Valparaiso,
Round the Horn by Madeleine ffitch
4 stars
Pages: 246
Pages: 246
Guest review by Kate
Vane
It’s taken me a while to write this review and these stories
have grown in my mind since I read them. They are engaging, funny and a little
strange, and it takes a while to absorb the complexity that underlies them.
The author has a very distinctive prose style. There is a
beautiful rhythm to the writing. This hits you from the first sentence of the
first story, a long, meandering statement that includes three lines of
dialogue. Grammar geeks might lie awake wondering if it even is a sentence. I just wanted to keep
reading and find out where it would take me.
The characters in these stories are outsiders. Sometimes
they have rebelled, but often they stand apart from others without conscious
choice, or even awareness. They look at the world aslant but they are rounded
and real, never kooky or contrived. Their difference is echoed in the distinctive
prose and the sly, surprising humour.
The narrator of “A Sow, on the Lam” is an academic
monitoring the decline into extinction of a turtle so unappreciated that even
her fellow marine biologists are content to let its demise pass unmarked. She
is thrilled when a public radio journalist comes to cover the turtles’ story
but the journalist is more interested in the pig farmers whose work is
destroying the turtles’ habitat.
In “Fort Clatsop” a girl lives with her father who works at
a progressive school as a janitor (or as they would have it, custodian). He
tells her vivid stories about his past and rails against the “plain people”.
When her teacher makes the class write about why they would like to be a
janitor (custodian), the girl suddenly sees her father as others see him.
In “The Big Woman” a man is caught between worlds. He is building
the dream home of an overachieving obsessive who makes him shout out what he is
doing as he performs each task, in the name of productivity. He lives uneasily
next to a family of thieves. All the while he is waiting for his own dream to
be fulfilled by a big woman coming out of the woods.
Be warned, these stories, with their insistent rhythm and
unique perspective, stay with you like a tune you can’t get out of your head.
Kate Vane writes crime
and literary fiction. Her latest novel is Not the End. She lives on the Devon coast in the UK.
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