Its understated tone is perfectly pitched: the narrative moves gently, then soars, into either sadness, or joyful contentment – again and again. It captures the all-encompassing intrusion of the world and its conditioning of our day-to-day emotions, our children’s colonisation of our hearts and our powerlessness ultimately to protect them. The piece has warm intimacy as well as cold spaces within it. It ends with a brief conversation between the narrator, Faith, and her 18-year-old son. This story tracks three friends as they visit a fourth who is dying. “So it is with all our dreams,” noted Flaubert. Sand died before she was able to read it. It also exemplifies the Flaubertian principle that irony and sympathy are not incompatible. Control of tone is central to its effect. It has a sombre novelistic density, and is touching and tender, comic and grotesque. It’s the story of Félicité, an old servant-woman, and the diminishing loves in her life, the final one being a (live – at first) parrot. “A Simple Heart” by Gustave Flaubert (1877)įlaubert wrote this story for his old friend and “fellow troubadour” George Sand. The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, will be published on 7 March. Lampedusa’s description renders this fatefully seductive creature specific, vulnerable and real. There are even two titles though published as “La Sirena”, it was originally called “Lighea”, the name of the siren, portrayed as a 16-year-old girl. It contains two narrative planes, two central protagonists, two settings, two tonal registers and two points of view. In addition to his celebrated novel The Leopard, he left behind some short stories, including “The Siren”, a mysterious masterpiece that jolts and haunts me every time I read it. Photograph: Alice Munro./Alamy “The Siren” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1961)īorn in Palermo in 1896, Lampedusa was a learned prince who died before his work was published. Tessa HadleyĪlice Munro carries us deep inside particular moments.
A woman moves among the willows beside a river at night, making up her mind. The sociology of a small town in rural Ontario is caught on the wing in the loose weave of her narration the story takes in whole lifetimes, and yet its pace is also exquisitely slow, carrying us deep inside particular moments. Like so many of Munro’s stories, this one has the scope of a novel yet never feels hurried or crowded. It’s about a murder – probably it’s a murder, because nothing is certain – and a love match that depends on keeping that murder secret. George Saunders “The Love of a Good Woman” by Alice Munro (1998)Īmong the handful of short stories closest to my heart, I’ve chosen “The Love of a Good Woman” by Canadian writer Munro, from her 1998 collection of that name. A wonderful sampling of her stories is available in Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories. Berriault, who died in 1999, is known as a San Francisco writer. But it is a much deeper and more biblical story than that and, like any great work of art, resists reduction. This great and underrated masterpiece is a meditation on good and evil and especially about the way that people’s expectations and assumptions about us may wear us down and eventually force us into compliance with their view.
I must have read it a dozen times, to see how its note is sustained and the surprise is sprung every time it makes me smile with delight. Mostly dialogue, it is a deft, witty tale in which a small kindness – though not by a diplomatic wife – pays off 40 years later. Reading this gleeful story in my expatriate days, I recognised the cast of “diplomatic wives”, trailing inebriate husbands through the ruins of empire. John McGahern and Annie Proulx are among my favourite authors, but to dispel gloom I choose this story from Jane Gardam’s 1980 collection The Sidmouth Letters.