Fen: Stories

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The overwhelming feeling i had reading it - as if i digested a bunch of psychedelic mushrooms (which i actually never tried so cannot compare) and going through a series of weird and often unpleasant dreams. Her writing is very imaginative. All her sentences work perfectly. But the ideas and symbols of the stories are starting to repeat themselves, especially at the second part of the collection. And while she is very good describing the feelings of adolescent girls, she is a bit out of her depth when it comes to mothers, babies and the profound transformation of motherhood. I would not blame her for that as she is still young, but for me it was very noticeable. Men in these stories are a little more than the decorations, it seems. (And in one stories they are literally used for food). She decided to do ghost stories because of the “amazing” tradition of people sitting around a fire, or in a room, telling their tales. University of Oxford (24 September 2018). "Alumna Daisy Johnson Shortlisted for Man Booker Prize 2018". Oxford University Department for Continuing Education . Retrieved 13 October 2018. I came to this book, after reading Daisy Johnson’s wonderful Everything Under – a book I described, alliteratively as a “literary novel of the liminal, language, leaving and legend, longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize.” Fen is on one hand ordinary. There's couples, sex, pubs, marriage. But within that, she weaves tales of magic and darkness, of inexplicable things, underpinned with something you understand. A longing, a need, that's ordinary, but works with the otherworldly.

There are hints of miracles and resurrection. I immediately thought of Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (see my review HERE). But this is darker than Tóibín’s novella, and without the explicitly Biblical framework, it’s more unknown and unknowable. It’s a lonely job, and the pull of tides and sea creatures is stronger than the pull of the nearby townsfolk. For another magical look at such themes, see Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping (see my review see my review HERE). A collection of short stories as a literary debut which are really difficult to classify but are impressive. They are set in the fens. The fenlands cover parts of East Anglia, Cambridgeshire and southern Lincolnshire. I am a Lincolnshire lad: I wasn’t born or brought up in the fens, but I know them fairly well. One thing you do get a lot of in the fens is eels (not quite as many as there used to be). Coincidentally I went to a farmers market this morning and inevitably there were eels (filleted and smoked, whole and smoked and jellied). Although reading the first story in this collection may make you wary of eating any. It cleverly blurs the lines about who’s making the decisions and if either party is taking advantage of the other.i liked it. but i was expecting more landscape.. i'd thought that's what the book would be made of, the way other people speak of it. Johnson, Daisy (7 January 2015). "There Was a Fox in the Bedroom". Boston Review . Retrieved 13 October 2018. When we were younger we learnt men the way other people learnt languages or the violin… We did not care for their thoughts; they could think on philosophy and literature and science if they wanted, they could grow opinions inside them if they wanted. We did not care for their creed or religion or type; for the choices they made and the ones they missed. We cared only for what they wanted so much it ruined them. Men could pretend they were otherwise, could enact the illusion of self-control, but we knew the running stress of their minds." Nevertheless, she embarks on an improbable relationship, which is unexpectedly cut short and even more unexpectedly transformed. I think that’s one of the things I love about the Fens, that things like Ely Cathedral you can see from miles and miles away because it’s so flat.”

England was the language of breaking and bending and it would suit our mouths better. None of us would ever fall in love with English. We would be safe from that.” Even before she sat down to write, she was clear that she wanted to push these memories beyond realism. “I think short stories are this perfect form where you can do really weird things and really weird things happen and, despite being small, they seem to be able to contain that really well,” she says.The Romans were the first to drain the Fens, but it’s ongoing, never permanent: nature is strong. This opens with unexpected consequences of recent drainage: eels everywhere, but there’s something not quite right about them, nor with Katy’s sister - and there’s a connection. It explores identity, sisterhood, and transformation in a very similar way to Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (see my review HERE). Water is definitely Ms Johnson’s medium. Her Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel Everything Under (2018) is set along the canals of Oxford, where she now lives. While her short story in Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold (2020) retells ‘The Green Children of Woolpit’ Suffolk tale with a tainted well. Read More Related Articles She stops, waits, nods. The male-dominated stories we have told ourselves are missing such a large part of human experience that there needs to be space for alternative ones next to them, she explains, a space opened up by the irruption of the uncanny. “It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be writing about male characters, but women need to appear not only as mothers and partners, they need to appear as I-carrying figures in their own right.” Does she feel that, if one’s opinion of a writer and their work changes, the value of that first reading can survive? Yes, she thinks so. Her feeling as a writer is that once you send a book into the world, you relinquish it to its readers, and that many Harry Potter fans are demonstrating what it means to be attached to a work of fiction: “That doesn’t mean that we can’t be critical about it and certainly we should be critical about the things we love, and people we love, but we can still remember it fondly and it can still be a very important part of who we are and our culture.” My favourite line is taken from How To F**K A Man You Don’t Know: “Talking about Iraq and the Booker shortlist.. You think this makes him knowing and intellectual”(60).

Reading the stories brought the sense of being trapped in a room, slowly, but very surely, filling up with water. You think: this can't be happening. Meanwhile, hold your breath against the certainty it surely is. " Cynan Jones Misschien zijn dingen die in de realiteit gebeuren gemakkelijk te beschrijven, omdat we ze kennen, of omdat we ze ons kunnen voorstellen. Maar natuurlijk is er geen garantie. Het is niet omdat een schrijver woorden gebruikt om iets uit het echte leven te beschrijven, dat alles geloofwaardig wordt. In the following episodes, each around 13 minutes long, we hear from a diverse cast of speakers: guests, cleaners, porters, owners, people drawn in from different parts of the country. Arch is a gifted storyteller, whose stories include a couple of those earlier in this collection, and Mattie develops an interest in the films of January Hargrave, linking to another. DH Lawrence’s The Fox (see my review HERE) also seems relevant. However, this is about family bonds, difference, fitting in, and maybe reincarnation.Having spent the first 17 years of my life in South West Norfolk, and (following a brief Thames estuary break) the next four years in Cambridge – the foundational part of my life was spent in areas which bounded the Fens – the eponymous district in which this collection is set, where water becomes land, and land can lie below water, and where the dark, earthy soil is heavy and fertile. So thanks, thanks for deciding you were going to take the power you were given and to use it for evil instead of good. When he says he likes your boobs or that your bottom is tight or that you’re pretty fun aren’t you, you tell him words are cheap enough to spit and push his face the place you want it to go.” She has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the New Angle Award for East Anglian writing. She was the winner of the Edge Hill award for a collection of short stories and the AM Heath Prize.