112 Pages
You can buy "Cove"...Here You can follow Cynan Jones...Here
Out at sea, in a sudden storm, a man is struck by lightning. When he wakes, injured and adrift on a kayak, his memory of who he is and how he came to be there is all but shattered. Now he must pit himself against the pain and rely on his instincts to get back to shore, and to the woman he dimly senses waiting for his return. With its taut narrative and its wincingly visceral portrait of a man locked in an uneven struggle with the forces of nature, this is a powerful new work from one of the most distinctive voices in British fiction.
This is a beautifully written short story. The plot is minimal. i.e man on kayak at sea gets struck by lightning, tries to make it back to shore. Clearly inspired by The Old Man and The Sea. But the description of this simple plot is exceptional. It feels akin to an academic exercise in literal descriptive techniques.
First of all, after the lightning strike, the author splits the narrative into two parts. The physical battle for survival and the attempt to rescue his mental capabilities. After the lightning strike as well as the bodily injuries, his memory has been wiped. All he is left with are the instinct to survive and the merest hint of a ghost of a memory of a woman.
The writing format is short separated sentences or paragraphs so that you are hit with point after point in rapid succession. It's like being machine gunned.
The prose however is not straight forward and simple. It is lyrical and opaque. It has numerous similes and metaphors, which I love. It makes the reader work. The reader has to decide whether the sentence is real or imagined or even symbolic. The writing style is much more to the Dylan Thomas end of the writing scale than say Cormac McCarthy.
Which brings me to another point. I began reading this in my usual way, quickly and business like but the writing is just so rich and poetic that I found myself slowing down, savouring every word and reading aloud to feel the rhythms.
Why then only 3 stars? I'm afraid the end let it down a little for me. It just seemed to happen abruptly and a little to ambiguously. I just don't like the endings to be even a little open to interpretation.
All in all a visceral, descriptive short story about how fleeting life in physical and spiritual form can be.
"He let the light in bit by bit, as if sipping it with his eye,"
"The smell of the jumper triggers something, but it is like a piano key hitting strings that are gone."
"He saw beneath him a flock of jellyfish, like negligees."
"If you disappear you will grow into a myth for them. You will exist only as absence. If you get back, you will exist as a legend."
"He had a sense, out here, of peace. He could feel not only the proximity of the bay but a proximity to himself. He thought: Why do we stop doing the things we enjoy and the things we know are good for us?"
- If You Like This Then You May Like...
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest HemingwayUnder Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas (for poetic type prose)
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Cynan Jones was born in 1975 near Aberaeron, Wales where he now lives and works. He is the author of five short novels, The Long Dry, Everything I Found on the Beach, Bird, Blood, Snow, The Dig, and Cove.
He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous prizes and won a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award 2007, a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize 2014, the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2015 and the BBC National Short Story Award 2017.
His work has been published in more than twenty countries, and short stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4 and in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta Magazine and The New Yorker. He also wrote the screenplay for an episode of the BAFTA-winning crime series Hinterland, and Three Tales, a collection of stories for children.
Cynan Jones was the 2008 Scritture Giovani Hay Festival Fellow, has tutored extensively for Literature Wales, the Arvon Foundation, and other writing bodies, and wrote and presents CBC's online Writing Short Stories course. For a number of years he was the RLF Writing Fellow at Aberystwyth University and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His latest work, available now from Granta books, is Stillicide, a collection of twelve stories commissioned by BBC Radio 4 that aired over the summer 2019.
(from cynanjones.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment