Category: Short stories

Review:Young Skins by Colin Barrett published by The Stinging Fly

I got terribly excited when I received a package the other day. I just knew it was my copy of Young Skins by Colin Barrett and I just knew I would have to wait a while before I could read one of the stories. I had to have my dinner first. Sorry, food will out over short stories. Just about.

I had already read two of Colin’s short stories in the Stinging Fly magazine and in Town and Country edited by Kevin Barry and have found myself cursing Young Barrett for his words, stories and general brilliance. He is also a Mayo man so I am made up!

Young Skins is a collection of 7 wonderful short stories set somewhere in the “Whest”. You may have read The Clancy Kid, his most well known which I reviewed a while back. Young Skins opens with this story and I read it again for the third time, wanting to get a feel for the collection.

You may be aware that I am a huge fan of Kevin Barry and have said before that Colin’s writing sometimes shows a Barry-esque feel. After finishing this collection, I think that Colin writes about much of the same subject matter of Barry but Colin’s writing has a more hyped up sexual and contained anger in it that Barry’s more linguistically playful characters and themes have. They are entirely different beasts.
Colin Barrett’s writing always surprises me. I have met him a couple of occasions and one would find it hard to pin these stories to the freshly-washed and groomed Colin! What is going on his mind?
The men in his stories are sexually charged,wanting sex or violence to give them a lift. Whereas, Barry’s characters are a tamer kind, more polite and not really “getting it” kind of men.

Young Skins is very male and the men are pissed off.  With everyone and everything. They have been accustomed to a certain ease but a life in a Post-Boom Ireland has left the young men with a gone-off sense of spoiltness that is true and well-observed here.
I read a story every few days, letting each one sink in. Indeed, they are worth further reads but that’s only after I finish the ever-replenishing mound of reading on my window ledge.

The Clancy Kid is the sort of story that could be sentimental in the wrong hands but not here. I loved the gentle loss shown in this story. The two strong men in thos story are tied together and both are really grieving.

Bait is the next story up. The title is most excellent when the story is completed. This story made me laugh and cringe at the Mayo men’s fascination and social madness that is “Playing Pool” Warning: do not let strange girls from the West into your car. Anytime. They like to play with glass bottles. A scary story which is up for the Bord Gais Best Short Story Award though it is an excellent story, it wouldn’t be my favourite in the collection.

My favourite is the one that every reviewer seems to also love. It’s Calm with Horses one. Almost not a short story with over 70 pages of greatness. It opens with an almost sexual assault and revenge of sorts is promised. This story, as did some of the others, had a real “Love/Hate” feel to it. The main characters, Arm and Dymphna(brilliantly chosen names) in the story have little to lose and little morals about the right things. Art has a son with autism, this is where see some elements of caring on his behalf but the child is not enough to change him. Colin deals with this subject brilliantly, I worked with children with severe autism for years and Colin either has direct experience or he has carried out immense research. Either way, he portrays this well. Children with autism have difficulties with empathy and can find it hard to establish relationships. Like the characters in this story, there is no human connection or caring about death and pain.

I was sickened when I finished Young Skins. My only complaint is that it was too short. More, please. So, it will come as no surprise that I completely endorse this collection and will force as many of my friends to purchase this.
I am sure there are many people predicting great things for Colin, like Kevin Barry, I am joining this campaign and think he will be heading into the area of screenwriting and film. Love/Hate may hire him or maybe, he will be moving onto the novel next. He gets Ireland in a fresh, fresh way.

You can purchase Young Skins by Colin Barrett at www.stingingfly.org here  and you really should.

It rocks.

After I had finished The Herbalist, big, long book that it is, I was dying to get stuck into a short story collection again! Alan Mc Monagle’s new short story collection Psychotic Episodes came to the rescue.

I had heard loads of great things about this collection and writer, first on the women write rule blog where Nuala interviewed Alan.

Alan loves the short story form so therefore he will always be dear to my heart.

This collection is varied in length, some of the stories are ultra short like Bloomsday Bus Driver or The mega-million lottery and some longer like Walking along ruins in Babylon

Incidentally, my favourite ones were the more longer ones like Walking along ruins in Babylon. This story unravels late in the night with a phone call intruding into a husband and wife’s bed and sleep. I loved the way this story unfolds itself and adds more and more information for the reader in abrupt stages. I was easily led into the narrator’s world and his wife, senile mother in law and distant son. It ends with a sudden realisation, like many of Alan’s stories seem to end, for the character and a move to some sort of shift in the main character’s world.

This collection is all about the odd things that happen in our world. How people can be disconnected from what is normal. How the strange events can show what a character has been through or where he is heading. Strange things happen in all the stories and it is the character’s reaction to them that show and enlighten their meaning.

For example, in the hilarious story of Thai Food. A young man meets his father who he hasn’t spoken to in years. The father suggests his favourite Thai restaurant and off they go. The lack of any relationship between the two is magnified in the father’s obsession with the restaurant, his strange behavior in the restaurant and the even stranger “psychotic episode” that goes on in the middle of their meal. The father is not aware of reality and in denial about his ex-wife and his own life to the point that he doesn’t seem to mind the strange events in the restaurant. The crazy scene in the Thai restaurant is set up to show what the father’s character is about. For he simply 

glances…at the unfolding commotion, takes a long drink and chuckles to himself.

With a few lines, we understand the whole, overused “Show, don’t tell” maxim of millions of writer advice books!

But, Alan does tender as well as fast and wacky. In Beside Titan’s Sea, the story opens gently and directly.

When his parents were quarreling and he was afraid to be around them, Bernard went to his room…

Bernard is a young boy who is living with parents who hate each other. I had started to wait for the crazy episode to appear and when it does, it’s too late for the reader to realise that the boy is in fact part of the crazy episode. Has he been made this way or has he made his parents this way?

In another favourite on mine from this collection, the striking Bleeding Boy creates some amazing images, right at the end. A sort of Mrs Robinson story where young lads hanker after a bit of fine stuff in the form of Mrs Cassidy, a lady who lives on their street. The narrator is mourning from his mother’s death. A wonderfully poignant paragraph about a series of check lists and post it notes give us a way into the narrator’s character when he tells us about his Mum and what she had wanted to do.

Her big list was a list of places she wanted to see before she died…She wrote it all down..I kept her list…I thought that some day I’d get to…these places…then, I could cross them off.

After the ending, I wondered about this boy and if he ever gets to cross them off for his mum’s memory. However, the ending implies that the event that happens will remain in his memory for a long time, shaping who he is and when he became a grown up. He wants to be her bleeding boy.

Alan writes interesting and well layered endings. They seem to end abruptly and I needed to stop, go back and make sense of some of them but they all lead to the same type of conclusion that mad things happen to people and some people will realise this and some will not. An epiphany may or may not happen for the characters in Alan’s stories.

I can totally recommend this collection for anyone who enjoys short stories and humour and wit. I find it interesting that so many of these stories are all taken from various awards, competitions or journals that he has been published in. We have much to learn and enjoy in these psychotic stories. Thought, some are not as crazy as the title of the collection suggests. Or does that say something about the reader?!

Thanks to Arlen House and Alan for allowing me the time to read and absorb this collection.

Alan McMonagle is a poet, playwright and short fiction writer living in Galway, Ireland. He holds an MA in Writing from National University of Ireland, Galway.
He has contributed stories to many journals in Ireland and North America. Liar Liar, his first collection of stories published by Wordsonthestreet appeared in 2008 and was long-listed for the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The title story from his second collection, Psychotic Episodes, (due from Arlen House in April 2013) was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize

 

 

Review:Siege 13 by Tomas Dobozy

Often, I get sent books to review that I am so excited about. I get so excited I take photos of the cover and dream about when I can read it. Sometimes, I will have a cheeky first read of the first story or few pages and then put it away and then dream all over again.

With Siege 13, I felt a bit stressed. My friend, Terry is a real-life historian and when he picked it and started to flick through, wanting to read it and then commenting that he was surprised I was “into this kind of book”, I got worried. I enjoy history but fiction is better. I don’t really enjoy historical fiction and I like my covers to be fun and touchable.

Siege 13 is a short story collection all based or inspired around the Siege of Budapest, this was where the Soviet Union captured the Hungarian capital city of Budapest towards the end of World War 2.  The siege began when Budapest, defended by Hungarian and  German troops, was first encircled on 29 December 1944 by the Red Army and the Romanian Army. It ended when the city surrendered on 13 February 1945. It was a decisive victory for the Allies in their push towards Berlin.

That is the history part over and in fact, there is no need to worry yourself about the above details for I was much relieved when I started reading the first story The Atlas of B. Gorbe. It’s the title that didn’t attract me and that is a shame as the story was immediately different and contemporary and I was hooked. I spent my whole time exclaiming to anyone that would listen( Read, Simon) that this book was brilliant and that I had been judging it by the cover and that it wasn’t boring like some historical fiction can be.

That is the beauty of this book. Each story is inspired, hugely or loosely connected to the Siege of Budapest, war, its horror, aftermath, life and death. It’s all there. The narrative style stays consistent throughout and Dobozy writes history as fiction. Each story sheds a spotlight on the human condition, the relationships we form and how war can shapes them for generations to come.

