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All
the Little Things That We Lose
by Deborah Sheldon
Skive Magazine Press
2010, Paperback
First collection
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Deborah Sheldon
lives in Melbourne, Australia and has been a professional writer for 24
years. Her television scriptwriting credits include State Coroner,
Australia’s Most Wanted and Neighbours. She has also written features
and non-fiction books. All the Little Things That We Lose is her first
book of fiction.
Read
an interview
with deborah Sheldon
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"She
slaps Joey again between his shoulder blades. His feet jerk and his
abdominal muscles clench weakly against her knee. If she manages to
dislodge the grated carrot, this will become a family story repeated
often throughout the years…And if her attempts don’t work, Caroline can
see her life as an empty, aching horror, stretching out for year after
unbearable year, and she slaps him again. That makes five slaps. One
more and she will turn him on his back, cradling her baby within the
curl of her left arm."
Reviewed by Elizabeth Rutherford-Johnson
A
couple of stories into All the
Little Things That We Lose
and I felt that I was beginning to orientate myself in Deborah
Sheldon’s world. This was an Australia I caught a glimpse of in a
long-ago visit: the everylands of suburbia – think Neighbours
minus the gloss and comfort (Sheldon is a scriptwriter who’s worked on
the show) – thinning out to the long, dull emptinesses between towns,
where any new person may be a threat. Against these flat, often banal
backdrops small details take on significance and the slightest gesture
can be loaded with menace.
I was getting a taste for this unsettling landscape. And then I read Counting the Steps From One Through Five,
a spare, coruscating account of Caroline tIrying to revive her son as
he chokes on a piece of carrot. The writing is unadorned and
unsensational and in slightly over two pages, Sheldon gives place,
character and sky-high stakes, tapping directly into a primal need,
mother love, and its appalling opposite: mother loss. Part of the
effect is achieved through the patterning of tenses – we are in the
present, yet even at this moment of high drama Caroline remembers where
she first learned CPR, and imagines possible futures spiraling away
from this moment. I finished this story through tears, then had to
close the book and take several breaths to try to find a way back out
of Sheldon’s world. Power indeed.
Sheldon specialises in the little moments that reveal the chaos and
terror beneath. Real life, even in suburbia is only skin deep: blink
and there may be plagues of flies or a ghost boy or a man with a gun.
Stories such as We Have What You Want
and Man with a Suitcase
pull off a violent, almost cartoonish, abruptness – think Flannery O'
Connor or Ernest Hemingway. What saves them from farce is the dense
subtext of unanswered questions that Sheldon weaves into her set ups,
plus spare, ungarnished descriptions – "Sarah’s cheekbone gave way with
a loud pop" – more horrifying than any laboured drawing of physical
agony.
As well as violence in the pieces themselves, the scale between each
story keeps changing, making the collection interestingly
unpredictable. To choose a run of five, consecutive stories from the
middle of the book, The Cash Cow
takes the reader on a blackly comic and also terrifying whistlestop
tour of gangland underworld. This then lurches into the quiet, domestic
tragedy of Waiting for the Huntsman,
where Natalie – staying with unfamiliar family while her mother is in
hospital – stares terrified at a spider lurking in "the space in the
roof…thick with darkness". Following this small scale domestic drama
comes Baggage, where the
breakdown of Afrodite’s marriage is enacted by a biblical flood that
"pulled back into the waterway like an octopus into its cave, sucking
and slurping at Afrodite’s van and Ruth’s hatchback and dragging both
over the buckled fence and down the grassy bank". Then to Lunch at the Trout Farm,
where a family fishing outing is infused with domestic disharmony and
the lack of tinfoil for a barbecue may be the end of a marriage. The
run of five finishes with Flight Path,
perhaps the strangest story in this collection: two survivors of plane
wreck wake in the middle of a salt plain – but who are these people and
what has happened to them? There was something of Samuel Beckett or
Flann O'Brien in the revelation of horror here, a truly chilling little
piece.
Occasionally, perhaps inevitably, the edge of emotion becomes blunted –
though the skilful organisation of the collection meant this happened
only rarely. A couple of stories, Parrots
and Pelicans
springs to mind, felt a beat or so light, especially towards the end.
But this feels carping in stories lined with the potential violence and
everyday horror that pulses beneath the most quotidian of lives.
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