I Read Books: Families And Other Natural Disasters by Anita Goveas
One of the sections of this book of flash fiction is titled Families; presumably therefore the other categories of natural disasters are Fire, Water, Wind and Love.
Families, and food, and clothing (especially shoes), and growing up, and love weave their way throughout all the stories. The opening story What Really Gets You Is The Rising Heat, a tale of a volcano that is a family curse, effortlessly offers the narrator’s background, her Indian family and her British background, single items of clothing, and a deserted ricepot, on its way to firstly underlining the metaphor, then transcending it in the final paragraph.
(I’ve previously written about my admiration of this story so will stop here).
What Really Get You Is The Rising Heat is both my favourite, and also exemplifies the themes of this collection. There’s more though, not just iterations on the same topics. Some highlights include Finding Venkat, about aquariums and only learning who people are when they’re gone. Magic and Candlelight captures being a teenager and not fitting in in a handful of well-observed sentences. And Reverse uses a turn around the table while playing Uno to show how well, and how badly, a family know each other.
This slim volume of flash fiction circles ideas of families, brilliant and terrible and inevitable, distant and close, disasters and recoveries. There are clever examinations of what family means and does, and in the best pieces there are witty or extraordinary transformations of what family can be.
Read This: For a set of short punchy stories about the landscape of family
Don’t Read This: If you want long meditations, all this is pretty short
Disclosure: As noted I have been a fan of some of these pieces when they were published elsewhere and Anita sent me a review copy. You can buy your own here.
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