Attrib. and Other Stories
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- 69,00 kr
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- 69,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
This debut collection from Eley Williams centres upon the difficulties of communication and the way in which one's thoughts — absurd, encompassing, oblique — may never be fully communicable and yet can overwhelm.Attrib. and other stories celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. Correspondingly, the stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books. This is writing that centres on the weird, tender intricacies of the everyday where characters vie to 'own' their words, tell tall tales and attempt to define their worlds.
With affectionate, irreverent and playful prose, the inability to communicate exactly what we mean dominates this bold debut collection from one of Britain's most original new writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British writer Williams's diverting collection (after The Liar's Dictionary) combines wordplay and narrative to chart her characters' attempts to find meaning. In "The Alphabet," flirtation, romance, and memory are explored through each letter's attendant associations as the narrator, addressing her partner, loses her ability to express herself because of worsening aphasia (" ‘You can't spell aphrodisiac without aphasia,' you said later, trying to make a filthy joke out of it and holding me"). In "Concision," the narrator, while on a silent phone call with an erstwhile lover, meditates on words in other languages that have no analogue in English, such as the Finnish word löyly for a sauna's steam. "Spins," set during a London gloaming, demonstrates the author's acute powers of observation: "clouds make a candy-colour of the evening, the passers-by have conversations that marble together like endpapers." Williams is strongest, however, when she diverts from rhetorical games. In "Spines," a vacationing family notices a distressed hedgehog treading water in a pool. The question of whether to save it reveals the lesson-focused cruelty of the family patriarch: "If it thinks we'll scoop it out each time, it won't learn." Williams explores pathos and the dictionary with aplomb and a fresh voice. Anglophiles and linguistic schemers will savor this.
