|
Anthropology
and a Hundred Other Stories
by Dan Rhodes
Canongate 2010 (first published 2000)
Paperback
First collection
awards: Shortlisted, Macmillan Silver Pen Award
|
|
Dan Rhodes was born in 1972. He is the author of Anthropology, the novels Timoleon and Vieta Come Home and the recently- published Little Hands Clapping, and the story collection Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love,
also published by Canongate. In 2003 he was named by Granta Magazine as
one of their twenty Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in
Edinburgh.
Read
an interview
with Dan Rhodes
|
|
Love the review? Disagree violently? Come rant and rave in our forums >>>>>
|
|
"My
girlfriend joined the police without telling me. I didn't find out for
two years, and then I came across a truncheon in the magazine rack.
Confronted with this evidence she blushed, stammered and looked so
pretty that I forgave her."
Reviewed by Pauline Masurel
A hundred and one stories in 101 words, about women who are plain and
pretty, vivacious and vacuous, some a little dotty and others plain
barking. There are even a few fiancees and wives too, plus quite a lot
of exes and a smattering of deceased sweethearts. The alphabetical
ordering of the titles gives an implied randomness to the reading and
you could dip into this book anywhere and enjoy the stories in any
order that you choose. Their effect is a cumulative one, rather than
being reliant on serial consumption. These stories are easy to read and
often make you smile, but there are also darker, more bitter-sweet
revelations about human nature and interactions.
Beauty is a quintessential
example of this type of observational story,
"My girlfriend is so beautiful that she has never had cause to develop
any kind of personality. People are always wildly glad to see her, even
though she does little more than sit around and smoke."
The story then goes on to take this adulation and vacuity on beyond the
limits of probability. In fact, there are a lot of unlikely women on
pedestals in these stories and it's undeniably funny. But after a while
there's a bit of a build-up of sameness, an accretion of inexplicable
admiration, and these "girlfriends" become a rather amorphous
generality rather than individuals, even though they often have
different, and extraordinary, names.
The narrator in these stories is hugely accepting of a whole range of
unreasonable behaviours and is determindly doting throughout most of
them. These certainly aren't easy women to cope with. At the drop of a
hat they will steal eagles eggs, retail reptiles in the street, fondle
their dying friends, form a support group for their ex-boyfriends,
gamble their hair, pretend to develop a heroin habit or watch their
bloke through night-vision goggles while he's asleep. The girlfriend in
the title story ends up growing a handlebar moustache and herding yaks
in Mongolia.
The story Real starts out
with the boyfriend having to pinch himself to make sure he isn't
dreaming. So far ,so cute. But eventually, "I carve chunks out of my
flesh with a surgical saw. Somehow it still seems too perfect to be
real". And, perhaps that's a fair way of characterising many of these
stories. They are clever, fun and beautifully written, but in the end,
we don't need to believe the outcomes could be real. The stories in
this collection are about their own world, not a starkly realist
representation of the one that we live in but they definitely allude to
aspects of it. They are deliberately, outrageously strange for the sake
of our entertainment, so it would be churlish to turn round and call
this a fault. After all, Quentin Tarantino has made a fine career
exploiting gratuitous oddness.
And speaking of movies, five of these stories have been produced as
very short films by Victor Solomon. They can be seen at his website. The
films are beautifully coloured-in representations of the stories and
work really well as an introduction to the collection if you want to
get a flavour of the stories themselves. But the visual medium doesn't
really add a huge amount to the texts, as they are still essentially
voiced-over with monologues rather than being film adaptations. Plus,
as a word of warning to the squeamish, you might prefer to avoid
watching Pieces while you're
eating your dinner.
Buy the book for some wry laughs and clever stylised observations of
human nature in terms of how men and women woo, love and lose each
other. Each tiny story is neatly crafted, so it's a satisfying, if
slight, read on its own. But rather like Belgian chocolates, you may
not want to plough through too many at one time, for fear of
indigestion. The quote on the cover of the book says that this is
"essential reading for anyone who has ever been in love", but it's
probably also a useful warning for anyone who hasn't tried it yet.
|
