This is my review of Le Bateau (Litterature & Documents) by N Le.

Originality is the common theme in this collection of seven stories, varied in length, which range widely over different countries, cultures and themes, boldly shifting viewpoints by gender and age as if to “try them all out”.

The the last and most powerful story is “Le Bateau” which gives its name to the entire book Although the author Nam Le was only a baby when he made the perilous journey to Australia as one of the Vietnamese “boat people”, tales of this harrowing experience must have fed his vivid account of a young woman’s attempt to survive life on board as the ship is lashed by a storm and the stores of food and fresh water run out. She is befriended by a capricious woman, whose son, although disturbed by the effects of war, and possibly autistic, fascinates her and arouses in her a maternal love which the mother seems at times to lack.

This and the first story struck me as the most authentic and well-structured, perhaps because they are connected to the family culture and history with which Nam Le identifies, despite his absorption into life in Australia and the US. With its indigestibly long title “Love, honour, pity, pride, compassion, sacrifice, the opening story has aspects of autobiography in describing a young writer struggling to meet deadlines, ambivalent as to whether he should focus on “ethnic literature” to earn money. His dilemma is increased by the ethical question of whether he should use as a theme his father’s experience of a massacre at the hands of brutalised American GIs. Even if the older man is prepared to recall it in detail to iron out the “errors” in his son’s story, does that mean he is prepared to see it sold and read by westerners who will soon forget it? Although the ambiguous ending feels like a let-down at first, on reflection it is interesting to debate the various interpretations one can make.

Nam Le’s upbringing in Australia may have given a particular genuine and moving quality to the almost novella-length “Halfhead Bay”, in which teenage Jamie steels himself to face up to the school bully Dory after daring to make a play for his girlfriend. Should he be protected from Dory’s fists so that he can once again strike a winning goal for the school team, or for the sake of his dying mother? The subtle and complex “coming of age” drama takes place in the context of a family’s inability to face up to the reality of a crisis.

Despite the varied themes, the essential style remains the same. Each story develops gradually, so that the reader has to work out what it going on, and it is impossible to predict the outcome. Heavy use is made of flashbacks, which sometimes disrupt the narrative flow, although they could also be said to reflect the way the mind works, drifting back to past events triggered by experiences of the present, or perhaps as an escape from it. Nam Le creates some fascinating dilemmas, as when a young gangster is ordered to kill a friend to save his own life. He knows how to create page-turning tension, but the endings are often disappointing, an abrupt anti-climax. “Tehran calling” was so nebulous as to leave me completely unengaged.

Overall, Nam Le is a gifted writer, with a plain, clear style which draws one in. It is an effective vehicle for conveying subtle nuances in people’s relationships with each other, and descriptions filled with vividly striking images.

I agree with reviewers who feel that he is better at writing prose than structuring a short story. Each one is mined from a rich enough seam to fuel a full-length novel. He reminds me somewhat of Alice Munro’s short stories with their deceptively simple prose and sometimes meandering, unpredictable storyline.

I read these short stories in the French translation, which I would not recommend since the original English seems more suited to Nam Le’s style.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

 

This is my review of A boy with potential: A choirboy’s sinister discovery (Crime shorts Book 1) by Rosalind Minett.

This well-written and expertly constructed tale sustains a sense of sinister tension to the end, but with underlying poignancy over the extent to which "oyster boy" – who ironically has misinterpreted the one piece of kind attention he receives – is a victim of other people's casual abuse. Although I agree that there is the material here for a novel, it makes a particular impact in its current concise format.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Redeployment by Phil Klay.

A dozen often bleak and brutal stories carry an authentic ring based on the author’s first-hand experience as a marine in Iraq. Although it is deliberate in the case of “OIF”, some are too cluttered with military acronyms, either meaningless or distracting if you pause to work them out or look them up. Others which focus on the fighting have nowhere to go after ramming home the way young soldiers are trained as unquestioning killing machines, kept in this state by psychopathic officers, then swear, take drugs and get drunk to blunt their fear, guilt and confusion.

What held me more were the issues raised by the “redeployment” of the title : how these men might deal with the return to “normal” life and communicate with non-combatants.

