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| LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf. |
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Feedback by Sheila Roberts
Second report
Working Late — Patrick Cairns
Café dreams — Dave Chislet
No fear of Virginia Woolf — Jacklyn Cock
Pancho Gonzales and Maxwell’s Demon — Tickey de Jager
Walking among chickens — Vicky Scholtz
The author has created a story, lasting only ten minutes of fictional time, by means of the vivid, interconnecting thoughts and images in the mind of the narrator — a woman about to jump twelve storeys from a boardroom window to the pavement below. The short opening paragraph, with its image of the “dancing” boardroom curtains in a two-step “Away and back. Away and back.” provides a subtle foreshadowing of how the story will end.
The rational, yet confused, thoughts passing through the woman’s mind are well-depicted, her sharp eyes seeing everything around her in metaphors that relate to her own life: a life of many successes and pleasures but also deep dissatisfactions. She muses: “I felt that I had lost myself, that my movements, my thoughts, my passions were no longer my own. It seemed that there was always someone else. Always someone giving orders or asking for love or demanding attention. It’s all the same.” Yet, during these ten minutes, her thoughts are very much her own, suggesting her confusion or, perhaps, dishonesty with herself. That the others who are always asking or demanding are not mentioned by name emphasizes to this reader that there is no one enemy she wishes to punish or escape from: she is in a general malaise; she is suffering life (as Freud might have said).
I liked her focus on the sheet of newspaper blowing down the pavement below, her concern as to whether it will return, implying that she does not want, or does want, her body to fall on it. About to jump, she reveals a very unsuicidal concern for her family, some other people, and the children of Africa. She prays for them and for peace in the Middle East. Therefore, the reader is not surprised that, as she is about to slip off the window ledge, she changes her mind and regains the floor of the boardroom. Her body, as it were, is given back to her, as is her life. She becomes aware of being tired and hungry and that her feet are cold. She cries tears “of unknown pain and of indescribable relief”. Furthermore, as she leaves the boardroom, she drops the packet of cigarettes she had been smoking from, suggesting her determination to remake her life.
I have some minor reservations about the story. The woman considers herself no longer young; yet she is only thirty-three. I accept that the intention of the story is to depict someone considering suicide who has, finally, no expressed good reason to want to kill herself. But the problem arising from this depiction is that the reader does not experience enough tension as she reads the story toward its conclusion. However, the imaginative use of language remains very enjoyable. A very minor observation: the story is narrated in the first person but the word “she” or “her” appears three times.
The major strengths of this finely rendered, nostalgic journey through memory to a boyhood past are the imaginative use of language and the well-controlled juxtapositions of a present Saturday morning visit to a corner shop with vivid flashbacks of being in such a shop twenty years before. The two shops are so alike, in spite of certain changes in food items, so blended that the “twenty-year-old snapshot” seems to have shared a single frame of film with the present “snapshot”.
This is a humorous and subtle narration of those unexpected repetitions in adulthood of childhood experiences. The narrator’s memory of his boyish sneaking of two cans of Coke in the front of his jeans, plus stealing sweets, yogurt and coins, is paralleled in the story’s amusing climax of the now grown man sneaking two Bar Ones in his jeans as he leaves the store — not for lack of money, but to allow himself to extend the boyhood memory as he drives away in his car. He will also eat the Bar Ones “in the old familiar way: chocolate coating first, then the caramel, leaving the thick nougat until last.”
Café dreams is an enjoyable, tightly structured, achieved short story.
This well-written, disturbing story is now much tighter in terms of structure and causality. Angela’s state of mind is fully believable, her actions convincing as they move from personal dissatisfaction with her partner, Sarah, to tragic endings for both of them. Why she has never been fully happy with Sarah is clearly explained when Angela contrasts the passion she had felt for her previous partner, Geraldine, with the lack of “depth and intensity” she experiences with Sarah. The question as to why, when living quietly amidst the beauty and tranquility of the Cotswolds, Angela should have become a serial attacker of men, becomes believable. Until a catastrophe occurs, her attacks are nasty but comical, and no real harm is done to the victims.
I have some minor suggestions for further tightening, however. Because my pages print out differently from yours, I will refer to the paragraphs by number.
In paragraph 5, I would alter the following sentence: “Making love with Geraldine had at first been like catching the back wave of a high sea.” This will foreshadow the next paragraph where, somewhat belatedly, the effects on Angela of a rape are revealed.
The opening sentence of paragraph 7 should read, “Now with Sarah, apart from some minor disagreements, there was a kind of bland affection, support and nurturing.” This would prepare the reader for the annoyance on Sarah’s part at Angela’s donation to the Rape Crisis Center and Angela’s anger that “money was a source of tension between them.” Previously, the reader has been led to believe that Sarah is very loving and indulgent of Angela. This “source of tension” comes as a surprise.
The first sentence of the last paragraph before the break should be altered. As it stands, some transition seems necessary; eg, “Sarah started eating. Speaking as she chewed, she said, ‘Driving …’” Or something to that effect.
