Seen and not heard

THE world of childhood memories is a strange playground, shunned by many writers - or approached with such acute circumspection that one knows it is as volatile and dangerous as nitroglycerine. The extreme nature of the diversity of approach confirms this, ranging from Alice Miller's concentration camps for little people to Alice Taylor's doses of sentimental syrup.

What better guide, however, could one have into such dubious regions than the finest of writers armed with incisive observation, compassionate detachment, intellectual acuity, wry humour and a breathtaking sense of truth and morality? These are some of the best and most moving short stories one could hope to read, and the jacket blurb's declaration of a "dazzling collection" is entirely appropriate.

An anthology can only be as good as its editor, reflecting his or her standards of excellence. One need only read Lorrie Moore's introduction to know that a keen intelligence and a fine sensibility govern the compilation. She speaks of evolving consciousness, ferocious poignancy, makeshift intelligence, a bruised sense of home, wildly idiosyncratic antennae and, above all, the overwhelming need to know "The stones included here, then, are less about a Romantic notion of childhood as unconscious intercourse with beauty than they are about childhood as a state of formidable awareness raw, secretive, tallying, assertive, forgiving or unforgiving."

The stories come from a variety of countries including Canada, Nigeria and Sri Lanka and are written by such international luminaries as Margaret Atwood, Amy Tan and Alice Munro, along with lesser known authors who write with equal mastery. That 230 are written by women to 13 by men may indicate a greater propensity by female writers to look back or return home - certainly a contrast in theme is notable by gender, with sex and death predominant in the stories by male writers while the complexities of relationships dominate those by females. One is left to muse whether the reality of boys and girls is so different, or does the division lie in the reflections of grown men and women?

Some of the stories, such as Sandra Cisneros's sprightly ode to secondhand dolls, Barbie Q, are no more than two pages in length; others, such as Spalding Gray's famous Sex and Death to the Age 14, meander like a child's mind, spanning time and events and pages. And who could not smile knowingly at Richard McCann's litany of "Our Mother of the mixed messages; our Mother of sudden attentiveness; our Mother of sudden distances; our Mother of anger; our Mother of apology.

Did no one talk to their kids back then? Edna O'Brien answers; "a child was not supposed to talk or have any wants." One of the saddest recurring themes must be the unrequited love of the child for the oblivious, ever distant parent, be it mother or father.

Moore herself comments on the distant or absent nature of the father in many of the stories and attributes - this to culture and era. She does not comment on the fact that all these "contemporary" stories are set in the 1940s and 1950s, with the odd - few in the 1960s. Post Victorian childhoods were marked by the great divide between adult and child and the withholding of information from children, for whatever reason. It would be fascinating to compare a more contemporary" collection of childhood stories by younger writers. Recent generations have been granted access to an ever increasing glut of information and they may have benefitted, one hopes, from a more open and humanitarian attitude towards our young. {CORRECTION} 97051700068