Short Stories

Last week I received an envelope in the mail, the address written in my father’s hand. My heart accelerated a little and it struck me as unseemly, at my age and in my circumstances, to be still so easily rattled by a parent.

Seamlessly extending from the French occupation of Cambodia to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and the current tourism industry, Laura Jean McKay’s début short story collection, Holiday in Cambodia, is a powerful portrait of a country long-affected by war and poverty. McKay’s knowledge of the Cambodian landscape underpins the collection. She evokes peak-hour from a motorbike, where ‘everything looks like bushfire, like nicotine’, and notes the forgotten landmines of neighbouring paddocks, which ‘travel like worms’ through loosening earth. In one of the shortest and most affecting pieces, ‘A Thousand Cobs of Corn’, a Cambodian woman looks down at her husband’s hands in the night, ‘which have shaken since he was a boy soldier’.

An old woman, caught between the present and her troubled past in another hemisphere, picks herself out of a puddle of water: ‘Her head is tender, and the left side of her body still feels strange: as if she has lost half of herself. Nevertheless, she understands things again.’ The characters in Maria Takolander’s collection of short stories, The Double, often seem as if they have mislaid parts of themselves – their sense of groundedness, their belief systems, their personal histories – but they push on, not always to positive effect.

Transactions opens with a scene of duplicity and murder. In the following pages, Ali Alizadeh plunges readers into a ‘whirlpool of greed and apathy’. The collection revolves around an assortment of men and women from different parts of the world. We encounter Anna Heinesen, a Danish charity founder who is revealed to be a sex trafficker and religious zealot; Samia, a rich and racist Emirati student who surfs cyberspace under the alias ‘The Alchemist’; Karina, a Ukrainian sex worker who winds up doing a B-grade horror film in Australia; and a nameless Iranian refugee who criticises ‘pampered Westerners’, but who has sinister secrets of his own. The lives of these characters intersect in unpredictable ways.

‘If you don’t like movies, I’m not sure you will like these stories.’ So warns Ron Elliott in his introduction to Now Showing, after having explained that the five stories in this collection are unproduced screenplays repurposed as novellas. It may be useful to clarify Elliott’s warning: unless you are a cinéaste who appreciates screenplay structure and enjoys seeing new variations on the same old Hollywood themes, you may find these stories lacking.

Finishing Chris Somerville’s début story collection, We Are Not the Same Anymore, I felt a sense of alienation and ennui. Somerville writes with a stylistic sparseness that is deceptively simple but that repays rereading. Passages of awkwardness and deep introspection are punctuated by moments of humour, warmth, and vulnerability. Embedded within this stark territory, these moments make the journey more enjoyable.

‘Tell me about it: you can trust me. I’m a writer.’ This ‘cautionary joke’ – one of few in this sober volume – cited in an essay by Frank Moorhouse, could be an epigraph for the latest Westerly. Editors Bird and Hughes-d’Aeth asked a selection of writers to share their thoughts on the ethics of writing. The ensuing essays include depictions of the past and of family in non-fiction, and play off each other interestingly. Kim Scott, Tiffany Shellam, and Clint Bracknell reflect on the Indigenous experience of colonisation. Scott offers a letter of sorts to an unnamed prison inmate, the result characteristically self-reflexive. Shellam delves into the archives to deconstruct the ‘friendly frontier’ trope, and Blaze Kwaymullina, in a metaphorically laboured appropriation of an appropriation, builds poems from the rearranged words of colonial archival documents.

Philip Roth wasn’t the only writer to take the unusual step of announcing his retirement at the end of last year. Confirmation that Alice Munro was also relinquishing fiction was tucked away on the New Yorker’s blog, Page-Turner, three days after the New York Times ran an interview with Roth on its front page. While literary magazines here and overseas continue to publish tributes to Roth, the dearth of comparable pieces on Munro has been conspicuous. Surely it’s not because we don’t think she’s any good. Like rainbows, sleep, and the Beatles, her short stories are things upon which we can all agree.

The latest Sleepers Almanac opens with a surreal encounter between a suave cane toad, presented as an amphibian Jiminy Cricket, and the guilt-wracked mother of a drug addict (‘Happy Monday’), and ends with the elaborate imaginings of a woman trying to distract herself from the reason why she is sitting in a hospital waiting room (‘How to Talk to a Fire Extinguisher’). Other themes echoing through the anthology include infidelity, sibling rivalry, mental illness, bullying, child abuse, ageing, death, and the complex nature of love. So far, so grim. Fortunately, there is a playful warmth to the Almanac that belies the gravity of its subject matter without lessening its impact.

In one of Georgia Blain’s subtle, beautifully paced stories, a young girl is given an IQ test. Believing it to be a game, she is outraged when her older brother crows about his results and she realises she has been evaluated. Later, as an adult, she can put her childhood indignation into words: ‘I thought it was just a matter of random chance. I should have been told that there was a predetermined pattern for me to decipher, and rules to follow.’ But at eight she can only protest at the psychologist’s betrayal: ‘She never said it was a test.’