Home > 2010, 21st Century, British Literature, Short Stories > The Best British Short Stories 2011. Part II

The Best British Short Stories 2011. Part II

The Best British Short Stories 2011, presented by Nicholas Royle.

Here is the second post about The Best British Short Stories 2011 published by Salt Publishing. As in the first one, I will only mention the short stories I preferred in the last ten ones. It’s my personal taste; it doesn’t mean that the others aren’t good.

The Rental Heart is SF, it takes the expression “heartbroken” literally and imagines what would happen if someone leaves you and afterwards your heart is actually “shatter[ed] like a shotgut pellet, shards lodging in [your] guts” Kirsty Logan imagines you could rent a new heart and change it when you change of partner. That leads us to feelings and emotions without risk, very intriguing. It’s a symptom of our societies where risk is a bad thing. In France the “principe de précaution” was included in the constitution in 2005. We want security in our everyday life. Love is a risk for your heart. Kirsty Logan fantasies about a way to secure your heart against pain, scratches and other marks. It made me think. I even started to imagine what kind of novel it could be, a world where broken hearts don’t exist.

Notes on a Love Story is an original tale in its form. As mentioned in the title, the important here are the notes. The short story is constructed around a four pages story of Sam and Sarah leaving London to spend a week-end in Sussex. It’s not that important. It’s a pretext to include long notes and digressions. Sam is a writer and in one note, he thinks about our expectation of love. We learn about love and relationships in stories (books or films). He says that as a writer he contributes to creating the imagery of what a love relationship could be. At the same time, his own love stories influence his writing. It’s a circle and as a circle, it has no beginning and no end. Well done, Philip Langeskov.

Slut’s Hair is about a woman harassed by her husband. I was horrified by what happens in that short story.

“Three years. That was all the time it had taken for him to become somebody she didn’t know, and make her into somebody she didn’t recognise in the mirror, somebody who had given up her job because he told her to, somebody who would sit in a chair at the kitchen table and let him prise her teeth out with electrician’s pliers. Now, she was sick and in pain, and all she wanted to do was get away from him, but she knew she couldn’t. She was too scared.”

The atmosphere is full of anxiety, violence and self-depreciation. I needed to pause in my reading, gasping for air. As a woman, her fear of him reached me. No one should be living that way.

Tristam and Isolde made me feel ill at ease right from the start. The crushing love described sounded unhealthy, I couldn’t explain to myself why I felt so compelled to twitch on my chair. It’s remarkably constructed and the ending, unexpected but so rational when you think about it afterwards, is well brought up.

When the Door Closed, It Was Dark made me claustrophobic. I felt compassion for that poor girl sent as an au pair in a developing country among strangers who have quite another conception of family and individual liberties than her. I would have wanted to steal her from there and put her on the first plane home.

I liked Epiphany too, where Charlie meets his father for the first time after he looked for him. His personal history is not what his mother had told him and he has to swallow a bunch of disturbing news.  

It took me a while to read that collection because I didn’t want to read two stories in a row. As they are from different writers, I found it hard to switch from one atmosphere to the other just by turning a page. I wonder what these short stories mean about today’s Great Britain. Reading your writers, it’s not a funny place to live. I didn’t laugh a lot, I’m afraid. Where’s your legendary sense of humour? Did I miss something as English isn’t my native language? Diner of the Dead Alumni was the only entertaining one. Otherwise, the themes are rather dark: war, death, broken hearts, harassment, panic in closed environments, oedipal love, strange fascination for birds, rotten marriages…Several stories took the breath out of me, not with fascination but with stress as their setting is in a heavy atmosphere. SF and ghost stories are well represented, with at least five stories. Several stories played upon the relationship between the reader and the writer, showing the process of creation.

If I had to choose five stories among the twenty, it would be Emergency Exit by Lee Rourke (best style, really), Love Silk Food by Leone Ross (great construction of the story and wonderful style), The Rental Heart by Kirsty Logan (original idea, efficient style but not so imaginative), Notes on a Love Story by Philip Langeskov (thought provoking in the form and the substance) and Slut’s Hair by John Burnside (chilling).  

The End.

__________________________________________________________________________

Here is the list of the short stories included in this collection:

  1. July 23, 2011 at 9:11 pm

    Are you tempted to try any other works by any of these authors? I found Jonathan Coe through a short story.

    Like

    • July 23, 2011 at 9:15 pm

      Yes for the five ones I preferred.

