In short fiction
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday August 22, 2009
FRIENDLY FIREBy Alaa Al Aswany, translatedby Humphrey DaviesFourth Estate, 240pp, $27.99Alaa Al Aswany is a powerful-looking Egyptian writer in his early 50s who trained, and still practises, as a dentist. "The clinic is my window," he says. "I open it to see what is happening in the street. You can't get disconnected from the street, as a writer ... because it is that relationship with the street that made you successful in the first place."Al Aswany's earliest forays into fiction writing were foiled by corrupt Egyptian bureaucracy, against which the character in The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers, the novella that caused the trouble and with which this book begins, rails until he is literally driven mad. The rest of the stories, all much shorter, address small individual aspects of the human condition, as short stories are wont to do, with most of the characters driven by defeat, humiliation and shame as they struggle and fail. There is a disturbing amount of cruelty, violence and unreason, too. But for all that, this feels like one of those necessary books that opens your eyes to the real nature of a country hitherto mysterious.PAINT A VULGAR PICTURE: FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SMITHSEdited by Peter WildSerpent's Tail, 256pp, $24.99The Smiths were a 1980s British alternative rock band, profoundly influential and a stark contrast to the usual bands from that decade of satin, big hair and bad songs.They recorded four albums in five years before their acrimonious split; they wore ordinary clothes and sang well-crafted songs that were not literary in themselves but were informed by a love and knowledge of literature. Adjectives used to describe them in this collection include funny, witty, sarcastic, strange, political, dangerous and dark.These short stories pay tribute, often in indirect ways, to the band and its songs. In one, a humble and humdrum character makes a video of himself while naked and lip-synching to a Smiths song, which immediately does the rounds of his workplace; in another, an edgy relationship slowly unravels in the sad way edgy relationships do €” subject matter that is recognisable Smiths territory.Like the band itself, these stories have something about them that is very English: wry and tough, with an underlying sadness.FARMING GHOSTSBy Jena WoodhouseGinninderra Press, 200pp, $25Anna Vance is the granddaughter of patriarch Harry, whom we first see burning the family photographs, an act of apparently wanton destruction echoed later in the book when he shoots his daughter-in-law's puppy.Their Queensland farmhouse has an abundance of sadness and bitterness, mainly because everyone feels trapped. Harry runs the farm, grasps the purse strings and makes all the decisions; Anna escapes through art and music and, in the towering figure of Paul Gauguin, gets a glimpse of what drives her grandfather.Jena Woodhouse is best known to Australian readers as a poet and her fiction is written in a poet's prose, dense with imagery and unexpected turns of language and thought.Her subject is nothing less than Australian history. In this short novel she explores the implications of white settlement, the effect on an extended family of two world wars, changes in rural life and the gap between dreams and reality that can, if wide enough, wreck someone's life.PICK OF THE WEEKONE MORE YEARBy Sana KrasikovPortobello Books, 208pp, $32.99Two of these eight short stories were first published in The New Yorker, which should give the reader some idea of their quality. Krasikov was born in Ukraine, partly brought up in the Republic of Georgia and taken to the US with her family when she was eight years old.Most of her characters have a background similar to her parents' and her own: men and women who have left Russia in the hope of a better life in the US. Some have found one, though not quite the one they imagined; others have been cruelly disillusioned; still others are struggling to maintain, or break, their ties with family back home. Recent Russian emigres of this generation form a rapidly growing part of the US population and the contemporary Russian neighbourhoods €” ghettos, almost €” of New York are territory that crime writer Reggie Nadelson has already made her own. But Krasikov isn't writing about criminals; only about people trying to get by.Some of her characters, however, are undeniably hustlers: women hoping that men will support them, teenage sons back in Russia demanding ever-newer PlayStations and the correct brand of designer jeans, people of both sexes desperate for visas and green cards and willing to take terrible chances to get them. Krasikov is not a judgmental writer and the awareness of ruthless necessity is there like an ache in her writing about people who, like most of us, worry constantly about those two great human levellers, love and money.The writer whose name kept coming to mind as I read these stories is Grace Paley who, like Krasikov, was a New Yorker of Russian-Jewish-Ukrainian heritage, whose style is the same, sad kind of witty minimalism and whose characters have the same sorts of problems in life and often talk in much the same way. Along with Australia's Nam Le, Krasikov was named one of last year's US National Book Foundation "5 under 35" best new writers but she writes with the insight and wisdom of a woman twice her age.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
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