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Personal Velocity
Rebecca Miller
Doubleday
*****

Bryna marries Milt because he too doesn’t like cheese. Louisa slits her wrist rather than destroy her paintings. These are only moments, but whatever the stories of these outwardly very different women, we are drawn in, involved in their lives and histories.

Rebecca Miller paints absorbing portraits of seven women. These are not nice women; they cheat on their husbands, they steal, they use men to make them feel good. But they are honest, and they command our sympathy. And the devil is in the detail; the resonances that truly bring these women alive. Julianne imagines what life would have been like had she not married, and pictures herself composing a poem, gazing out of the window, “a cigarette between her fingers. No, no cigarette. Coffee.” Each is a separate story, but the book reads like a novel: not so much character studies as a beautifully crafted tapestry of humanity.

Review date: February 2002

A Fictional Guide to Scotland
ed: Meaghan Delahunt
OpenInk
*****

The editors of A Fictional Guide To Scotland would have us believe they’ve done something daring and revolutionary. In fact they’ve merely selected the best writing from anonymous submissions. But they’ve chosen well. The standard in this collection from Scottish writers is consistently high and the tone varies hugely. There is the uncomfortable 'Happy Hour', where a dutiful son visits his Alzheimer-stricken parents, and the understated magic realism of Stevie dreaming up a perfect wife in 'When Stevie Was Married'. In the light-hearted 'Being Leonard Cohen', the author discovers her true vocation. But the star here is the superb 'Nodding Off'; narrated in Scots, there is the added challenge of understanding Kenny who has cerebral palsy. And with a “creative non-fiction piece” and a poem, there is something in this collection for everyone. The voices are real, and, with the exception of the over-excitable foreword, there isn’t a weak note.

Review date: October 2003

To buy this excellent collection of short stories click here A Fictional Guide to Scotland

Real Time: Stories and a Memoir in Verse
Amit Chaudhuri
Picador
*****

In The Man From the Khurda District, Bishu overlooks Jagan’s activities because of the monsoon rains. “The days were monochromatic and dull, with light like a suggestion.” Real Time is Amit Chaudhuri’s first collection of stories, drawn from over 30 years. They share a sense of being a prolonged snapshot: no resolutions are made, no plots thickened, but new characters are given life. In Words, Silence Mohon has gained so much weight that his old friend barely recognises him. The story describes only their dinner, but we are made very aware of the chasm that now exists between the once close friends, and despite the narrator’s assurances: “I’m sure my father would remember Mohon and that he was ready to be transferred to Calcutta”, we know they will not meet again. Much is left unsaid, but enough is here to give an incisive insight into modern India. Evocative and well-written.

Review date: July 2002

The Complete Short Stories
Muriel Spark
Penguin
*****

Like Wittgenstein, what is important in Muriel Spark’s stories is what she does not say.

From the first, The Go-Away Bird, about a young woman growing up in South Africa, there are common themes: illicit sex, society, an ever-present hint of the supernatural. One suspects that Spark’s black humour and acerbic characterisation is because she is not a very nice person, lending the stories an edge. But her strength is in skilful understatement.

She knows her area well – in The Black Madonna, after a few choice sentences, we have Raymond and Lou precisely: middle-class, ‘liberal’, childless, and ‘not racist’; in fact two of their best friends are black.

And we are expected to know her well. This collection comes without an introduction, and despite the stories spanning a period of forty years, no dates are given. This is a book intended to stand or fall on merit alone: it stands.

Review date: October 2001

To buy this click here The Complete Short Stories