In the third paragraph after the break, the name “Alex” appears. I take it this is a slip. In the next paragraph, about Frideswide and a knight, the word “king” appears. Also a slip, I think.
Where Angela attacks the middle-aged man who turns around, the short fight between them cannot be clearly visualized. If he grabs her raised arm in which she holds the hammer, so that she whimpers with pain, how can she then strike back with force? Perhaps he should try to reach for it but instead grab the other arm, making it easier for her to hit him.
When Sarah and Angela are talking at table about feminist behaviour (after Sarah has discovered what Angela has been doing), it seems to me that Sarah delivers something of a lecture. I think the talk could be teased out into a real conversation rather than left as two monologues.
I am still uncertain why “Drowning Sarah had been easy …” I know this means easy on Angela’s conscience, but in the other sense of the word the drowning is still rather unconvincing. Surely there was a struggle? I recall a movie titled Ma Barker (I think). There is a scene where it takes Ma Barker and two of her grown-up sons to drown a struggling woman in a bath.
In the last short concluding paragraph, I would alter the first sentence to read: “Angela settled down at the river’s edge to wait for the sleeping pills …” I have no idea how much the Wye River rises and whether it flows so fully over its own banks that a body could be washed away. I visualize Angela climbing down from the bank to get closer to the river and also to avoid being noticed by any hikers or passers-by.
Engrossing, vivid, and well-structured work.
This is a remarkably humorous and eccentric story. I enjoyed the experiments with typography, paragraphing, and font size. Although at times the dialogue was mildly confusing because of inconsistent punctuation, the conversations themselves were economically rendered, witty, and believable.
I liked the way the author knitted together games of tennis, particularly Peter (?), the protagonist’s game with Pancho Gonzales, with “the fundamental law of science …” the law of increasing entropy which, however, is undermined by a demon named “Maxwell’s Demon”.
The mini-portraits of Pancho Gonzales; of Maxwell’s Demon and how he goes to work; of David and the maths teacher; plus the discussion in the maths class were delightful and amusing. The whole story is believable in the way good Magical Realism always engages and charms the reader.
I do not know much about the finer points of tennis, but the game, the crux of the story, is exciting in its build-up of tension and unexpected reversals. Just as I am ignorant of tennis and cannot comment technically on the rendering of the game in the story, I also feel inadequate to make any constructive criticism about the work as a whole. I greatly enjoyed the story and would like to leave it as it stands.
The narrative of this sophisticated story plays itself out in the always unexpected emotional changes experienced by Traci, the main character. Such changes are evocatively rendered by alterations of diction, tone and mood. Traci’s consciousness guides the reader through the story but is itself subtly, almost imperceptibly, guided by an omniscient narrator.
The tone of the opening pages is one of intellectual posturing and grandiosity, amusingly undercut by irony. The author makes clever use of name-dropping to emphasize how Traci and her friend Peter “lived passionately, thought deeply and experienced life with an intensity only known to sensitive souls such as theirs-the philosophers, poets and artists of their and preceding generations.” The irony here is trenchant, particularly in view of how the story progresses. Peter moves away and retreats into himself (termed The Bell Jar) and Traci drops out of university to “donate her labour to the Struggle.”
Traci undergoes an enormous change when she finds herself a single mother living frugally in a small flat in rainy Cape Town. Her remembrance of the intellectual pride and complacency she had fostered at Stellenbosch now leaves her “bored … to bourgeois tears”. Nonetheless, ever unpredictable (her unpredictability being what makes her such an interesting protagonist), she tries to contact Peter in her “longing for her lost self-importance”. They meet briefly. The conversation between them is sharp, with banter and witty gossip, but is finally inconsequential. They part without even touching.
In Traci’s next transformation, she has got her domestic, artistic, and political life back on track. But her intellectual arrogance of the opening sections is now paralleled by her refusal to fall in love and her aspiration to become a “tough cookie”. It is from this point on that any affection the reader may have developed for this character begins to diminish. What follows is a very well-orchestrated scene of Traci, naked and hot in bed with her lover, Rob, but forced to answer the telephone and listen to desperate and tearful pleas from a homeless Peter, who now wants to come and stay with her.
In the final paragraph, when whisky tastes bitter in her mouth and the afternoon’s passion has been driven from her mind, she has a short conversation with her son in which she speaks of Peter as “a very dark person, I don’t think there was very much happiness in his life.” Asked by her son why she speaks as if Peter were already dead, she replies that “he probably is by now”, as a result of her saying no to his request for a place to stay. The reader feels something like a blow to the chest at her calm lack of compassion. She has truly become a “tough cookie”.
I have walked myself through this story at some length (I hope not tediously) because I wanted to express my admiration for the brilliant way the author has manipulated the unforeseen effects of time, place, and circumstances on her main characters, and how well this manipulation plays on the reader’s emotions and expectations. This is very fine work.
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