Things Look Different in the Light & Other Stories

Начало книги

In the story by Medardo Fraile called ‘The Bookstall’, a man starts to buy books from a stall where the wares are generally so weathered that they’ve become more object than book, like rain-soaked slabs of sod — so much so that if he gives one a “squeeze” he can actually smell “the earth and the air, the rain and the sun” in it. At the end of this story, a story about inevitable disintegration, the man is living in a state of hope and delight. What he hopes is that “one day a novel would simply crumble to dust in his hands”, and what has “surprised and delighted” him most is that inside his latest purchase he has found “a small, dead toad”—quite real, quite dead—“but it seemed to him very beautiful”.

This is reminiscent for a fleeting moment of the American twentieth-century poet Marianne Moore who once defined our true poets as the “literalists of the imagination”, the writers most able to present to their readers “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. It’s a little subconscious nudge, maybe, from Fraile, for us to bear in mind that the dividing line between the forms of short story and poem is often thin and permeable, and that one of the most exciting things that literary forms can do is cross the lines, not just between each other, but between the imagined and the real, between the book and the world, to make a specific, literary and very real kind of surprise and delight.

Читать дальше →