Despite suffering from a viral infection (had to look it up: Pharyngitis), I did manage to read some bits and pieces. I wanted to give my thoughts on a few stories here.
I (finally) finished Jeffrey Ford’s short story collection, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories moments ago. For unknown reason, I had put off finishing the third last short story “Floating in Lindrethool” for a long time. The book page marker stuck in the book was bugging me after a while, though. For a couple of days now first thing in the morning when I woke up, I would stare at that blue piece of paper sticking out the beautifully bound hardcover of Golden Gryphon Press. And if that marker wasn’t enough already, the empty space between a copy of Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Inferior (which I still haven’t read - much to my shame) and Ford’s other short collection The Empire of Ice Cream was enough to convince the book needed to be read in order to comfortably reshelve it again where it belonged. So in three short reading sessions, it has gotten back to shelf. Which is, on a related side note, one of the biggest advantages of reading short fiction over novels. You won’t have to commit to reading a (nearly) 900 pages thick tome (cough Perdido Street Station cough).
I will only comment on the last three stories of the collection, because those three are still fresh in my mind. Suffice it to say that Ford’s collection is fantastic. I think I like his second collection (The Empire of Ice Cream) better, only by a small margin though. This book has gone out of print now but there are tentative plans for a trade paperback release, which will hopefully make it more accessible to the general audience. Ford is deserving of such.
The third last story I tackled was, as I said, Floating in Lindrethool (available online). Part Death of a Saleman, part Science Fiction - wholly imaginative. The story concerns itself with the misfortunes of Slackwell, whose job it is to sell brains in a jar for a big brother like corporation. Ford treats the classic Science Fiction trope as something mundane, and in this rendering his skill is apparent. In one of my posts on Fantasybookspot after I had read Empire I wrote “[..] has the ability to turn the mundane into something magical and turn the magical into something mundane”. This story is one of the most striking examples of that ability, which I admire him so for. The ending did not came much as a surprise, at least not if you are familiar with Arthur Miller’s play.
The second last story, High Tea with Jules Verne was of shorter length. The title is also the synopsis of the story. I thought it was actually one of the lesser story of this volume to be honest, because Ford seems somewhat restrained. In most stories he creates enough atmosphere for the bizarre, the magical and the mundane but in this story, basically a drawn-out dialogue, structure seemed to limit the imagery. There were some nice touches in the person of Jules Verne himself and the allusions to various works. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling it was one of the lesser pieces Ford has written.
The collection ended on a high, though, with the fabulous Bright Morning. It is Jeffrey Ford at his best and at his most authentic, when I like him best. His recounting of clamfishing in The Trentino Kid was wonderful, the tropical wall paint in A Night in the Tropics was brilliantly rendered, his adventures as a kid growing up in Botch Town were hugely intoxicating and so on. Bright Morning contains biographic elements, despite the neat trick Ford pulls off in the end and it has that good old, slightly sentimental Jeffrey Ford feel to it. Those familiar with the story would probably agree it’s Kafkaesque, in the tradition of Kafka and Kafka-like. I certainly do.
Which means the book can now be safely reshelved and I can go back to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin. More on China Mieville to follow.
Locus reports that Thomas M. Disch committed suicide on the fourth of July. He was found in his apartment by a friend who lives a few blocks away.
