Little Black Book Of Stories (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
This review originally ran in the San Jose Mercury News on May 2, 2004: Look at -- no, better yet, listen to the way this story begins: ''There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest.'' How can you not read that story? As that sentence delicately steps from naive to sinister, it evokes the shivery delights of campfire tales. Which is precisely what A.S. Byatt intends it to do. The first of the five stories in her slim but extraordinary new collection, ''Little Black Book of Stories,'' ''The Thing in the Forest'' cycles through several modes -- once-upon-a-time fable, reminiscence, horror story, psychological realism -- before it ends with the sentence that began it, implying that the characters are caught in some horrifically inescapable loop. Byatt is working here on the margins of the genre associated with Stephen King, though she equals King in fecundity of imagination, far excels him in mastery of language and thought, and manages to give us the delicious creeps without succumbing to the gratuitous vulgarity of shock-lit. What the two little girls see, or believe they see, in the forest is evil embodied, a foul creature with ''a liquid smell of putrefaction, the smell of maggoty things at the bottom of untended dustbins, the smell of blocked drains, and unwashed trousers, mixed with the smell of bad eggs, and of rotten carpets and ancient polluted bedding.'' Or is it that what they see is what they have done? For all of these stories, even the ones in which the supernatural plays an apparent role, are about the way imagination shapes reality or cushions us against it -- but only up to a point, for reality has a way of asserting itself after all. In ''Body Art,'' Damian, an ob-gyn, becomes involved with Daisy, an artist, but is appalled when he discovers that she has appropriated items from the hospital's valuable collection of antique medical instruments to create a sculpture of the goddess Kali: ''Her four arms were medical prostheses, wooden or gleaming mechanical artefacts, ending in sharp steel and blunt wooden fingers, and one hook, from which hung what looked like a real shrunken head, held by the hair. Her earrings were preserved foetuses, decked with beads, enclosed in mahogany-framed glass jars like hourglasses. She brandished a surgical saw in another hand, and the final two arms were crocheting something in an immense tangle of crimson plastic cords. Her crochet hooks were the tools of the nineteenth-century obstetricians, midwives and abortionists; the dreadful formless knitting glittered like fresh blood.'' Damian insists that the sculpture be removed from the gallery and the implements returned to the hospital, but it's not just the grotesque and unauthorized use of the instruments that disturbs him. For he has always been attracted to Daisy, and by the end of the story both of them will face something neither has anticipated: that life can be more terrifyingly uncertain than those things that are often regarded as life's antithesis -- art and death. Byatt's love of specialized and esoteric lore can make her fiction somewhat lumpy, as the narrative dodges around all manner of intellectual preoccupations. The novella ''Morpho Eugenia'' in her book ''Angels and Insects,'' for example, is aswarm with lepidopterology, and her most recent novel, ''A Whistling Woman,'' was a jumble of everything from Chomskyan linguistics to the sex life of snails. In this collection, ''A Stone Woman'' tells how the protagonist, Ines, discovers that her body is gradually petrifying -- literally. And not just into ordinary rock, but into a variety of minerals and gemstones. Byatt's foray into mineralogy adds to the story's richness and strangeness. Here's a bit from her account of Ines' transformation: ''She observed its beginnings in the mirror one morning, brushing her hair -- a necklace of veiled swellings above her collar-bone which broke slowly through the skin like eyes from closed lids, and became opal -- fire opal, black opal, geyserite and hydrophane, full of watery light. . . . She saw dikes of dolerites, in graduated sills, now invading her inner arms. But it took weeks of patient watching before . . . she surprised a bubble of rosy barite crystals, breaking through a vein of fluorspar, and opening into the form known as a desert rose, bunched with the ore flowers of blue john.'' This gorgeous specificity is certainly over the top, and some will object that such virtuoso cataloging weighs the story down. But it's also what keeps ''A Stone Woman'' from dwindling into allegory -- the story of a woman who turns into stone could easily have been a preachy parable, either feminist or anti-feminist, but Byatt is working in the realm of myth, as she sends Ines to her destiny in a land of stone -- Iceland. Anchoring her story in physical reality gives it a substance and depth that such a fantasy would otherwise lack. Fantasy