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The Dark-Blue Winter Overcoat and other stories from the North by Sjon Hodgkinson and Ten Hodgkinson (editors) (view source)
Revision as of 11:32, 17 August 2020
, 11:32, 17 August 2020no edit summary
But my disengagement with this book could not be laid entirely at the editors' feet, regardless. It's that change I talked about that hindered me – the authors here are too keen on not providing the postcard from their life, a snapshot of their world, and seem to want too much to move on. They have every right to concern themselves with whatever they want, but very little here from, say, Finland, needs to have been set in Finland (if indeed it is), and if I came for a smorgasbord of Scandinavian and Nordic tastes, I came away with very little of those flavours indeed. I'm sure it's what I read Tim Parks [[Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books by Tim Parks|discuss once]], where the global audience for world's literature has taken all the domesticity out of modern fiction, and given it all an international, placeless feel, the current equivalent of a mid-Atlantic twang.
Greenland gives us a glimpse of national costume, but little else we could only have had from there, in linked tales of growing up with a drunken mother, while the other character from that locale speeds her way to North America when her partner dies. A story from the Faroes a hundred years ago is added to by lengthy footnotes, as if fiction cannot survive on such an insular territory where everybody still remembers everybody else's business for a long time.
Don't get me wrong, there are pieces here I certainly will remember – the lad on his raft for one, and a further, teenaged boy witnessing his inability to get his head round around adult impulses and urges. There's a great, short and very creepy encounter with a man running that you will find making laps in your mind for ages, and a short story that actually, finally, epitomises and encounters the very change I have been bewailing – when an elderly Icelandic woman goes shopping for that unlikely Christmas foodstuff, an avocado. This book became for me something I don't think it was intended to be – a lament for a landscape and its people increasingly looking outward, and not down to the soil beneath its feet. Iceland and the countries surrounding her are unmoored, and adrift in that mid-Atlantic space, and that's a shame.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
By their nature, the short stories in [[Winter Tales by Kenneth Steven]] feel particularly Arctic at times. You might also appreciate [[Breathless by Anne Sward]].
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