Fantastic Metropolis

Two landmark short story collections by practitioners of the fantastic were published this year: Jeff VanderMeer’s Secret Life and D. F. Lewis’s Weirdmonger. Although I had already read most of the stories in Secret Life, it is very satisfying to be able to revisit them between hardcovers and to trace the development of a writer I admire through the honest and illuminating ‘sleeve notes’ to each story. It’s a collection I would recommend to young writers looking for guidance and inspiration, and worth having for the beautiful title story and the extraordinary “Learning to Leave the Flesh” alone. Weirdmonger is a retrospective of epic proportions and even so, it only represents “a few nosegays culled from the mass” of its author’s published output. If the scent is more often of rotting than of blooming flowers, it accords well with the grotesque beauty of this withered wreath. Lewis’s imagination and use of language are unique.

Speaking of epics, I was one of many readers lured to Homer (better late than never) this year by the film Troy. Whatever the quality of the movie, it does seem to have got a lot of people interested in classical Greek literature, and that can’t be bad. What struck me most about The Iliad, through all its relentless death and blood, was its complete refusal to moralise or comment. The greatest literature portrays human experience as truly as possible, and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions. The same could be said of the equally grisly and relentless The Secret History by Donna Tartt—the most compelling account of the squalor and chaos (both physical and emotional) of student life that I have ever read.

No fewer than three books have appeared this year from the prolific Zoran Živković, who never ceases to amaze me with the supple inventiveness of his writing. Through Hidden Camera, Compartments and Four Stories Till the End he continues to pursue his complex meditations on love, death and art without ever being less than compulsively readable. Camera and Compartments are companion pieces and should be read side by side for a full appreciation of their glimmering subtleties; the Four Stories are linked by a tight mesh of symbols and narrative structures which leave you thinking and rethinking them over like some Rubik’s puzzle. It’s also some of the most excoriating satire Živković has yet written.

I wouldn’t like to end this 2004 account without mentioning some of the other cultural highlights of the year—in film, the astonishing Touching the Void and the bleak and heartbreaking Russian road movie The Return; in theatre, a Serbian production of Faust Part II which took the concept of avant garde to a new level, and the absolutely devastating First World War piece Journey’s End by R. C. Sheriff; in art, Paula Rego’s brilliant lithographs for Jane Eyre, bringing to light symbols and subtext in a novel whose secret meanings are still emerging after nearly 160 years.

Tamar Yellin’s The Genizah at the House of Shepher is released in March 2005 by The Toby Press. For further details and ordering information please visit the publisher’s website.