writing habits of the author but if these stories took twenty years to write, they are a very noble use of that time.  

I urge anyone who loves the short story to read this collection.  There are sixteen stories in all in the collection.  I read all of them.  If I must pick favorites I would say "Goat" for its perfect structure, its amazing recreation of old myths, its account of the forces that push people over the edge.  I also very much loved, and I admit it is because but for the grace of God I could see myself in the central character in "Strong Enough to Help".

Author Data

Born in Salford in 1944, David Constantine worked for thirty years as a university teacher of German language and literature. He has published several volumes of poetry, most recently, Nine Fathom Deep (2009). He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. In 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter than Air won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation of Goethe’s Faust, Part I was published by Penguin in 2005; Part II in April 2009. He is also author of one novel, Davies, and Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. His three short story collections are Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), and The Shieling (Comma, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Constantine’s story ‘Tea at the Midland’ won the BBC National Short Story Award 2010. He lives in Oxford, where he edits Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen.

http://www.commapress.co.uk/

Tea at Midlands is published by Comma Press.  I spend quite a bit of time on their webpage and was very impressed by their books.

Mel u