The brilliant opening story, “Redeployment”, describes with great clarity and insight a young man’s sensations on returning home from a seven month stint in Iraq. Having been trained to function at an “orange” level of alert all the time, he cannot adjust at first to a world of people “who’ve spent their whole lives on white”. He cannot cope with walking down the high street alone, rather than in a line of men, each detailed to scan ahead at a different level: tops of buildings, lower windows or at street level. “You startle ten times checking” for the gun that is no longer there. By the end of the trip, the man is too “amped up” to drive. “I would have gone at a hundred miles an hour.”

In “War Stories”, a young man whose face has been hideously scarred agrees to be interviewed by a chilly young actress “with a splinter of ice in her heart” who wants to use his experiences for a play. She is only interested in the drama of his injury, so never discovers his pragmatic decision, being unlikely to “pull” a girl like her, to give his undamaged sperm to a bank, so that his genes can be passed on in a new life. “I’ll have some baby out there. Some little Jenks. Won’t be called Jenks, but I can't have everything, can I?”

I also recommend “Prayer in a Furnace” where a sensitive and well-intentioned chaplain’s faith is unequal to dealing with the horror which a cynical young soldier confesses to him, and “Psychological Operations” which explores the complex emotions of an American of Coptic Egyptian origins who, because of his assumed knowledge of Arabic, is sent to deliver propaganda which involves insulting Iraqi extremists to goad them into coming out to die under fire.

Less harrowing than the other stories, but chilling beneath its humour is, “Money as a weapons system” in which an idealistic man sent out on a “Provincial Reconstruction Team” learns painful lessons over the extent of corruption, tribal division and American ignorance which bedevil any serious attempt to rebuild the country.

I don’t know how cathartic is was for Phil Klay to write this, but it would be a mistake to “write these stories off” as the scripts for yet another violent war film – into which they could well be twisted. Most of them provide salutary lessons on the folly of ill-prepared engagement in Iraq.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken.

My four stars are for the best stories in what struck me as a "mixed bag" much as I wanted to admire the quality of the writing and risk-taking originality.

McCracken reminds me of Alice Munro: the unusual take on situations, the continual drift to unpredictable outcomes, the concern with observation rather than plot, the sharp, self-possessed prose stripped of emotion even in the most moving situations, the flashes of humour to alleviate the pain or even horror. However, I find her writing a little more contrived and less empathetic than Munro's.

The stories seem very variable in their effectiveness. I was hooked by the opening "Something Amazing" in which teenage Gerry comes home to find that his grief-deranged mother, unable to get over the death of her small daughter, has kidnapped a neighbour's child. "He wonders how to sneak him back home. He wonders how to keep him forever".

The plight of a couple trying to deal with an accident which has befallen their wayward adolescent daughter in the title story "Thunderstruck" comes closer to moving than most of the rest. Sustained by false optimism, the father "looked at his wife, whom he loved, and whom he looked forward to convincing, and felt as though he were diving headfirst into happiness. It was a circus act, a perilous one. Happiness was a narrow tank. You had to make sure you cleared the lip".

"Peter Elroy; A Documentary by Ian Casey" is very original, showing how a longstanding friendship has been destroyed by film-maker Ian's early masterpiece in which he interviewed Peter, but only recorded his responses, thereby both deceiving him and showing him in a dreadful light.

McCracken is good at portraying earnest young children, and some of her quirky descriptions have a childlike quality: "A lawnmower skulks up to its alligatorish eyebrows in the yard". A family anxious to comfort a daughter "bundled" her up "in their eight bare arms, the devoted family octopus". I also enjoyed her revealing but oblique Pinteresque dialogues.

Although some stories improved on a second reading, perhaps I was getting used to her style, about half like "Property","The Lost and Found Department of Greater Boston", "Juliet" or "Some Terpsichore" failed to engage me. Although the technical quality is high, and she is often original and very imaginative in both her descriptions and ideas, many of her characters seem unconvincing. At times, situations slip into unrelieved black farce which tends to distance the reader: you may be intrigued and fascinated by the writing, but you do not care enough about the characters and need to take a break at the end of each piece to escape the bleakness.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Progress Of Love by Alice Munro.