      Like

      • July 24, 2011 at 1:13 am

        Burnside has one that looks interesting: The Devil’s Footprints

        Like

        • July 24, 2011 at 1:31 pm

          It sounds like the name of a mountain landscape. I’ll check this one thanks

          Like

  2. July 24, 2011 at 12:44 pm

    Emma, I’m afraid these stories depict Britain as it is, as I have seen it depicted in recent movies as I have heard it described by many, which is one of the reasons so many Brits I know do not want to go back ever. Burnside has, I belive a very good reputation. Slut’s Hair sounds like some stories Banyard mentioned in the Equality Illusion. I would like to read it.
    I’m sorry you didn’t mention Hillary Mantel, she is said to be one of the best contemporary writers. I got a novel and a memoir.
    I like ghost stories, I would maybe like those.
    What struck me is that you had very emotinal reactions to some of these stories. Apart from the review on What Masie Knew I’ve hardly read such a strong reaction coming from you.

    Like

    • July 24, 2011 at 1:29 pm

      Of course I can’t tell if it’s a good vision of today’s Britain. I don’t want to generalise from 20 short stories. After all I’m not sure French writers give a cheerful vision of France.
      I didn’t mention Hilary Mantel because I thought her stories rather average. Maybe she wasn’t at her best with these ones.
      I had really strong reactions to some stories, yes. I can’t explain why except that I’m always touched by violence to women or bad treatments of children
      I haven’t read Olmi’Bord de mer yet because I expect that kind of reactions. Silly I know but reading can be physical sometimes.

      Like

  3. July 24, 2011 at 2:15 pm

    No, it is not silly at all.
    I did deduce that Mantel’s stories were not so good which I find disappointing. Maybe another one who isn’t good at short fiction.

    Like

  1. April 27, 2014 at 6:38 am

I love to hear your thoughts, thanks for commenting. Comments in French are welcome

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Literary Potpourri

A blog on books and other things literary

Adventures in reading, running and working from home

Liz Dexter muses on freelancing, reading, and running ...

Book Jotter

Reviews, news, features and all things books for passionate readers

A Simpler Way

A Simpler Way to Finance

Buried In Print

Cover myself with words

Bookish Beck

Read to live and live to read

Grab the Lapels

Widening the Margins Since 2013

Gallimaufry Book Studio

“To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.” -- Ursula K. Le Guin

Aux magiciens ès Lettres

Pour tout savoir des petits et grands secrets de la littérature

BookerTalk

Adventures in reading

The Pine-Scented Chronicles

Learn. Live. Love.

Contains Multitudes

A reading journal

Thoughts on Papyrus

Exploration of Literature, Cultures & Knowledge

His Futile Preoccupations .....

On a Swiftly Tilting Planet

Sylvie's World is a Library

Reading all you can is a way of life

JacquiWine's Journal

Mostly books, with a little wine writing on the side

An IC Engineer

Just another WordPress.com weblog

Pechorin's Journal

A literary blog

Somali Bookaholic

Discovering myself and the world through reading and writing

Australian Women Writers Challenge Blog

Supporting and promoting books by Australian women

Lizzy's Literary Life (Volume One)

Celebrating the pleasures of a 21st century bookworm

The Australian Legend

Australian Literature. The Independent Woman. The Lone Hand

Messenger's Booker (and more)

Australian poetry interviews, fiction I'm reading right now, with a dash of experimental writing thrown in

A Bag Full Of Stories

A Blog about Books and All Their Friends

By Hook Or By Book

Book Reviews, News, and Other Stuff

madame bibi lophile recommends

Reading: it's personal

The Untranslated

A blog about literature not yet available in English

Intermittencies of the Mind

Tales of Toxic Masculinity

Reading Matters

Book reviews of mainly modern & contemporary fiction

roughghosts

words, images and musings on life, literature and creative self expression

heavenali

Book reviews by someone who loves books ...

Dolce Bellezza

~for the love of literature

Cleopatra Loves Books

One reader's view

light up my mind

Diffuser * Partager * Remettre en cause * Progresser * Grandir

South of Paris books

Reviews of books read in French,English or even German

1streading's Blog

Just another WordPress.com weblog

Tredynas Days

A Literary Blog by Simon Lavery

Ripple Effects

Serenity is golden... But sometimes a few ripples are needed as proof of life.

Ms. Wordopolis Reads

Eclectic reader fond of crime novels

Time's Flow Stemmed

Wild reading . . .

A Little Blog of Books

Book reviews and other literary-related musings

BookManiac.fr

Lectures épicuriennes

Tony's Reading List

Too lazy to be a writer - Too egotistical to be quiet

Whispering Gums

Books, reading and more ... with an Australian focus ... written on Ngunnawal Country

findingtimetowrite

Thinking, writing, thinking about writing...

%d bloggers like this: