Black Vodka by Deborah Levy

 

The first story that’s grabbed me this year is ‘Shining a Light’ by Deborah Levy, from her excellent collection Black Vodka. It's one of those you read and think huh? when it ends, because, well, what just happened? The events of the story are as follows: a British girl, Alice, goes on holiday to Prague, the airline loses her suitcase, she befriends a group of young Serbs, and goes for a day out with them. And that's it.

But there's a hidden arc, or movement in the story, which starts with the loss of something relatively trivial - Alice’s suitcase – a minor aggravation which means her mobile phone will be unusable because her charger is in the lost bag. We are reminded of this loss as she dances in a park with her new friends “in the blue dress she has worn for three days”, and again when she goes for a swim with them at a lake near Prague and meets Alex “a famous brilliant terrific genius composer of electronic music” who is curiously uninterested in her mobile phone problems. As she waits for him in the woods, feeling panicky in case he’s got lost, both she and the reader understand Alex and her other new friends have suffered far greater losses; their names, possessions, homes, identities, families. “She wonders if there are people hiding in the woods because they have lost their country and their home and their children and their sister and cousin and she thinks Alex might have lost his brother and father because of something he said earlier.”

It’s beautifully and subtly done; a tale obliquely told through objects lost and vivid impressions of a couple of summer days. There is no preaching here. All the stories in this collection are worth lingering over and rereading.

Black Vodka is published by And Other Stories  a small publisher which focuses on work that is "collaborative, imaginative and 'shamelessly literary' ". It relies on subscriptions from readers to continue its work - can you help?

Recommended by Simon Savidge over at Savidge Reads - thankyou!
 

Short stories

Happy New Year and welcome to the year of the short story. Only this afternoon journalist Bim Adewumni (@Bimadew) suggested that we should all give up "snobbery regarding short stories and essays". Yay!

Yes, this blog is written by two characters from a big fat novel (that be Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens) and big fat novels are my all-time favourite way of consuming fiction. But inspired by my former teacher and awesome novelist Susan Chehak Taylor (@stchehak), as well as being naturally poised at the cutting edge of the zeitgeist, in 2014 I will mainly be writing about short stories on this blog. I want to discover what it is about those brief works that can conjure up a universe in so few words. So I'm compiling a list of must-read short stories, with the help of friends on FB, Twitter and elsewhere, and am hoping that you too, dear readers, will rally round with further suggestions. If you've got ideas for short stories I need to read this year, please post them here. Bim recommended Sarah Hall's story Mrs Fox, which won the BBC national short story award in September, which will do nicely for starters.

No doubt life will hurl multiple spanners in this direction, but as Bim says, short stories "seem a perfect match for our hurried existences". (listen here from 40:53, available til 8 Jan 2013) Let reading commence.

Hiatus

So I've not been updating this blog too often the past couple of months. Tsk, tsk. That's because the Prestwich Book Festival  (12 May-15 June) has taken over my life once more. Yes, it's back for a second year - but this time it's bigger, badder and better. (Thanks to some funding from the Arts Council.) So I'm blogging over there from now until the end of the festival - if you'd care to follow me on that, I'd be really grateful.

Otherwise, I'll be checking back in once festivities are over.