Alice Munro, whose short stories remind me of the work of the "groundbreaking" Katherine Mansfield, seems to break every "rule" of creative writing courses. On a rough estimate frequently up to around 13,000 words in length, stories digress and ramble from a central theme that has to be deduced, although it may remain unclear until the end. Plot is unimportant, although certain "key" events emerge in what sometimes proves to be a carefully planned order.

Tension may arise over shocking events – like a person drowning – with anticipation fed by the knowledge that the crisis may come in the middle of the tale, then may be allowed drift away to a bland, even incomplete-seeming ending, or the drama may itself be defused abruptly, or ebb away. Munro's attention flits between people's insights, often derived from the minor events of life, a strong sense of place, or scraps of conversation which have an authentic ring, as if based on comments overheard (say, young children talking) but embellished to fit the situation.

Munro explores the thoughts and relationships of ordinary people carrying out their daily tasks in smalltown Canada against the backdrop of lakes, forests, changing weather and shape-changing winter snow. She draws heavily on her own situation: father a farmer, mother a perhaps stern teacher, who fell ill when Monro was still young, possibly creating the dilemma of whether the latter should sacrifice herself to stay at home as a carer, like many of the women in her tales, or strike out to claim her freedom as Munro did. She writes of early marriages, motherhood, divorce and second partners, all part of her own life. The question of losing one's memory with age clearly interests her, together with the way we sometimes distort the truth, almost deliberately twisting memories to how we would have them be, or accepting the convenient assumptions of others and making them the truth.

I agree with the view that her stories, though clearly too short to be novellas, are packed with as much content in terms of events, relationships and insights as many novels. I was also relieved to read that Joyce Carol Oates's review did not baulk at finding some stories wanting. It is true that what seem like important aspects, like the course of a developing relationship, are glossed over, leaving the reader feeling unengaged with "central" characters. Also, some stories seem overcomplicated, appearing to cover too much as what seems to be the central theme emerges.

For me, the most successful stories are `The progress of love' about a woman's relationship with her mother whose life she has clearly made huge efforts not to imitate, `Fits' which explores people's prurient reaction to violent death and almost angry disappointment with a witness who declines to feed their ghoulish curiosity, and `White dump' about the collapse of a marriage in which a mother-in-law may have played an unwitting part, and its lifelong effects on the daughter of the union.

Readers will draw different meanings from each story, and vary in those they prefer, or believe they understand. This anthology will repay rereading in the future, when one's perceptions may have changed.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of New Selected Stories by Alice Munro.

Why is Alice Munro regarded widely described as one of the greatest female short story writers, yet also perhaps read less than this accolade would suggest?

This selection from five collections covering the decade 1998-2009 displays the key aspects of her writing. On one hand, stories which are often as long as 30-40 pages, loosely plotted to allow digressions into the lives of various characters, generally lacking in suspense or dramatic endings, or pithy punchlines. On the other, very acute observation of human behaviour and empathy with their thoughts and emotions, a strong sense and apparent love of the Canadian landscape and seasons, and a deceptive rambling in stories which maintain a clear underlying purpose and momentum.

I particularly enjoyed "The Bear came over the Mountain", about a sensitive and creative woman whose Alzheimer's has become sufficiently serious for her husband to place her in a home. When she forms an attachment to another resident, is this a kind of revenge for her husband's serial infidelity? What makes this story interesting is that it is written from the husband's perspective. Although sad in places, this is too insightful and at times sharply witty to be depressing.

On a lighter note, I appreciated "Chance" about an academically inclined but uncertain young woman on the brink of her adult life and possible career, who responds to a letter from a married man she has met by chance on a train. To what extent is she choosing her fate?

The three stories selected from "Too much Happiness" were the ones I enjoyed most in that collection: the woman who has suffered terribly from a controlling man, the woman estranged from a son whom she loves who drifts into a lifestyle she finds alien, and, most gripping of all, the widow who has to deal with a sinister guest.

I found it hard to get into the first story "The Love of a Good Woman" which seemed quite disjointed with too diffuse an opening section for me. "My Mother's Dream" written apparently from the viewpoint of a baby is also highly original and imaginative, but not to everyone's taste.

Perhaps one is most drawn to the stories which reflect one's own experience, so that the range of Munro's topics make it likely that there will be something for everyone. Also, each story gives a great deal to discuss, as we are likely to come away with some different perceptions of each tale.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars