If the “only true voyage of discovery”, according to Proust, “is not to visit strange lands but to behold through the eyes of another… the hundred universes that each of them beholds...” Patrick McGuinness’s magisterial anthology teems with universes from each of its 84 authors.
Beginning with Phillipe de Laon’s The Husband as a Doctor from the 15th century, it ends with Virginie Despentes’ wild 21st-century werewolf, Hairs on Me. McGuinness’s introduction eschews “focusing on ‘page count’ and ‘word limit’ as undifferentiated slabs of matter…” favouring “a genre that puts the reader in a unique relationship with time… the best short stories use their length as a resource, rather than… a limit… a further advantage… is uninterruptedness, the way it can be read (or heard) in one sitting.”
This is beautifully illustrated in Antonia White’s fine translation of Colette’s Green Sealing Wax. Following a deliciously detailed description of her father’s “‘desk furniture’” mania, the narrator concludes “It was ironical that, equipped with every conceivable tool for writing, my father rarely committed himself to putting pen to paper, whereas Sido – sitting at any old table, pushing aside an invading cat, a basket of plums, a pile of linen, or else just putting a dictionary on her lap by way of a desk – Sido really did write. A hundred enchanting letters prove that she did. To continue a letter or finish it off, she would tear a page out of her household account book or write on the back of a bill.”
McGuinness maintains: “The question is not ‘what is a short story?’ but ‘what can a short story be?’
McGuinness maintains: “The question is not ‘what is a short story?’ but ‘what can a short story be?’ French thought has a reputation for classifying and defining, and French literary history is the home of ‘-isms’: Naturalism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Existentialism…” There is no shortage of trailblazers here, classics by Georges Perec, Joris Carl-Huysman and Maupassant jostle beside less well-known gems by Xavier Forneret or Marcel Schwob, who influenced so many great writers yet is hardly known outside of France.
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Stephen Romer’s translation of Schwob’s The Sans-Gueules measures out its unique and exact blend of comic horror and piercing pathos. Prefiguring the horrific mutilations of the first World War, this is the tale of two soldiers disfigured in the Franco-Prussian war who are taken home by “a little lady” who is not sure which one is her husband. “The two broken pieces… that represented the loved one never joined together in her affections… her thoughts went regularly from one to the other, as if her soul were continually tilting like a balance… Smoking their pipes, sitting in the same attitude on their beds, blowing out the same plumes of smoke… they were her ‘two monkeys’, her red mannikins, her two little husbands, her burned men, her meaty rascals… She mothered them in turn, arranging their blankets, tucking in their sheets, mixing their wine… she played with them.”
‘Legacies of colonialism’
In Volume 2, the “legacies of colonialism” diversify the conversation. Guadeloupean Maryse Condé's terrific slice of memoir, Family Portrait, is unputdownable, “If someone had asked my parents what they thought about the second World War, they would have… replied it was the darkest period they had ever known. Not because France was cut in two or because of the camps in Drancy or Auschwitz… but because for seven long years they were deprived of… their trips to France. For them France was in no way the seat of colonial power. It was truly the Mother Country and Paris, the City of Light that lit up their lives.”
McGuinness is “fascinated by the way in which classic stories share… their narrative DNA with other forms of writing: the prose poem, for instance, with Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Charles Cros, who are included here..” McGuinness, a poet himself, has translated many of these prose poems as well as Félix Fénéon’s three-line novellas (which could also be classified as poems, proving just how slippery these categories can be). Fénéon’s compressed newspaper stories are nuggets of black irony, “La Verbeau hit Marie Champion square on the breasts, but burned his own eye, because a bowl of acid is not a precision weapon.”
The French short story’s influence has always extended far beyond its borders, and these volumes put the spotlight firmly on that unending, international conversation: “Jorge Luis Borges cites Schwob’s Imaginary Lives as an influence on his A Universal History of Infamy.” Could the intense observation and identification with aquatic life in Christian Garcin’s The Goldfish be related to Axolotl by Argentinian Julio Cortázar?
There is so much to discover in these stories – both history and food for short story lovers everywhere. To complete the Proust quote from the beginning of this review: “with men [and women!] like these we do really fly from star to star”.
