WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO SURVIVE OUR TIME by A.L. Kennedy ( Cape £16.99, 288pp )
WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO SURVIVE OUR TIME
by A.L. Kennedy (Cape £16.99, 288pp)
The title of this dark, dangerously funny collection comes from the Voyager satellite which, as it journeyed into space, carried a recording of ‘the very brave and frail and hopeful’ message ‘we are attempting to survive our time’; a message entirely appropriate for Kennedy’s damaged, daunted but struggling-on characters.
Abusive childhoods, destructive relationships, brutal wars and terrible memories mar their lives, and, as bad as things get, the characters attempt to wrestle some Stoicism from a world where predators thrive and civilisation seems far away.
It’s an attitude that is best summed up by the punchy podcast host in New Mexico who’s getting her fifth tattoo, a skull garlanded with marigolds in memory of her murdered mother, determinedly ‘turning pain into beauty, because we can’.
HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE by Souvankham Thammavongsa ( Bloomsbury, £14.99, 192pp )
HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE
by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Bloomsbury, £14.99, 192pp)
The author was born in a Lao refugee camp in Thailand and grew up in Toronto. An award-winning poet, her poignant, affecting debut collection conversationally captures the everyday lives of immigrants and refugees who have moved to the city in the hope of better lives, with new traditions to learn and strange words to pronounce.
In the title story, a child protects her beloved father from his mispronunciations, keenly aware of ‘what else she would have to find out for herself’.
While in the charming Chick-A-Chee!, a brilliant, home-made, luminous Trick or Treat skeleton costume is met with squeals of delight by a younger brother, rather than envy, because ‘he knew that someday soon this outfit would be passed on to him like everything else I ever had’.
WILD SWIMS by Dorthe Nors ( Pushkin Press £9.99, 128pp )
WILD SWIMS
by Dorthe Nors (Pushkin Press £9.99, 128pp)
There are bottomless lakes in these brilliantly uneasy stories, and cold, ‘unknowable’ landscapes, creaking with snow and ice, as in her spare, elegant prose Nors eavesdrops on the inner lives and complicated emotions of her yearning characters.
In By Sydvest Station, two friends, Lina and Kirsten, collect money for a cancer charity, a good deed that is clouded by Lina’s boyfriend’s scepticism — ‘her head is full of what he said . . . that her love couldn’t be genuine’.
In Fairground, ‘something strange has taken residence’ in the narrator, a love so obsessive that she ‘reads signs in off-hand remarks, she researched his past, his possible sorrows’ as she stares at the empty space where a summer fairground stood.
While in the titular story, the melancholy remembrance of a childhood paddle hand in hand with Emilie, a now estranged little sister, surfaces at an uncomfortable swim in a chlorinated, local pool.