The stories are either written directly in Budapest during the Siege or in Toronto where an exiled community live, trying to get away from the past.

My favourite story was “Rosewood Queens,”a girl tells us about his father’s new girlfriend who is called “Aunt Rose”. She is a strong and fascinating character. She had a strange habit, she goes from shop to shop buying only the queens out of chess sets; a sort of regaining of herself, where  she makes the chess set she leaves behind worth nothing. The narrator’s father loses out in the end because of his inability to communicate his feelings and let go of his past. The ending is perfect-

There was nothing, of course, and had never been, only two queens desperate for the affection of an absent king, trying to conjure him into existence and losing each other along the way.

What can be challenging for the reader is the disjointed nature of short story collections, Dodozy solves this by using the common theme or event of the Siege and the war. He shows how its effects could be subtle or more apparent with some stories barely hinting at it. He writes in an easy and unobstrusive style which is immediately accessible to the reader.

Siege 13  can be purchased at amazon here or at the publishers, Milkweed Editions here. You could grab it on kindle too but you already knew that.

 

 

Tea at the Midlands by David Constantine

This set of short stories has probably taken me the longest to read and to review. That is purely because they are packed with the kind of stuff that you need a breather from, a couple of a days or even a week.

David Constantine is a British poet, author and translator and most recently he won the Frank O’ Connor Short Story Award where Tea at the Midlands was pitted against some strong writers like Deborah Levy and Black Vodka, which I reviewed recently here.

Tea at the Midlands is a hard but a freeing read once completed. Some stories demand more from you that others in the collection, for example Charis, a story about three siblings and the fall out after one of the three kills themselves, all siblings are mature in an old age. It is most depressing to think of older people thinking this way yet we know they must do as these are thoughts of all ages.

Most of David’s stories are from a more mature angle, like Alphonse, a fun loving and energetic story about Alphonse, the shape shifting pensioner who keeps changing names and identity to escape being confined to an awful old people’s home by his family. We cheer Alphonse on to the glorious end where he “sails into the south” with a couple on a barge.

In the story The House by the Weir and the Way, two elderly ladies, Odive and Sabela live in an ageing house. They are going downhill physically and when Odile gets sick, a chink of hope comes in the form of a young lodger. This is a beautiful and universal story, a future that we will all relate to and hope to emulate their energy.

In Lewis and Ellis, we have a condensed version again of the same type of relationship, two elderly men called Ellis and Lewis share a quiet bond but it is only when Ellis is diagnosed with a terminal cancer, the strength of their relationship is highlighted. Ellis has left Lewis all of his classics, his books, his memories and the theme of fiction as power is really brought to the equation.

But, some read so beautifully that they seem as if they are whispers of entertainment. But, of course not one of David’s stories could be called  mere entertainment. Each line, paragraph and page is plumped with meaning, classical references and evocative representations of the landscapes. The power of nature and the way a landscape or the open fields or sea front can untie a person comes through in all of these stories. David is also a well-known poet, this shows in his choice of language and imagery throughout remaining meatier than the average story. He also uses a modern style of not using the apostrophe and allowing the characters’ actions and dialogue to drift in and out of the narrative. This can be taxing on the reader but there is pay off for the patient people!

My stand out stories would be An Island, this is a long, short story, which I do enjoy when mixed into more shorter ones. A sad and moving story where nothing much happens but a former monk moves to a remote island. We feel his past and his turmoil. He writes and reads alone. He is reluctant to let anyone in and thinks constantly of the past. The island itself is made up of people leaving and returning and we sense he too will be heading that way. David’s use of poetic in nature is present especially in this story as it is written from a first person narrative in a diary format. We see the inevitable end or at least we think we do.

Each and every story is gelled together by the power of narrative, imagination, fiction, stories or poetry. The power of telling a story is illustrated time and time again and I found this wonderful to be able to piece together the many puzzles David leaves for you. His imagination and his characters have no boundaries, they are all complex and pushy, they are all difficult. If you enjoy a story that will linger on your mind so much that you just have to read it again, then Tea at the Midlands is for you. I thoroughly enjoyed the collection and can see why he won the Frank O’ Connor and the BBC National Short Story Award. Although, there are many stories on a more mature age group and the relationships that they have, David gets the youthful couple as well, he analyses people and the struggles and pain they go through, regardless of their age or where they are. It is a painful yet moving collection. Get a copy, read some slowly and put it away. Come back to it again.

Tea at the Midlands is published by Comma Press and you can purchase a copy of it here and also listen to him read some of his stories too. You can also purchase it in hard copy or kindle on amazon here and at audible for the audio version.

David will be reading at the upcoming Cork International Short Story Festival in September. It should be a treat.