Posted by Sari
As you may or may not know I generally detest short stories. With few notable exceptions I find them boring and pointless writing excercises which may well benefit the writer but offer little to the reader. I also know that the above is not exactly a fair and balanced view. So, I have been trying to read short stories trying find some that I like. I have dutifully read one short story a night from the Picador collection, and when my sister, the Byatt scholar lent me thelatest collection of Byatt's short stories I actually sat down and read the damned thing.
Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories is actually a genre collection. The five stories are all horror stories and three have supernatural elements in them. I found three of the stories totally pointless and boring ("The Thing in the Forest", "A Stone Woman", and "The Pink Ribbon"), and two which were readable. "Body Art", a story about an encounter between eminent Irish Gynaecologist, and a down-and-out art student who is into installations and body-piercing is vintage Byatt in that it takes the title and spins it into many different directions. Reading it, you can actually feel how words, descriptions, events make connections in your brain. If I was still doing a lit-crit class this would be a great work to analyse, but it isn't interesting enough to do pick apart on my free time, and I suspect it really is one of those stories that would greatly benefit from being picked a part.
The other readable short story in the collection is "Raw Material" which is a sort of a story about a creative writing -teacher. His class writes and demands melodrama, stories about abuse and rape and violence whereas the teacher finds that the most satisfying excercises are those of an old lady writing about how household chores were done in the olden days. As it is a story about writing it can't escape being on some leve a metafiction, and in that light its ending is really interesting.
So, two out of five, not bad. Certainly better than the Picador collection which at the moment scores one out of fifteen.
I have also been reading Naomi Kretzers fantasy duology Fires of the Faithfull and Turning the Storm. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Firstly just because it turned one of the usual fantasy tropes around. In Kretzer's world everybody can do magic, and those who do not are suspected of heresy. And the heresy is Christianity with little tweaking here and there. It also has a nice understated lesbian romance, interesting characters and evil is not something epic, but something very human, and can be seen both sides of the conflict. I was not too fond of the first person narrative, and the plot itself flounders a bit here so that sometimes there is a feeling of deus ex machina plotting. But overall, quite nice.
Read PNH's Starlight anthologies and let me know what you think. If you find those short stories pointless and boring, then you can relax and know that you are indeed a hopeless case!
Posted by: Johan A | February 16, 2004 at 18:43
You don't like short stories?? The foundation of my existence is crumbling! My twin doesn't enjoy short stories...
Oh well, I suppose that's allowed. You might try some Jane Yolen, but I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't already done that. And, as Jophan says, Starlight.
Posted by: Néa | February 16, 2004 at 23:05
Yep, I would agree that some of these stories are without a point, and I also agree with Sari in preferring "Body Art" and "Raw Material" to the others. (Let's get into the analysis of titles: "Body Art" - installation made of medical specimens, a collection of medical specimens that are artworks in themselves, body piercings in the sense of jewellery and sexual contact; then "art" in the sense of craft: the crafting of new bodies in the wombs of mothers, the skill of doctors in healing bodies, the craft of relationships in bringing two bodies together. "Raw Material" - lived life as material for writing, raw both as in violent and unfinished or unpolished, material both as in something that can be crafted into art and as in physical matter and thus the difference between words and the violence done to the human body... I just love it when Byatt does this!)
The rest of the stories - hmm. I did enjoy her descriptions of the minerals on the Stone Woman ("The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite.") and the way in which the changes in her attitude towards her own body were depicted. All of the stories are about words and flesh, similarities and differences, and the magic inherent in both. And the different reactions of the two women to the horror of meeting "The Thing in the Forest" - one of them feels made unreal by the fact that such a Thing could be real (and it must be real, since there were two of them to see it), the other clings to the reality of faces, colours and textures, and copes by making a story of the "two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in the forest...". Which of them is right?
Posted by: Mekku | February 19, 2004 at 17:15