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BOOK: What Remains by Dawn Garisch (Karavan)
Just before going to sleep one night, I read Dawn Garisch's story Knock, Knock, which is about an encounter between a man and woman who are unknown to each other and meet randomly when the woman knocks on the man's door asking for sugar.
The nearest restaurant is two hours away, and they have both driven somewhere isolated in a quest for peace and a way to escape their everyday lives.
The story lulled me to sleep with its sweet melody of this serendipitous encounter and its satisfying conclusion.
What Remains is novelist Dawn Garisch's powerful and compelling debut collection of short fiction. Not all the stories lulled me to sleep, though. Some left me a little uneasy, in a good way, mulling over and digesting the events of the stories.
Here are stories about marriages barely holding together by the crumbling remains of a long-ago glue that's losing strength. Here are women who have lost husbands or are coming to terms with the realisation that the unions they stayed in so long weren't quite as glorious as hoped. A man steps outside his life to take an unhealthy interest in other people, another man contemplates a dalliance with another woman, and a married man falls in love with another man.
These are stories of ordinary people barrelling through the messy, chaotic lives that we all lead. There are many gems among them. Written in a plain, unadorned style, with shots of humour, Garisch's style places the characters of her stories right in the centre of our vision.
Besides Knock, Knock, there are many highlights in this collection. Another story that kept reverberating in my mind was Stranger, in which a woman, Daphne, sits on a bench in a park, nervously awaiting the arrival of a young woman called Tracy. The interaction is awkward; these two people don't know each other, yet there is a connection. To say more would spill the beans: in the end, we are left with a sense of what people do and don't mean to each other, of how illusions and expectations can shatter in moments. This story has stayed with me and is a fine example of the power of the short form.
Although Garisch's stories are written in the realist tradition, in Inheritance, Garisch plays with a bit of magic in the telling of a woman in a funeral parlour addressing the remains of her dead mother. It has been a somewhat fraught relationship, and the story highlights the difficulties in an amusing and memorable way.
In Rescue we are given a bird's-eye view of a man who loves rock climbing and a wife who doesn't quite understand that passion: "What Alan Partridge wanted, what he hoped to attract, was a woman who understood his need for mountains and his obsession with repeatedly solving the riddle embedded in vertical slabs of rock. A woman who would be there for him when he came home replete, ecstatic. Someone who wouldn't be fearful for him, nor complain to her friends when he wasn't around to braai on Sundays.
"What Alan had was Jenny, Jenny who believed that their meeting each other outside the Design Expo was a direct result of the Law of Attraction…"
Then Alan meets a man, Claude, "and they would enter each other in a way that he had never experienced with a woman. Falling, it was called: falling in love…"
The story follows Alan's experience of this relationship, his wife's sense that something is wrong, and his assertion to Claude that he is not gay despite their affair. It is yet another look at a life gone off the loop of expectations.
An encounter between a young journalist, Donna, and the elderly writer she has come to interview, Irene, makes for engaging reading in The Interview. Irene is rough and bristly in her answering, or often, non-answering of Donna's questions. The interview turns into a confession on Donna's part, and the story turns on explorations of creativity and what fuels our stories.
Marriage is explored in The Year of the Fire and Grip. In the latter, we home in on a long-married couple, Rosemary and Roger, who get lost while walking – "twilight closed in sooner than expected". Rosemary has a hip problem that will need operating on at some point and holds them back. Impatient, Roger has begun to have stiff wrists. This is an intricate portrait of a marriage, told through both their frantic attempts to find their way and Rosemary's growing realisation of what this marriage has meant to her.
"The Year of the Fire" presents another vision of a marriage – but one that has, as its catalyst, Clara's visit to a gynaecologist: "Clara was burning, a queasy, low conflagration in her belly". The doctor's diagnosis will blow a hole through her marriage to Tim.
Sometimes, we can only really tell what a long-term relationship has meant to us when the beloved is no longer alive. Such is the case in Remains, in which a newly widowed Frances can't decide what to do with the remains of her cremated husband. Her indecision over what room to place him in or whether and where to scatter his ashes shines a light on her growing realisation of their less-than-perfect union.
The Essential Ingredients also focuses on the memories and experiences of a recent widow, Jane, but this has been a happier union, though still seamed through with annoyances and faults. But, in this story, Jane starts to heal from a premature loss by cooking a soup with ten ingredients. The collection concludes with this warmly satisfying tale of comfort and healing.
In the end, after all, this is what remains of our lives, the memories of the stories we live – and this excellent collection gathers up the flotsam and jetsam of scattered lives and presents them in all their glorious contradictions and confusions.
Arja Salafranca is a Johannesburg-based fiction writer and poet and a content writer for Now Novel (nownovel.com)
