These are ordinary people. Mostly male, they are often fixated on small minutia, worried and fixated on something out of their control. The subjects vary wildly, from a weary window cleaner reflecting on his life around London before the recession of 2007; a reunion at a teacher’s funeral that hides an adolescent secret; a suburban oddball with a perchance for alternative medicine and a darker side; or a love letter never delivered to its recipient.
Unlike most conventional short stories, the short tales in this collection do not feature the practically ubiquitous beginning, middle and end structure. Instead, they are like a short snippet of ordinary life caught in an instant, like using God’s remote control. Because of this, the stories are not action filled or loaded with a punch-line or soaring end, content to simply show life at its most basic and fundamental. That’s not to say these aren’t deeply emotional tales, they are affecting by stripping away the artifice and bombast to reveal the fragile people beneath.
Two stories in particular hit me pretty hard. Mrs Kaminski is the rambling and disjointed interaction between Mrs Kaminski, an elderly and confused woman who has fallen over in the street and the nurse who is trying to establish what has happened. Mrs Kaminski’s dialogue is muddied and cyclical, absorbed in the past and Poland in particular, while the nurse’s tender questions try to keep her on track. It’s a real and shattering story told purely through dialogue and in only four pages that manages to reveal so much about her past and leaves a lump in the throat. Fusilli is a simple story about a man in the supermarket reflecting on his son’s service in Afganistan and that his final conversation with him was on the subject of something as dull as the nature of pasta. This leads him down the aisles as a form of pilgrimage and remembrance.
The fleeting and open-ended nature of these short stories will not appeal to everyone. But those who enjoy the idea of peeking into small subtle worlds will find much to love here. There is a real range of people and situations here, each finely crafted and delicately placed.