All the Lights

Начало книги

The short story requires precision and economy; no matter how verbose the prose stylist, all writers are bound by its formal constraints. Even with this in mind, Clemens Meyer’s work remains exceptionally lean, pared down, stripped bare. His stories are taut affairs, built — in the main — on short sentences, adjectiveless nouns and vernacular language. But while All the Lights appears simple, plain even, it swells and burns with complexity, subtlety and a strange kind of beauty. This is writing that basks in the terrifying possibility of now; that neither celebrates nor glamorises its cast of lost, lonely or otherwise impoverished characters, but presents them in situations that feel both authentic and devastatingly real. These are razor-blade slices of life, shorn of an overarching moral or social message.

The ‘now’ that each of the stories deals with is haunted by the past; it crops up in the most awkward places, stalks characters as they try to deal with the life the past has given them. In the opening story, ‘Little Death’, Meyer shows this confusion explicitly, hopscotching through time, allowing the past and the present to coexist in an uneasy, first-person present. Christian — if that is his name, we are never quite sure — is a construct of his own memory, a composite of all the people he has been and the person he has become, and the reader is left to piece his narrative together, from the loss of his silver wrist-watch, to leaving his apartment to sign on, to looking at the same apartment, evicted and drunk, passing a bottle to another victim of circumstance.

Читать дальше →