Juxtabook

Short Story September: Taking Leave by Tove Jansson

After hearing the Finnish writer Tove Jansson much praised over at Stuck-in-a-Book I was pleased to happen across the story collection a A Winter Book . Deceptively simple and always elegant these short masterpieces are captivating. In the interests of Short Story September I am just going to review one story but I heartily recommend the whole collection.

'Taking Leave' is the last story in A Winter Book. It concerns growing old and recognizing that you are doing so, building psychological defences and making adjustments. The narrator and her partner Tooti have spent each summer upon a Finnish island but after many years they know their annual summer idyll is coming to an end. The realization has come on gradually:

There came a summer when it was suddenly an effort to pull in the nets. The terrain became unmanageable and treacherous. This made us more surprised than alarmed, perhaps we weren't old enough yet...

But eventually things are clearly too much:

And that last summer something unforgivable happened: I became afraid of the sea. Large waves were no longer connected with adventure, only anxiety and responsibility for the boat, and indeed all the boats that ply the sea in bad weather.

So together they deal with it, though the dealing is mostly presented through Tooti. Tooti is packing, which is a 'love' as 'she is so good at it'. So packing for the final time is reviewed in the context of all the previous packings they have done. Instead of dwelling on the final pack to leave we get lists of things that they habitually bring to the island. In this way past and present, previous comings and goings, are woven together. They do acknowledge their coming absence with notes all over the house explaining things for the next occupant. But even here they connect with the future by hiding a bottle of rum in the 'secret room' as a 'reward' for the next occupant when they find it. These projections back and forth are crystallized by Tooti's intervention in the narrative. She wants the narrator, Tove, to tell the story of their boat the Victoria and she is keen to have it done just right. Tooti demands:

"And write it in the present tense, which makes it seem more dramatic. Like this, for example: the sea rises violently, turning black and speckled, the house gives a shudder then its all over."

And in this way we have a story within a story as Tooti both narrates and comments on her narration of the story of Victoria. The narrator lets Tooti do the packing because she loves it and is good at it, but the narration itself is surely her own territory. By handing the narration over to Tooti threads are again woven between narrators and narratees within and without the story, and more poignantly the narrator is perhaps slightly worried about the sureness of her hands when hauling her wordy fishing nets onto the shore of the story. Losses, absences and a sense of diminution in old age are thus shared and together they deal with it. The last paragraph, again narratively pushed by Tooti as she is the subject, is positive and uplifting as the narration literally floats off at the end, a fading but also  a launching. I have no idea what Tove Jansson's spiritual leanings are but it is hard not impute an after-life, and an extension of 'now', but one that is successful in a different temporal and physical medium, and so despite everything we feel Tove and Tooti soar.

From childhood to old age these stories are exquisite and multifaceted. Not diamonds, tempting though that analogy is, as that is too grounded and weighty, but rather the jewels of nature seem the most appropriate metaphors: snowflakes, dew drops  ...

And, recollecting its own light,
Does, in its pure and cirling thoughts, express
The greater heaven in the heaven less. (Andrew Marvell)

A Winter Book by Tove Jansson is published by Sort of Books is blessed by a delicately weighted introduction by Ali Smith as well as afterwords by Esther Freud, Philip Pullman and Frank Cottrell Boyce.

Short Story September: Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice by Nam Le

Following C B James' Short Story September challenge is taking me into highways and byways I either don't usually go, or haven't been for years. This story by Nam Le is from the collection The Boat but I actually read it in Prospect magazine (more of Prospect in another post).

In this thoughtful first person narration the "I "of the story, a Vietnamese immigrant to the USA via a childhood in Australia, is suffering writer's block. His words and his writer's identity seem to be lost in his confusions about his own identity, his family's past and his relationship with his father. All of this is reflected in the overlong and indecisive story title: "Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice" which, taking the terms from "Faulkner's verities"*, are the themes round which the narrator tries to sculpt his work.

The narrator's relationship with his ethnicity is very unsure. He uses it to try and reverse his writer's block, moving away from 'Faulkner's verities' to what aspiring writers view as a quick route to publication if not critical approval:

"It's hot," a  writing instructor told me at the bar. "Ethnic literature's hot. And important too."

Other friends were more forthright: I'm sick of ethnic lit," one said. "It's full of descriptions of exotic food." Or: "You can't tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn't have the vocab."

For the narrator then his "Ethnic Story" is a sell-out, made suddenly worse by the unexpected presence of his father in his life, leaving us to wonder what will become of his identities now when he will have to face the real story not the "ethnic" one.

