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Literary Review
ANTHOLOGY
Life and all that it entails
SHEILA KUMAR
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A set of heavyweights tell their tales
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The Deep End; Granta; £9.99
It’s a slim volume with an arresting cover, that of a lone swimmer doing a crawl in blue waters, beautifully offset by ominous gray clouds that all but obscure the bleak horizon. The list of writers who have contributed a short story each is a
known and formidable list, with the likes of Paul Theroux, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Diana Athill, Louise Carpenter.
Thought provoking
Appropriately enough, the stories are almost all deep, thought-provoking chronicles of the human condition. No real light touches here; “Clydeside”, which features evocative photographs of the Scottish town by the famed lensman Martin Parr, is a break in the written word but no less deep for that. You observe the snapshots closely, appreciate Parr’s eye but you definitely do not put the somewhat dreary Clydeside on your travel itinerary.
Theroux’s cold-eyed assessment of his parents, “Dear Old Dad”, is quite startlingly free of any sentiment. Definitely not a loving tribute, more in the nature of a “Daddy Dearest”. Chimamanda’s tale of the immigrant (yes, a fresh take) “On Monday Last Week”, was my pick of the lot. Her protagonist, a Nigerian woman freshly comes to the U.S. and baby-sitting an American child, thinks: “She had come to understand that American parenting was juggling of anxieties. It came with having too much food. A sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child may have a rare disease they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from the things that were part of life; disappointment and want and failure.”
Moving and deprecating
Jeremy Seabrook’s belated lament of his selfless aunt in “A Woman Wronged” is a moving excerpt from a family memoir. He details how a house of love becomes a house of correction under the gimlet eye of his martinet of a mother and the reader has to wince as the story winds down to its inevitably sad ending. Todd McEwen’s “Now a Major Motion Picture” is a deprecating look at literature in the post-Tech Age, a piece that would be funny if it didn’t ring such a true note.
The swimmers in “Morning Swimmers” face some revelations they would rather sacrifice their morning dip in the freezing river than hear. The book contains the occasional dreary tale, too, like “Hunter’s Moon”, and “The Last of the Smokers”, though the latter does have a real gem: “We were the grateful not yet deads”. Hugh Raffles’ “Cricket Fighting” yields up interesting nuggets only if you can plough through some turgid writing.
Louise Carpenter’s account of Ida Cook in “Ida and Louise” who was a sort of British Schindler and saved many a Jewish life during WWII is a most unusual tale told in excellent reportage style. Ida Cook has many fascinating sides to her… opera groupie, Mills and Boon author, saviour of the beleaguered Jews. Quite the stuff of real heroines.
“You are never entirely what you are but what others choose for you to be,” states Javier Cercas in “Agamemnon’s Truth” about a pair of look-alikes who share the same name, same physiognomic characteristics, and exchange lives… the symbolism fairly shouts out loud. “The Scan” has a description of an MRI that will have the reader forever look at the brain scan anew; elsewhere, Diana Athill looks back with a lot of wistfulness in the self-explanatory “Somewhere Towards The End”.
With The Deep End, Granta editor Ian Jack bids his readers farewell after a dozen years and 48 issues. Granta is the magazine of new writing which promises a dialogue in prose about prose, Jack says and you know that whoever helms the publication next, the tradition will live on. Thanks be.
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