is also present in ''The Pink Ribbon,'' about a man whose wife, sunk into senile dementia, is oddly fascinated by the Teletubbies. At night, the man is visited by a mysterious woman who claims to be a ''fetch,'' the spirit of a living being, the embodiment of his younger, saner wife. Byatt's audacious trick is to play off the familiar but truly bizarre fantasy of a children's TV show against the sad, melancholy but somehow genuine fantasy of the haunted husband. But my favorite story in the collection is not a fantasy. ''Raw Material'' is about a failed novelist, Jack Smollett, who teaches creative writing courses to adults in provincial English cities. His students write cliche-ridden stories full of rape, torture and murder -- sometimes working out their own revenge fantasies: e.g., ''A tale of the entrapment and vengeful slaughter of an unjust driving examiner.'' Then one of the students, Cicely Fox, a woman in her 80s, hands in something extraordinary: an essay titled ''How We Used to Black-lead Stoves.'' Dazzled by this elegantly written memoir of a childhood chore, Jack reads it to his students, who react to it with hostility and ''merciless adjectives'': '' 'Slow.' 'Clumsy.' 'Cold.' 'Pedantic.' 'Pompous.' 'Show-off.' 'Over-ornate.' 'Nostalgic.' '' But Cicely is unperturbed, even when her next essay, ''Wash Day,'' gets the charge of being ''overwritten'' from the class, which begins to shun her as ''teacher's pet.'' (The contrast of Cicely's simple, eloquent, marvelously detailed essays with the portrayal of Jack's sour cynicism and his students' relentless banality is superb -- Byatt's astonishing gift for voices has never been better displayed than in this story.) Secretly, without informing Cicely of his plan, Jack enters her essays in a writing contest -- and they win. But when he goes to tell her of her prize, he makes a shocking discovery. Yet, tellingly, the story doesn't end with Jack's discovery. In none of these stories is Byatt out for cheap thrills -- even at their most sensational, they are vehicles for reflection. Byatt's novels have always struck me as unfocused and restless, as if she were a little bored with having to live with the same characters for so long. But the short story concentrates her strengths; the very conciseness of the form doesn't allow her to dawdle or divagate. And these are stories that are extraordinarily varied in style and emotional texture, from the mythic in ''The Stone Woman'' to the mundane in ''Raw Material,'' and from the unspoken guilt that lingers in ''The Thing in the Forest,'' to the sexual tension of ''Body Art,'' to the regret that haunts ''The Pink Ribbon.'' ''Little Black Book of Stories'' is abundant proof of Byatt's greatness as a writer.
Byatt no es una mujer fácil. Esto es Goodreads, así que muchos -¿todos?- los que estamos aquí conocemos ese meme: “La mayoría de las personas no sabe cómo reaccionar cuando una frase no acaba del modo en que ella salchicha”. Así me he quedado yo con algunos de los relatos de este libro. Bien escritos hasta el punto de querer leerlos en V.O. y tanto como para agradecer su labor al traductor, inteligentes, ágiles y removedores. De los que se te pegan a las arterias, como el colesterol malo. Y sin embargo…La cosa del bosqueDos mujeres se encuentran al comienzo y al final de sus vidas. Ambas las han vivido de modo paralelo, ambas marcadas por un episodio del que no se habla. Como las familias no hablan de aquello que pasó. Un relato despersonalizado y un poco frío, pero in quietante. Para leer despacio.Arte corporalUn final demasiado abierto para unos personajes febriles, muy pasionales. Una mezcla de Sagrada Familia muy impía, en la que el ángel anunciador tiene un papel protagonista. Una mujer de piedraAquí comenzó el libro a interesarme de verdad. Una mujer se convierte en piedra tras la muerte de su madre. Poco a poco, con un lenguaje rico, millonario. Ni siquiera conocía muchas de las palabras con las que está escrito el relato. La protagonista evoluciona al mismo tiempo que su cuerpo se transforma y no, no se le endurece el corazón. Una especie de fábula –sin animales- bonita y oscura.Material en brutoMi favorito porque no termina en salchicha. Habla de lo que se muestra, de lo que se oculta, de la actitud grupal, de prejuicios, violencia y rencores. Con dos interludios impresionantes –porque impresionan- y de nuevo esa prosa envidiable.La cinta RosaNo es mi favorito, pero es el mejor de los 5. Ancianos, alzheimer, desamor y la posguerra mundial en Inglaterra. Tiene todo lo que necesita para enamorarme y un final que depende del lector. Igual que el final de “Arte corporal” me dejó fría; en este caso agradezco la posibilidad de que depensa de mí.Un lujo de autora, un lujo de lenguaje y una visión del miedo (no del terror, del miedo) muy acorde con mis expectativas y mis deseos.4 estrellas de 5 porque cada vez necesito más ritmo y estos relatos, en ocasiones, tienen demasiados meandros para un río poco caudaloso.Aplausos.
