SHORT STORIES: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Love Begins in WinterBy Simon Van Booy Beautiful Books, 226pp, £7.99
A CELLIST WAITS to go on stage. His instrument is already out there, in position beside the old chair that travels with him. The cello belonged to his grandfather, as did the chair. “My name is Bruno Bonnet. The curtain I stand behind is the colour of a plum. The velvet is heavy. My life is on the other side. Sometimes I wish it would continue on without me.” Bruno is melancholic and solitary. He lives in hotel rooms and each performance he gives seems to summon to him the dead from his past. “When I play I feel as though I am flying. I circle the auditorium I am anywhere but inside my body. Without music, I would be a prisoner trapped in a sealed wall.”
By name as much as everything else, Beautiful Books seems a good choice of publisher for Simon Van Booy's second volume of short stories. Love Begins in Winteris a book of intense, deliberate and calmly beautiful stories; it is also the winner of this year's Cork City – Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. The five stories are complex mediations on life and living. The best advice is to read the last – and finest – story, The City of Windy Trees, first; the others will follow. Van Booy believes in the short story as a journey and is also convinced, as is Paul Auster, in the power of coincidence. Van Booy is aware of the weird web of connections that fasten people to each other. Two of the narratives, including the title piece, are told in the first person. Interestingly for a writer who deals in small confidences and revelations, Van Booy is at his surest when writing in the third person; it allows him draw on a range of cross-references and stories within stories.
He has a delicate touch; his vision is mythic, detached. Every history begins in the past. Van Booy also has a laconic streak. When Bonnet the cellist on tour in Quebec thinks of his parents at home in the French village where he grew up, he sees them watching television. “Above the couch is a framed watercolour of a mountain lion. If it fell, it would kill them. It’s a limited edition print. There are 199 others in the world.” You read this opening story because of strange little asides such as this. The cellist lives in his head. A chance remark, such as deciding his brother is emotionally literal, quickly acquires added importance. “I love New York” reflects Bonnet, “but miss the silence of rural Europe. Americans are literal. I think my brother would find a wife here in five minutes.”
At times, Van Booy weighs down his stories with ponderous similes. Early into this first story, Bonnet notes “I drip with sweat. Each drop holds its own tiny clapping audience.” Elsewhere, he wonders whether his parents “feel me like a small animal gnawing them affectionately”. Van Booy often stands away from his story to make a detached pronouncement such as: “Grief is a country where it rains and rains but nothing grows.”
A new character enters the opening story. He is a silent, eccentric old man dressed in a dusty dinner jacket. Known as the birdman, he stands in the local park and gestures to the birds that flock to him. Through the birdman, a grieving woman meets Bonnet and they travel to the mountains. By adding two further strands to Bonnet’s narrative, the story becomes plausible if overwrought.
The title story draws the reader in and pushes them away. It is crafted so finely – too finely. It is the same with Tiger, Tigerin which a female narrator, through a developing new relationship with a man, recalls her past as a result of reading a book on childhood written by a former lover of her boyfriend's mother. It is very Auster; "The exactitude of feeling two years old flickered inside me. I kept very still . . . I felt with absolute clarity how it felt to be two years old on one particular day in the 1970s."
Elsewhere, in The Coming and Going of Strangers, gypsies living in Co Wicklow are rewarded with a gift of land when one of them rescues a child from drowning. It is a complex story that never quite engages.
For all the careful grace and thought sustaining his narratives, Van Booy is at his most human and compelling in the final story, which begins: “One day, George Frack received a letter. It was from far away. The stamp had a bird on it. Its wings were wide and still.” The simplicity of what follows is devastating. This is the story to read and remember. All Van Booy’s characters are suspended by life and memory, yet none are quite as lost as George Frack, who cuts his hands on a broken teapot and sits, bleeding, for hours on the edge of the bathtub. Things get better for George – a lot better.
It is through George that Van Booy most profoundly evokes a palpable sense of living a half-life. As a boy, George Frack wished his bickering parents would divorce and “had spent his childhood like a small satellite orbiting their unhappy world”. He had eventually left home. “His parents remained together, until one day his father jumped off the office building where he worked. George imagined his raincoat flapping, then the impact; strangely bent limbs; people circling in disbelief; somebody’s ruined day.” George recalls his sister, a single mother, whom he has not seen in years. Most of all there is the grief for Goddard, his beloved cat who was killed by a car when George was out “buying oranges and sardines”. The letter that arrives in the midst of what has become an incapacitating apathy informs George he has a daughter, born of an encounter in a hotel – the day he had planned on upsetting his former girlfriend’s wedding.
For this unforgettable story alone, and the way George begins to save himself, Van Booy emerges as a special writer, magpie by intent, formal yet engaging, and a skilful exponent of the short story as the surest portrait of lives as lived. It is the finest in the quintet, each element of which has something to say, some image that defines a moment, a thought.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times