The good stories in this are really wonderful and sketch vivid, evocative scenes with just the right amount of detail. Free Love, Text for the day, Jenny Robertson your friend isn’t coming, the second passage in To the cinema and College were all good; especially Text for the day. The less good stories either had too little information in them, making them feel disconnected and obscure (Scary, The unthinkable happens to people everyday), or were overly sentimental, too neat and tidy or twee (A story of folding and unfolding, The touching of wood). Conversely, A quick one had a really excellent ending and Cold Iron had an ending I enjoyed too, even if it is a little sentimental, because I liked the idea of gathering things together and trying to think out a story that makes sense. I really loved the best stories but overall it was a mixture.
Free Love is good and i liked the way it was ambiguous as to whether it was a boy or girl for the first page or so. The recollections have a warm, youthful glow and the details are terse but full of richly descriptive context. Very enjoyable and evocative but not so much in a sexual way. Even though the story is explicitly about sex and sexuality, its sex scenes are sparse and minimalist.
A story of folding and unfolding is quite bad and doesn’t really capture either of the situations it describes vividly. Scene of recently bereaved father is better than the electricians bantering in the girls’ dormitory. A little too romantic and twee for me. Also a it grand and theatrical in its conception.
Text for the day. Loved the idea of the whole story and it’s rapid, haphazard pace. The voices are funny and likeable, especially on the telephone sections. The idea of the book fuelled hiatus from work and life was fantastic. Perhaps leaving a paper trail behind her as she went was a little pretentious - what would you think of someone actually ripping up books in front of you? - but the whole concept was so cool I really enjoyed the overall effect. The prose, characters and narrative all seemed to chime together on this and it was my favourite so far.
A Quick One. I wasn’t so sure about the descriptions of love making at the beginning of this but the atmosphere of meeting up with an old lover at the cafe is really well done. I also really liked the end, which isn’t prim and doesn’t try to tie up too many loose ends or stuff a huge amount of the protagonist's narrative into two paragraphs.
Jenny Robertson your friend isn’t coming was beautifully mundane and uneventful. The protagonist was whinging and seemed to be unusually preoccupied with illness. It was an enjoyable, realistic description of a trip for dinner and a film told from the perspective of someone who doesn’t seem to be happy unless they’re moaning!
The cinematic theme in To the cinema didn’t really resonate with me but I liked the thinly sketched scenes of domestic deterioration. The protagonist seems unhappy in her relationship and seems to be under pressure to have a baby from Geoff, her partner. She seems to have a day job in marketing but works at the cinema on Sundays, which Geoff attributes to her ‘vulgar streak’. The stifling effect of her relationship, work and life, with the exception of the bliss she feels at the cinema where she dreams she would stay all day without getting paid, are very richly drawn with remarkably few words. The story itself is a bit longer than the ones that precede it. It’s split into four parts and seems to be have been written by: 1) an outside observer who knows the cinema intimately 2) the protagonist who works at the cinema on Sundays taking tickets 3) the protagonist’s stalker 4) perhaps the impartial, cinema-loving third person from section 1 again? The second section is by far my favourite because it paints her life so expertly yet so succinctly. The third one is creepy and slightly obsessive; its voice hovers somewhere between harmless immaturity and menacing fixation.
The touching of wood was a bit of a strange mixture of holiday scenes, leprosy and a love story. I didn’t like the end and thought it was a bit cliched or too neat and tidy. Strangely, one of my favourite parts was the nightmare the narrator has before they wake up and enact the clunky ‘touching wood’ ending. The scenes were the two lovers lark about on the island are well drawn. It annoyed me that the couple say they are on a week long holiday but when they talk about looking at the photos they’re taking they say they will do it in two Saturdays time; is this delay for developing the film or are they going on somewhere else and, if they are going somewhere else, why doesn’t this count as holiday too? The fact that the narrator’s lover looks much better and loses the dark circles around their eyes, ‘coloured in by the sun’ which is a good phrase, is also annoying as it didn’t really seem to connect with any other parts of the story. Sometimes, Smith seems to get it spot on and gives you just enough detail, just well enough connected to the narrative to make it conjure up all sorts of ideas and situations. In this instance, the detail seems to sparse and unconnected; it just sort of sits there, disconnected and meaningless except for its hint at an illness or unhappiness that’s never explored.
Cold Iron was a slightly disjointed account of a family bereavement, which I didn’t enjoy much. The last lines, “Myself I’m hanging on, leaning on the rail that overlooks the sea on either side of me. I’m picking up bits and pieces for my house. I’m thinking it out, I’m working out the story.” were crisp and cathartic while not being overly optimistic or sentimental.
I liked College and thought it had a good pace and well expressed scenes and characters. It’s quite exciting, without having a especially far fetched narrative, and I felt it had a cinematic quality when I read it. The scenes are vivid and the descriptions of the sunny, Southern England university town (Cambridge, I think, because of the bridge) were very realistic. I assumed the family of the deceased student are Scottish and felt the story did a good job of capturing the foreignness of Cambridge.
Scary tells the story of a new couple taking a train trip to visit an old friend of Tom’s and her new boyfriend in London. The protagonist, Tom’s girlfriend, seems fairly passive during the trip, their arrival and supper. However, when Tom is in the bathroom, she takes her things and leaves to go home on the last train back to where the came from. It’s not clear whether she objects to the other couple’s obsession with River Phoenix or whether it’s Tom’s moaning about how rude his friend’s boyfriend was to him or neither of these things. Whatever it is, it’s strange for the protagonist to take such drastic action without any indication as to why she is doing it.
The unthinkable happens to people everyday is about a man trying to find someone at an old address where he grew up in Scotland. He calls from London, where he lives and works and finds out they no longer live there. He crosses the street and smashes a few TVs in a TV shop before getting in his car and driving all the way to Scotland and the house where the mystery person he is trying to find lived, even though he already knows they are no longer there. His car runs out of petrol so he leaves it on a road and walks into a loch beside the road where he meets a young girl. The young girl’s mother gives him something to eat and some petrol and he drives home again. Is this a depiction of someone who has gone temporarily mad? It’s a strange and disunited story and I never felt connected to the man, his actions or his possible motivations.
The World with Love describes a chance meeting between old school friends who reminisce about how their French teacher went mad one day. This leads Sam, the protagonist, on to other reflections about the French class, the teacher and a girl who he had fancied long ago. The scenes had a sad and oppressive quality like there were many things Sam wanted to do back then that he didn’t and now looks back on it somewhat sorrowfully.
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