What do You think about Little Black Book Of Stories (2005)?
A good story makes me want to read the next one; a great one makes me close the book, almost involuntarily. I want to read the next one, but not yet, not yet. There were several such stories in this little volume of five short stories.Byatt, here, is inventive and unexpected. She brings characters rapidly to life and into their strange fates, and captures moments of vivid humanity. The stories are both dark and luminous. The least strong, in my opinion, is "Body Art," which seemed slightly contrived; my favorite, I believe, was "The Pink Ribbon."
—Felicity
The Thing in the Forest ****Body Art ***** (lovely)A Stone Woman ***** (exquisite)Raw Material ***The Pink Ribbon ****ONCE UPON A TIME there was magic immersed in real life. Magic! And magic was palpable…just like in fairy tales and people believed in it. When exactly in the evolution of humanity did we lose the ability to believe in what we could not see? When did we forget that there are things which cannot be explained by science, that our world is not only populated by visible beings, but also by invisible creatures? These are some of the questions that Dame Byatt wants to make the reader of this book think of.Usually fairy tales have happy endings: the prince and the princess get married after struggling with opposite forces, the dichotomy good versus evil is ever-present and good defeats evil with no exception. In Byatt’s stories however, real life takes over: rather than focusing on how people get together and stopping at that, Byatt’s princesses and princes, heroines and heroes (who are actually real people) have to face consequences after an important moment from their lives. In Byatt’s imagined worlds there is no such thing as happy ending…maybe this is why the volume is called “Little BLACK Book of Stories”. All the stories from this volume are good, but there are two which are really amazing: “Body Art” and “Stone Woman”. I will only talk a little bit about the second one because it’s fresher in my mind.Ines, whose mother has recently died, starts noticing after a surgery that her body is turning to stone. While looking for a place where to stay when her metamorphosis is complete, she meets a stone mason from Iceland. He tells him her secret and he invites her to Iceland, after telling her stories about trolls and their transformation over time. They go together to this “primal chaos of ice, stone silt, black sand, gold mud” (Iceland) and her metamorphosis is completed there. Byatt explores in this story many aspects related to stones and she creates very plastic descriptions:“The mind of stone lovers had colonized stones as lichens cling to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles; phyllite is leafy-green.”or“Labradorite is dark blue, soft black, full of gleaming lights, peacock and gold and silver, like the aurora borealis embedded in hardness.” In the context of this story which takes place in Iceland, the valences of this phrase are simply exquisite.A wonderful book which made me highly appreciate Byatt's sharpness, eloquence and way with words, a book which made me want to see Iceland very soon and made me read about artists such as Matisse and his contemporaries and a book which convinced me to explore her literary abilities further in the near future. Highly recommended for anyone who still believes in magic.
—Deea
This would be a 2.5, but I'll bump it up to 3 for writing quality alone. Not sure how I feel about this one. Honestly, the reviews on the back of the book blew it so out of proportion that I felt I should feel underwhelmed, so the fact that I am is all the more disappointing. Ms. Byatt certainly knows how to turn a phrase, but her stories never found the niche I desired. Were they intended to be creepy? Insightful? Mesmerizing? One cannot know. I think I hold short stories to a higher standard because I've read some truly incredible ones over the years, so finishing all five of these with barely feeling an ounce of fascination for the character stories is another reason I rate so harshly. I do believe the last story, "The Pink Ribbon," was the highlight of the collection. This story did captivate me on a larger scale, and the final paragraphs gave me the "Aha" moment I desired. Short, sweet, and a conclusion I agreed with but still surprised me, I wish more of the book had been like this.
—Claire Monahan