This is a readable piece that leaves you wanting to read to the rest of the collection. It is thematically interesting, probably even more so if you are a writer, as so much of it is concerned with the nature of writing and self. Oddly, for a piece about writers writing, it is rather flat in its prose (and that is 'flat' not 'spare'!). The 'writer' posited in this exploration then, perhaps cares more about subject matter than art, and this story is more successful on that level than with its language. Still it is a worthwhile piece, and probably a worthwhile collection.

The Boat by Nam Le is published by Canongate and is available as a hardback at the moment, with paperback publication to follow in 2009.

* A writer must write "leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 1950

Short Story September: The Universal Story by Ali Smith

'The Universal Story' by Ali Smith is a quirky quick read of lovely lively prose. Strangely familiar scene too:

There was once a women who lived by - no, in - a second-hand bookshop. She lived in the flat on the first floor and ran the shop which took up the whole of downstairs. There she sat, day after day, among the skulls and the bones of second-hand books, the stacks and shelves of them spanning the lengths and breadths of the long and narrow rooms, the piles of them swaying up, precarious like rootless towers, towards the cracked plaster of the ceiling. Though their bent or riffled or still chaste spines had been bleached by years of anonymous long-gone light, each of them had been new once, bought in a bookshop full of the shine of other new books. Now each was here, with too many possible reasons to guess at when it came to the question of how it had sunk in the bookdust which speckled the air in which the woman, on this winter's day, sat by herself, sensing all round her the weight of it, the covers shut on so many millions of pages that might never be opened to light again.

An imaginative, if initially a little depressing, description of used books which belies the perky sense of renewal that actually fills this story, as it follows the life of a fly and the life of a book.

I have never read any Ali Smith before, but on the basis of this story and the few others I have read from this collection, I will be on the lookout for her in future. I notice she has written one the Canongate Myths series: Girl Meets Boy (a re-writing of the myth of Iphis) which is now on my wishlist.

'The Universal Story' was in the collection The Whole Story which I heartily recommend.

I am now off to refine my book cataloguing vocabulary. No more rubbed, sound, or mint for me! I shall take to using 'bent or riffled or still chaste'!

Short Story September: Bliss by Katherine Mansfield

As I sell academic books I am approaching my busiest time of year so I was delighted with C B James' idea for a Short Story September. Time-wise I daren't let myself get too lost in a large book at the moment and short stories are the perfect solution. Normally I prefer a novel length  prose work, but at the moment short stories are just right. I haven't read many since I finished my first degree 13 years ago, though I used to enjoy writing about short stories very much. I loved the real overview you can get at the same time as, in the best stories, details that you can almost touch. It is like both looking at an ornament and being able to pick it up, and turn it round in your fingers.

If you want to join in C B is running a multiple-prize book draw for the occasion and you get more entries the more short stories that you review, either on your blog in in the comments section of his blog. You can read the full rules here but you need to scroll about half way down the post.

So, merrily joining in, I am going back to a story and a collection that I really enjoyed a few years ago: Bliss and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield.

In Katherine Mansfield's title story "Bliss", Bertha is 30 years old living an upper middle class London life of servants and dinner parties. She has a husband, Harry, and a daughter Little B. The story is written in Mansfield's painterly style with due attention to colour and form; close focus on objects give an insight into emotions which can be crisp or angular or fluid but are never fussy. Her preparations for her dinner party for example show Bertha's oddly rich focus on the irrelevant, highlighting her naivety. 

There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones. These last she had brought to tone in with the new dining room carpet. Yes, that did sound rather far fetched and absurd but was really why she had bought them. She had thought in the shop: 'I must have some purple ones to bring the carpet up to the table.' And it had seemed quite sense at the time.

She sees the fruit in all its details but cannot see her relationships with her husband, or her child, or her friend Pearl, at all clearly.

Childish herself, Bertha is playing at dinner parties, and admits her frivolousness: "What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you had swallowed a piece of that late afternoon sun..." 

Like all Mansfield's work "Bliss" is a very pleasurable read that also seems superficially an easy read; you can take from it as much or as little as you want. Great when you're tired: you enjoy a coffee and a Katherine Mansfield, and hours or days later bits of it keep popping back into your head as the images stay with you. Great too for teaching or book groups as you can discuss the symbolism endlessly. In a very grey September here in the UK it is great to read a writer who uses colour so warmly.

Bliss and Other Stories is no longer in print as a complete collection it seems, but the story 'Bliss' is in the Oxford World Classics Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. The vagaries of Amazon's catalogue declare this edition to be in French, but honestly it is not!