Tania Hershman casts mysterious and magical spells in her latest collection of short stories and flash fiction. She somehow manages to be forensic yet lyrical, playful yet profound, disturbing yet compassionate. Her scope is daring, unique and revelatory, investigative and sharp; continuously, entertainingly experimenting with ideas and with words; searching for meanings in stories about religion, science and love (nearly always love); the alchemy of life examined in startling ways, robots and octopi, the human spirit tested but winning through. It’s a beautiful book.
Like all truly original ambitious books that I’ve loved and savoured, there are some parts I don’t get or respond to – I think of writers like Dostoyevsky and Joyce that I consumed too quickly in my teens, whose books were so wondrous that it felt okay to skim over certain passages. Here there are occasional very short stories that don’t quite touch me, their meaning too slight or obtuse, frustratingly out of reach. But when Hershman’s experimentation is wedded to character and emotion, as it nearly always is, reading becomes a thrilling experience. The rogue scientific nun, Emmylene in ‘God Glows,’ who happens on the essence of love through her tests on other nuns’ blood, is a character who will long stay in the memory.
There are several near-future dystopian stories – the domestic servant disconsolately apart from her land replacing a discarded robot in ‘Something Like a Tree,’ tending the grandmother of the house, who is slowly dying, so 'when she tries to breathe there is a dark deep knocking from inside as if something wants to leave.' In ‘The Special Advisor,’ there is the chillingly mundane world of dumbed-down subservience at work – following orders in a shadowy totalitarian state, bringing to mind Hannah Arendt’s observation about the ‘banality of evil’ – its central character employed to witness and advise on an array of inexplicable executions. Written in the second person to heighten the sense of existential dread, the witness/advisor is disturbed but doesn’t know what to do, a way out offered near the end by the predecessor in the post, who simply says ‘you don’t have to.’
If the flash shorts can sometimes seem oblique, they can also be spellbinding and moving. In ‘A Song for Falling’ a woman starts by composing songs for standing, and for sitting. After life engulfs her and the songs dry up, at last a single note appears, ‘a small small song ... for breathing, for taking the next breath ... a song for how to live now that you know what life can do to you.’ In another beautifully spare story, Carly, ‘a lonely child,’ ‘seems to have more of everything, more features than usual, diffused, extra, spare. And yet there is not enough of her. Not enough of her to make her way in the world.’
I found myself thinking of Barthelme, Borges and Lydia Davis in the wit, brevity and range of the stories, of Atwood in the disturbing science fictions, but Tania Hershman’s voice and vision is all her own. It’s a book I’ll enjoy giving to friends, for them to savour, to have their senses ignited, to be in thrall to.
About the reviewer
Alan McCormick lives with his family on the Dorset coast. He’s been writer in residence at Kingston University’s Writing School and for the charity, InterAct Stroke Support. His fiction has won prizes and been widely published, including Salt’s Best British Short Stories and Confingo. His collection, Dogsbodies and Scumsters, was long-listed for the 2012 Edge Hill Prize. See more at www.dogsbodiesandscumsters.wordpress.com.
It is inevitable that there will be a moment in our lives where we will think the end is near, whether the thought is triggered boarding a plane, watching a loved one die of old age or an accident, or even those close calls that make you question how you survived such an event. Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings is a project by Nicolas Ruston to explore how an art form can operate through different media, as described in the introduction of the book The End, edited by Ashley Stokes. The book consists of fifteen interpretations by writers who have chosen one painting each by Ruston. Each painting is ambiguous with few hints towards the genre of the short story that follows it.
Every chapter captures the emotional response of its writer, inspired by a black and white etching by Ruston. ‘The End’ is first seen as a large, dominating white text situated in the centre of each painting, and is also the central theme for the fifteen narratives that follow each painting. Fifteen detailed, uncomfortable, thought-provoking narratives present a multitude of emotions. Some paintings are much clearer than others in that they present us with a familiar object, hinting what the story that follows will entail. Each painting is then crafted into words, as it were, to arouse feelings of anxiety, or nostalgia in the reader, or even perhaps to draw the reader into the writer’s paranoia and vision of ‘The End’.
There, of course, are chapters you connect with and are more drawn to than others – paintings and stories that speak to your unconscious mind, your own anxiety and experience with more power than others. There were times where I felt suffocated, uncomfortable when reading certain stories. The stories vary in style and content. The power behind chosen sentence structure and word choice changed my mood and at times I had to put the book down to walk away for a moment before returning to complete the story. Even now I am reminded of the stress I felt on one particular interpretation of a painting. Each story, each memory presented a new thought, a new location, a new passage to the end of something, whether it is life or opinion, whether it is the narrator’s life or someone they are observing. Something ends, even if it is the fictional story itself.
On finishing each story, my attention was drawn back to the beginning of the chapter – the image of ‘The End’. At times the first few lines of a story directly connected image to text, or sometimes it was the final sentence or idea, or even the story as a whole. Back and forth I flicked from painting to word, from chapter to chapter; I sometimes understood the connections, and sometimes I was so caught in the narrative I forgot the painting. There are recurrent themes – such as reference to someone dying, something or someone leaving, or even a habit abandoned. In this way, the reader is teased by the notion of the end throughout. I felt a constant anticipation to find out what will end, who will end and even why.
When each story ended I found myself back to comparing the painting to the words, or the memory, the narrative, the character or setting. Stokes is right in saying the book never ends and you will re-read it: I have read it twice and I want to read it again. When walking in the street or around the house I picture my surroundings like the painting, a black and white etching telling me a story, an end; I text my family and friends more often now than before. The End: Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings made me think about my situation, my thoughts, and I hope others look at these painting by Ruston and their interpreters’ stories.
About the reviewer
Annalise is a student in her third year at the University of Leicester, studying BA English. She is currently on an Erasmus year abroad at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Outside of her studies Annalise paints and writes as a hobby, hoping to use her degree to work towards a career within the art industry.
