Month: January 2018

The stories of this collection are undoubtedly precise. In their concision an air of disdainful melancholy hangs over the prose as if the terrors of ordinary life are too mundane to speak of and yet they must still be spoken of. Boredom, loneliness, sleeplessness, loss, all squirm under the surface of the characters who try so hard to make sense of it all that anger, violence or simple disinterest result.

Having only just finished reading the collection, I feel I must turn to the beginning and start again. There is an aesthetic quality, a vision that entices and repels me; it’s almost like learning the nuances of a new language: it takes study. Continue reading I am the brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy

As the title suggests, Attrib. and other stories is a collection of works that delights in examining and redefining the often surprising characteristics of people and things, particularly in terms of their etymology. Many of the stories echo with birdsong, and many burn with the intensity of emotions associated with falling in and out of love. They reexamine the periphery of events, so that saying goodbye to a loved one is set against the simultaneous loss of a man’s toupé caught up by the wind and blown into someone else’s face (‘Platform’), or the view of another goodbye scene is reimagined through the witness of a spider in the corner of the room (‘Spins’).

Perversely, because this story is not typical of the collection given that it isn’t in first person and doesn’t overtly play with words, my favourite story of book is ‘Spines’. It’s about a family who discover a hedgehog in the pool of their French holiday home. Their life is lived around the creature’s struggle to survive. Continue reading Attrib. and other stories by Eley Williams

Lina is a writer and PhD student from Chile, living in New York. The book opens as the veins in Lina’s eyes hemorrhage. An event long dreaded from childhood, the incident leaves her blind, but for how long?

Seeing Red follows Lina as she waits to see if she will ever see again. Looking through her fingers, her writing so reliant upon those fingers to shape it, Lina complains that she can’t write if she can’t see. And as the days and weeks go on who can she rely on? Her relationship with her parents is complicated by the history of her illness and the guilt and resentment it generates. Her relationship with her boyfriend is now equally fraught. Whose eyes can she now see through? Who will give her their eyes? Continue reading Seeing Red by Lina Meruane