By Nawaid Anjum
Years ago, when Bill Buford was the fiction editor (1995-2002) of The New Yorker, he had published a quick story by George Saunders, who went on to win the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo in 2017. Saunders, who had to place up with a series of painful edits and was fishing for a compliment, whined to Buford on the phone: “But what do you like about the story?” There was a lengthy pause at the other finish. And, then, Buford, who had relaunched the then-defunct Granta in 1979 and vaulted it to the literary glory as its editor till 1995, stated: “Well, I read a line. And I like it… enough to read the next.”
“And that was it: his entire short story aesthetic and presumably that of the magazine. And it’s perfect. A story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time. We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us,” writes Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), in which he tries to fully grasp the physics of the type by way of Russian classics.
In Out of Print, Ten Years: An Anthology of Stories, a commemorative compendium of 30 stories compiled from the quick fiction published in the on the internet literary magazine, Out of Print, which completed 10 years in September 2020, the staggering energy of the type reveals itself to the reader — a line, a segment and a structural pulse at a time. It was this energy that had led Indira Chandrasekhar, a scientist and writer, to envisage a platform devoted to the genre of quick fiction from or connected with the Indian subcontinent. The anthology provides a peek into just how substantive the decade has been for the quarterly literary e-zine that has, more than the years, featured work from a wide spectrum of writers. Chandrasekhar notes in the introduction that the variety of writing reflects “the issues dominating our collective psyche”. These writers — each these writing in English as nicely as these (practically half) whose functions have been translated from Indian languages, like Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Bangla, Marathi, Malayalam and Gujarati — are “writers with spike and bite, writers rooted and restless, writers telling good old-fashioned stories, undercut with unease”, as Sampurna Chattarji succinctly summarises in her blurb for the book. Their stories aid us glimpse, Chattarji adds, “the fractures and fissures of the India we must constantly reimagine, remake, retell and yes — record”.
The volume has been neatly categorised into 5 sections, with each and every section containing stories with widespread terrains and thematic issues. The sections start with comments by various writers that bring into relief the strands coursing by way of the veins of these stories — the strands that bind them — as nicely as their narrative arc. The stories variety from the mythological and magical, subversive and surreal. There are stories that delight and stories that disturb, stories that are at when profound and perceptive, uncanny and evocative, eclectic and electrifying. Some reflect on life and death, other people on like, art and beauty. Some discover a sense of the self of their characters although other people appear to be preoccupied by their protagonists’ spot in the planet and their journeys inside.
In the opening story, Three Princess of Kashi, Shashi Deshpande draws on Mahabharata to re-examine and reinterpret the voicelessness and powerlessness of the 3 Princesses of Kashi — Amba, Ambalika and Ambika. At some point in the story, Ambika, who narrates the story, wonders: “Sometimes I think that if Bhishma had had a mother, if he had a wife, sisters, if he had lived even a part of his life among women, he would have been a different man. But he never knew women, any woman, intimately. He sees them only as creatures meant to bear children, heirs for the family.” In her opening comment, Samhita Arni, one of the magazine’s initial editors, writes how it is basically a story of sexual exploitation that has its resonance in the era of #MeToo: a story that utilizes “muted, forgotten” characters to “offer us rich possibilities and new perspectives”. The stories that comply with, across the sections, are each and every wondrous in their personal techniques. For instance, UR Ananthamurthy’s Apoorva (translated from the Kannada by Deepa Ganesh), Anjum Hasan’s The Big Picture and Chandrahas Choudhury’s Dnyaneshwar Kulkarni Changes His Name — that foreground the dichotomy amongst the inside and the outdoors — demonstrate how fiction writers shift amongst the self, each familiar and strange. Jayant Kaikini (Threshold) and Annie Zaidi (Sujata) are amongst the writers who capture the dissipation of like and hope. Krishna Sobti (The Currency Has Changed) and Anita Roy (Jenna) are amongst these who “craft place from layers of memory”. The six translated stories in the final section, titled Reality Imagine, consist of these by Ali Akbar Natiq (The Graveyard), Paul Zacharia (The Bar) and Mustansir Hussain Tarar (Baba Bagloos). They all examine the inequitable social realities that engender sorrow and suffering, despair and helplessness.
A very good quick story is stated to be the one that examines the human situation nicely. Many of the stories in this volume live up to that adage — a shard, a sliver, a vignette at a time, a line at a time.
Nawaid Anjum is a Delhi-based independent culture journalist