There is a commercial hierarchy in publishing which marks where money is most easily and quickly made at a given moment in the zeitgeist – the industry keeps a close watch on these trends. After all publishing companies need to stay in business. Perhaps even make a profit or two.
So we have forensic crime or romcom or up-lit or immigrant stories or sci-fi or light mystery or historical dramas or fantasy or erotica all battling for their moment in the sun. Which is often duly afforded them from time to time by the changing dictates of public taste.
But there are a few genres which, if they are lucky to be published at all, generally languish sad and neglected at the bottom of the revenue table and at the back of the bookstore. We all know which they are, because we so rarely buy them.
They are short stories and poetry.
I read short stories only occasionally. The most recent was Lauren Groff’s Florida and I remarked in a review that I posted at the time that a short story is it’s own microscope. Every word, every sentence, every phrase must count towards a 4 or 9 or 14 page plotlet. Every ounce of fat must be pared, only muscle must remain – lean, strong, compressed. Its fuel is its scarcity of on-page real estate.
And so, this collection by Diane Awerbuck. The difficulty in writing a cohesive review about short stories is often their spread; one cannot possibly cover each story in a collection. Even so, there are things to be said.
The first is that Awerbuck is an astonishingly good wordsmith, forging sentences and phrases dripping with allusion and dimensionality or just the music of finely wrought language. Part of joy in reading this book is to read a sentence, stop, savour, and go back and read that one sentence again, its effect amplified by the repetition.
This alone is worth the price of admission, but the stories themselves bear commentary. Some of the characters in the stories overlap and drag the reader through time. An insecure and barely post-pubescent teenager meeting a bunch of army boys on a train, [almost] losing her virginity some years later in another, sinking into the grief of the spurned lover in another, wrestling the certainty of a dread disease in another, communing with her late father long lost to suicide in another.
There are individual stand-alone stories too, an unlikely lust-soaked love story in 19th century Fish Hoek, a larger-than-life celebrity corpse on display in a funeral home and the kind attentions lavished on it by the mortuary make-up technician, a story of sin and redemption attending a death in a Karroo farmhouse.
Threading through this entire collection are commentaries around the big themes of a life closely examined – love, sex, death, meaning, family, self – each buried in stories that bring something new to these well-worn territories; a surprise (sometimes gentle, sometimes shocking) stalks every plot.
(There is the whiff of autobiography in many of the stories, some of which are borne out in the acknowledgements, which have the effect of wanting to have a wine-drenched dinner with the author to probe further.)
If you have not ever bought a short story collection, or have bought just a few, do yourself this favour and buy Inside your body there are flowers. And after you have finished this gorgeous outing spare a moment of gratitude for those publishers who bet the commercially impossible odds on books like these, simply just because it strikes them as the right thing to do (Karina Szczurek at Karavan Press in this case, others mentioned in Awerbuck’s acknowledgments).
karavanpress.com 