Rather than writing, David Constantine seems to perform an act of visualisation on the reader’s behalf; what he makes us see is matter-of-fact but at the same time somehow light, unmoored and thoroughly poetic. His stories are evidence. Everyone in them is a witness, sometimes to a death, more often to a birth; sometimes, to something which is too complicated to describe as either but somehow partakes of both. More.
8 Comments
November 7, 2009 at 10:39 am
“But as much as the sound of the water is a metaphor, it’s also perfectly literal: the sound of geology, of the universe, of the simple, implacable, forgotten matrix of things.”
Yes, yes, yes: whatever might operate in the same way as the word ‘liverish’ indicates; a direct and unconscious physicality urging a voice for the vague states we lisp to ourselves. And any writer who might also capture this in relation to the minerality of buses, pylons and neon bulbs has really bagged it – and I think this is what you do best yourself (MJH) – or what I find best about your own work.
November 7, 2009 at 11:00 am
Hi MikeM: if I could do that thing one quarter of a percent as well as Constantine, I’d be twice the writer I am. There’s something about his directness of engagement with the real–his investment in his own humanity, & his ability to be on both sides of the metaphor at once–which shows me up, in my own estimation, as nothing but a fantasist.
November 7, 2009 at 11:59 am
But a fantasist in tension with fantasy, which is as good as anyone can be, in life or in writing or whatever else.
November 7, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Added the book to my amazon wishlist thing, incidentally. Good review. S.
November 7, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Thanks for the review > instant one-click @Amazon. Stumbled upon his poetry in a dusty and musty bookshop corner 15 years ago, then likewise for 21st C: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th56jeso6fc
November 8, 2009 at 1:56 am
Lovely review (both for him and for us). I do now want to read him, but I’m going to be engaged (I imagine for almost all this week) in reading (fortunately rereading, in many cases) all of William Trevor’s complete short stories. For £200, I guess. But then I just wrote 2,000 words on Barthelme for Americans for half that; the biography was 900 pages. Thank goodness I’d read the books themselves. Orwell’s essay seems more and more real.
I think Trevor is up there with – here comes selective short story writer list, omitting, for propriety’s sake, yourself (who would be in there for Gifco and Engaro, if nothing else) – Maupassant, Pritchett, O Henry, Alice Munro, Kipling, Chesterton, Katherine Mansfield, Chekhov, Barthelme, Saki, Poe.
November 9, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Constantine’s translation of Hoelderlin got me into deep waters, almost fatal … Added this book to the n+1 must-read list … Have to track down a few items by Alan Garner first (pioneer of the Red Shift technique appropriated by Peter Ackroyd in Hawksmoor & others).
November 9, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Your reading, with the quotations, of The Cave was itself moving.
I’ll have to get this book.
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