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Baghdad Noir: short story collection – review by Pete Kalu

    Baghdad Noir (Akashic Books) contains fourteen new short stories penned by an impressive line-up of primarily Iraqi writers. Each story is set in a different part of Baghdad. The tales are a heterogenous bunch: in ‘I Killed Her Because I Loved Her’, a mother and her two daughters are working on different sides of the American forces v Insurgency divide, with tragic consequences. In ‘Doomsday Book’, a man is recruited to commit “divine, holy murder” until his distraught brother tracks down the recruiter. In ‘Baghdad on Borrowed Time’, a detective is hired by a killer with a bizarre proposition: the killer wants himself killed. In ‘The Apartment’, a sharp-eyed criminal investigator detects an old lady’s death was not by natural causes. In ‘Empty Bottles’, a young woman is murdered, her screams masked by the call to morning prayers, as an entire neighbourhood blocks its ears. In ‘Homecoming’ a father is attacked by an area thug, leaving his soldier son seething.  In ‘Baghdad House’, an accountant lands in a hotel with deadly goings-on. The overall effect of this gathering of stories is kaleidoscopic: shifting fragments that, coming together in the collection, create a sense of Baghdad’s uneasily beating heart. The stories are crisply edited. Most of the stories have been written in English. A few have been translated from Arabic, and where they have, the translations are smoothly done.  As a city, Baghdad presents a challenge for crime fiction.  Arguably, the genre is predicated on a functioning state apparatus imposing law (however cankered), and handing down some form of justice, (however partial or temporary), against a backdrop of a society in some form of order (however warped). Given all these anchors – law, justice, order – appear to have been pulled up by the maelstroms Iraq has experienced, the genre has to react. The Baghdad Noir response is to explore what justice might mean to citizens living in such a shattered landscape, how individuals either reconcile themselves to these disjunctions or else attempt to reconstitute justice and its associated concepts. The collection features a wide range of such troubled, burdened protagonists: nervous accountants, embittered relatives, laconic detectives, traumatised children and frightened students among them. There are touches of the phantasmagorical and the magical in the tales but, for the most part, the mode is realist, as if the absurdities of life in Baghdad need no extra gilding with fantasy….   (Full review is contained in Banipal Magazine, Edition 63 (The 100 Best Arabic Novels)...

Book Review: Tell No-One About This, by Jacob Ross (Peepal Tree)

These stories are page turners: tautly written tales, concerning subaltern characters, in real crisis, their backs to the wall against some external threat, some foe, their choices harsh. The stories grip. You want to know whether the characters emerge intact from their crisis. And emerge they usually do, though rarely completely intact. The stories are quietly moral – something hovers above them, holding out the promise that there is such a thing as justice, as a social contract, and that when it is broken by the powerful, then the ‘small’ people can and do have a right to fight back, and they have the intelligence and resources to do that, sometimes in surprising ways. De Laughing Tree is my favourite for this strand of storytelling, closely followed by A Different Ocean, both featuring resourceful, female protagonists: JR has a particularly deep commitment to creating space for women’s voices and his work often fuses technical craft with a quiet, caustic shaming of misogyny. There is rarely a lazy line in Ross’s stories. He generally uses the third person, ‘He/She’. It better allows that barely perceptible oscillation between author and character – the sense that within one paragraph you are at once hearing the voice of the character and the almost imperceptible pulling away towards some quiet, allegorical, authorial statement. So Walking For My Mother begins: “Old Hope turned out their children to watch Nella go. It was wonderful and frightening because the quiet in the air was all for her. All for her, the gifts, the utterances of pleasure, the sideways glances and sweat-rimmed smiles. Like they were seeing her properly for the first time.” JR has the attention to language of a poet. One example will have to suffice. In Giving Up On Trevor,  a woman walks past an alley and sees three young people. She notes they are ‘cowled.’ It’s a beautiful choice of word. I would have gone with hooded; but cowled, with its echo of a monk’s habit, quietly invites you to re-see, adds an undertow of religious piety to the troubled events that take place from this point. Of course, those events confuse and complicate such initial purity, but the starting point is important. Most of the stories in the collection are set in what I take to be the Caribbean island of Grenada, JR’s country of birth, though Grenada is never named. Why that preponderance? The Canebreakers seems to provide a clue. When the young narrator discusses his leaving the island on a scholarship – a passport to the wider world – his sister sharply tells him: ”dem offerin you a ticket so you could up and leave – like your modder – alone – and never come back. Leave everybody else behind.” And later adds: “Learnin to escape cane not enough. How to break it – break out ov it, is what you have to learn. You unnerstan?” I understand this as somewhere between a plea and an admonition for those who leave to remember those people left behind, and to “break cane” for them: to speak of their lives, both internal and external. The Canebreakers is one of my favourite stories in the collection. Tell No-One, is a collection of short stories. It is therefore, arguably, less commercial than a novel (for a novel try JR’s recent, prize-winning, The Bone Readers), but the stories here are flecks of gold. And through them JR shows himself a short story writer of the first order.   Hesitations: The dateline of the subtitle (“Collected short stories 1975-2017”) suggested for me that the order of stories would be chronological, by date of creation. But there are few clues to what was written when. I found myself guessing which were the early works and creating my own meta-narrative of the movement from young Jacob Ross to mature Jacob Ross: was it a movement from optimism to cynicism, from dense syntax to short clear sentences, from ascetic realism to the numinous?  Or maybe JR gets rich and the move is from a Marxist alignment with the voices of the oppressed to a concern with the lack of parking spaces in Chelsea?  None of the above. I gave up guessing. The style and themes are remarkably consistent. Whether this is because everything has been given a contemporary edit or simply that the author’s concerns have remained constant, I can’t tell. Even in JR’s description of villages, there is this sense of atomisation – of characters facing great danger and crises fundamentally alone. I ached for a story that showed a collaborative endeavour – a modern day Fuenteovejuna that might suggest the power of waging battles collectively, as well as individually. But I understand a writer is not a juke box: writers write what they write! Why do short story collections not get reviewed much?  I came across the blog of a retired professor of literature who did a six-paragraph critique of each of thirty stories in an anthology. It took him four blog posts to get through them all. I doff my cap to that professor.   Full disclosure: I met Jacob Ross this year while on a writers’ visit to Portugal & Spain.  As far as I can recall, he did not buy me any...

Book Review: Come Let Us Sing Anyway by Leone Ross (short stories)

Reading the Come let Us stories is like stepping into an hallucinogenic dream. A woman gives birth to geometric shapes in Love Silk Food. In Pals, there are two schoolfriends, one of whom coincidentally has no head. Echo begins with the line: ‘The young man dies like flower’ and is a story, told staccato, of pain, of a restrained, loving anger, as much a psalm as a story. In Breathing, a dead wife comes back to life, re-entering her husband’s life by the simple expedient of ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night. In Art, For Fuck’s Sake an artistic collaboration takes on multiple dimensions. Phone Call To A London Rape Crisis Centre voices a desperately sad call from someone who is being abused; that call ends with the plangent, ‘We do have fun. / We do.’ Velvet Man features a ghost ‘with clean, well-shaped fingernails’, who shows hope of a better life to a lonely, divorced woman. The brilliant, The Woman Who Lives In a Restaurant maps how people are weird but can reach vital, love-affirming arrangements around each other’s idiosyncrasies – a paean to acceptance and to love, however strange. There’s more. Mrs Neecy Brown, centre-stages a woman, drained by a faithless husband and needy, grown daughters. It’s a narrative that produces at its end three simultaneous, contradictory feelings:  a vicarious, bemused cynicism –  at the pious woman suddenly cast in a wanton shadow; a surge of pathos – aching for poor Mrs Brown to get some of the love she deserves; and a more distant, reflective vibe – on the strange twists life can take and how there is a piece of Mrs Brown in us all, the optimism of that thought. There’s more. Drag stars a young woman who at the story’s beginning feels more male than female and is writing a thesis on advertising. She picks up Michael in a Soho porn shop. They have sex and Jo insists Michael fucks her as if Jo were male not female.  There are three sections to this story, each divided by a centred asterix – a favourite marking device of LR’s to denote shifts in time and space. The story becomes Pinter-esque in its working through the personas. We see the duo again. In the second section, Jo / Josephine is masturbated to orgasm by Michael as she closes a business deal in a restaurant. Jump cut to seven years later and there’s a wedding.  Jo/Josephine dons a Cinderella-like wedding dress and, prior to the ceremony the couple make love. ‘We have never made love before,’ Jo tells him.  This comes across not as judgemental or sonorous, but as a distinction observed. So another sexual identity is introduced, another aspect of Jo’s identity opens up.  At the end of the story she runs off, abandoning, it feels like, all three identities – a defiance of conventional romance but also a refusal to be set down as one type, one way of being. I can imagine this story being filmed.  It would work well. Though I doubt  any Renee Zellweger – Hugh Grant type shctick would do it justice. My favourite story is Roll It. Set in Kingston, it begins with the line, ’The woman has fifteen minutes before she dies on the catwalk.’  I loved the deft weaving of Caribbean folkloric references (to the White Witch of Rose Hall, to the Rolling Calf myth etc). By turns, mysterious sweltering, shocking, macabre and phantasmagorical, the story trembles with ambiguous meaning. ‘Before she dies’ has many reverberations: the catwalk show theme is vampiric and there is lots of blood around, so it sounds metaphorical, not literal. And yet. As an attention grabber, it’s a brilliant first line and the rest of the story charges on in a blaze of righteous indignation, weary journalism, with the promise of redemption signalled by the transcendence metaphor allows. The main character is fashion designer, Parker Jones’s favourite model. Tellingly, she is never given a name. She’s beautiful and clever. She’s also dyslexic. She is vibrantly alive and wholly exploited by fashion industry celebrity, Parker (the story fore-shadows the 2017 furore that began around Weinstein and Hollywood). The triply horrific ending involves the macabre staging of Parker’s ghoul-themed catwalk parade, the heart-wringing horror of the young woman’s self-immolation and the moral horror of Parker’s indifference to the model’s fate, instead ‘swearing for his precious dress.’ Roll It shows beauty without warmth. It’s a mercilessly beautiful story. I could go on. The stories flik-flak between Kingston and London.  Other stories include a woman recovering from bariatric surgery…and… and… I now realise that reviewing short story collections is tricky. Nobody wants a reviewer to plough through every story in the collection offering a morsel from each one. So, stepping back for the larger picture… LR’s collection blends realism with a fabulous and at times astringent surrealism. She uses sharp, pithy, often simile-based images (“face like a streamed pudding.” “Hands a wedge of flesh”) that tend to cue up the transition from the real to the surreal. While the tones can be surreal, the stories are highly individuated, and often nightmary/dreamy. Taken together, the stories feel like an assertion of the richness of ordinary people’s internal lives, a richness that is often in stark contrast with their material struggles and with the way others’ see them. JR is a fabulously inventive, egalitarian writer.  ...