Tag: Catherine McNamara

Reflex Press: Love Stories for Hectic People by Catherine McNamara

Abingdon-based Reflex Press grew out of a prize for flash fiction, so naturally enough that’s one of their focuses as a publisher. And here’s a collection of 33 stories in a hundred pages, by Australian writer Catherine McNamara. I really liked one of her stories when I read it at random a few years ago, so it was a pleasure to read her work once again. 

As the collection’s title suggests, this is dense and busy fiction, whose characters are often in heightened situations. Here are a few examples:

‘Banking’ sees a woman returning to confront her ex-boyfriend of one week after some money has disappeared from her account, and struggling with the desire that she still feels for him. There’s tension throughout this piece, and it’s only partly resolved by the end. 

‘A Forty-Nine-Year-Old Woman Sends Messages to Her Thirty-Two-Year-Old Lover’ is a paragraph of just a few lines capturing an intense feeling of desire that its narrator can’t shake off: “I wait for the thought of your face and body to mean nothing.”

‘The Vineyard’ has a strong central metaphor of a couple replacing their ruined grape plants with new hybrids. Their place is hemmed in, adding to the sense that this is the last chance for their vineyard to recover – just like a relationship on the ropes. 

For all that the stories are so short, McNamara’s distinctive voice comes through strongly. This is a collection that stays with you. 

Read the story ‘As Simple as Water’.

Sunday Story Society: ‘Nathalie’ by Catherine McNamara

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Sunday Story Society is a monthly review/book club feature where I write about a recent story that’s been published online, and  invite you to join in the discussion in the comments.

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Catherine McNamara’s story may be called ‘Nathalie’ (Bookanista, Oct 2013), but it as much (if not more) about Nathalie’s mother, Mona. We meet Mona at home in Ghana, waiting for Nathalie to arrive for one of her periodic visits:

She went out to smoke on the terrace, the city air a giant belch of open sewers and fried food, a gassy decomposition. Mona had seen travellers gag at the channels of waste snaking through the city. Where old women straddled and pissed, where a fallen coin might well have plopped into magma. But for her it was the most acute of honesties, the travails of the city were naked.

I like that description, both as a depiction of place, and for what it says about Mona: she is a person who sees what is in front of her, perhaps even one who takes some pride in being so. That quality will come to haunt her by story’s end.

What Mona sees in her daughter as she arrives is a bright and  welcome interruption to the doldrums of her daily life (Mona’s lover has long since left her, and she has only her difficult young son Miguel for company), but also someone who has what she never had: love that came easily and frequently. When Mona meets Nathalie’s new boyfriend Seth, she feels jealous of him because “she had wanted Nathalie to herself”, but it seems clear enough that she’s also jealous of Nathalie for having Seth in her life.

For me, the crux of McNamara’s piece is the unspoken (and, to pretty much everyone but Mona, unperceived) difference in power between mother and daughter. This changes drastically later in the story, when Nathalie is attacked: her confidence is shaken, perhaps permanently; and then Mona is there to provide a mother’s comfort, just as she’s also finding her first success as an artist. Mona wanted her life to have more of the dynamism of Nathalie’s, but not like this, not at this cost. Nathalie has changed:

The lines Mona had never noticed on her face had become grave and hard. Her eyelids were fallen, discoloured furrows below them, and the cheeks were those of a gaunt woman whose good health had been stolen.

Now Mona can’t help but see what has happened to her daughter, and there is no comfort for her in being able to do that. I like the subtlety of the characterisation in McNamara’s story, but it’s the reversal of status the really makes ‘Nathalie’ such a powerful piece of fiction for me.

Sunday Story Society preview: November 2013

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A new month is around the corner, which means a new instalment of Sunday Story Society. The story I’ve chosen comes from the October issue of Bookanista (an excellent site, always worth visiting): taken from her collection  Pelt and Other Stories, ‘Nathalie‘ by Catherine McNamara tells of a day that changes a mother and daughter forever. Join me from Sunday 3 November for a review and discussion.

(EDIT: As I’ve been short of time lately, it’s now going to be Sunday 10 November)

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