One was Ali Smith's "The First Person and other stories". And the other was Evelyn Waugh's "Work Suspended and other stories". This is a late update. I read them a few weeks ago.
I enjoy short stories. They are also good for times when it is difficult to carve out sustained reading time. I feel that with essays too. More recently, it has been Nabokov's Speak Memory and Teju Cole's collection of non-fiction writing. They send me on different paths too. More on them soon - that is, once I finish reading them. The point is difficult to read a complete narrative or a novel at the moment. So reading whatever takes me away for a little while but brings me back soon.
Ali Smith's this collection was different from the Public Library one. I had loved that one. This one, the First Person and Other Stories, was a little bit difficult to completely warm up to. The language and the smooth, flowing narrative is the same as any other writing by Ali Smith. It is the characters, their sadness at times, and at times the strangeness of the set-up. There were some interesting bits - I would say, more of a mixed bag, this collection. There's this thing about her writing, she quotes from so many places, and she uses such beautiful words, that I'm often tempted to stop and look them up deeper, but there is a compulsion in her sentences, which pulls you along. It is like a slide. Once you are on it, even though you do wish to go slow and look around and enjoy the scenery, you cannot do much; you just slide.
I felt that most of the stories here were exploratory. They explored a setting - the narrator and narrator's younger self. The narrator and a lost cause/ lost child. The narrator and a random parcel at her doorstep. It starts with something and as if, the author wishes to see where it will take her. And it takes her to strange lands. I feel I need to reread some to understand what is really going on, to understand the intent or even where the focus of the story lies.
I liked "True short story", a story about short story. More than a short story, an exploration of what a short story is and leaves you with collectible quotes from several writers. Consider this:
"Tzvetan Todorov says that the thing about a short story is that it's so short it doesn't allow us the time to forget that it's only literature and not actually life.
Nadine Gordimer says short stories are absolutely about the present moment, like the brief flash of a number of fireflies here and there in the dark.
...
William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like the flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people's life."
The other collection I read was Evelyn Waugh's "Work Suspended and Other Stories". I haven't read anything from Evelyn Waugh in the past and this seemed like a good way to get introduced to the author. This one is a collection of short stories and a couple of novella length works. Most of the short stories in the collection are satirical. Interesting picture of the times - 1920s, 1930s, between the wars. Depicting a wide and disparate set of people and their lives, immediate problems and their preoccupations. One of the novella-length story, Scott King's Modern Europe, is another satire. This time focusing on a school teacher from England on a trip to a fictional totalitarian country, and through his journey, we explore the difficult, senseless, nightmarish random country (reminded me of early pages of The Unconsoled or a bad dream).
The one story that stood out in all this, was Work Suspended. This one was different from all the rest. More like a novel. Traces the life of a writer of detective fiction, and his fascination for a friend's wife - not much in this seemed satirical. His work gets suspended because he puts his book away to make way for the war.
Interesting collection. Keen to read more at some point.