Author: Joanna Walsh
Finished on: 3 September 2017
Where did I get this book: From the publisher in exchange for an honest review
One of the stories in this collection by Joanna Walsh is Travelling Light, the tale of a mysterious ‘shipment’ transported all the way from London, via Paris, Munich and Belgrade, to Athens. Along the way it loses its bulk, going from inhabiting multiple shipping containers, to consisting of just a few crumbs in an ashtray.
Having made a similar journey myself on trains with two children, I first read this as an extended metaphor for expectations of the wonder of travel! But by the time I reached the end of the collection, this was the story that summed it up for me. Walsh is all about the changes in scale. Grand themes, lightly told. And light themes, grandly told. From nothing less than the meaning of life itself, to the significance of an x after a name signing off a message.
While I enjoy her deft touch with what it takes to make a day mean something, it is the gravity with which she treats the minutiae that is the star of the show for me. The pettiness of office life; the chips in a teacup. We’re left discombobulated; what is important and what is frivolous? I can’t tell anymore. And maybe there is no difference anyway.
I picked this book up fresh from reading a number of novels full of exposition and detailed description. And a reader should be provided with some kind of airlock to move from that writing, and into a Walsh story, in order to prevent a serious case of the bends. Okay slow down, read it again. Ah, there you are.
Walsh is a writer’s writer; this is a collection born of a mind that eats, sleeps and breathes language, and words, and gets right to the heart of what it means to try and earn your living by them. Perhaps it’s because I am embroiled in the Herculean task of writing a book myself at the moment, but The Story Of Our Nation, where a writer has embarked upon the ‘heroic… spectacular’ task of penning an epic, but can’t get past the details of hedgerows, made me genuinely laugh out loud (yes, a real lol) maybe a little hysterically.
But she is also a reader’s writer. This is a reading experience akin to spending the day in a huge bookshop, breathing in book-smell, unashamedly luxuriating in words on pages. I’ve said it before, I am a sucker for a book about loving books.
I would love to meet my bookself, the version of me who got beyond the first hundred pages of Don Quixote and studied every text on my degree reading lists. Walsh is beautifully wry on literary tastes and how we define ourselves by the books we read. It’s okay that you have nicer legs than me, because I read better books. Another lol. But for all the discernment on display here, Walsh writes like a literary egalitarian.
Published by Sheffield-based And Other Stories, Worlds From The Word’s End is a treat for writers and readers alike. Get yourself through that airlock and dive down deep. Or shallow. I’m not sure which is which anymore.
Advertisements Share this:
