Influx Press, 2017, 171 p.

The first impression on reading this collection of short stories is that Williams has an abiding interest in words – see two of the story titles, not to mention aphaeresis* and apocope. That is all to the good, authors ought to have such an interest. So here we find Williams using stark and spectrum as verbs, giving us an unusual meaning for the word ‘boggling’ to do with the movements of rat’s eyes and also the pleasing coinage Timbucktootle. However she doesn’t appear to know that ‘staunch’ is not the spelling used to indicate suppression of blood flow.
*Aphæresis?

The stories themselves are short, none is more than fourteen pages long and the typeface is quite large, but all say what they need to.

The Alphabet (or Love Letters or Writing Love Letters, Before I Forget How To Use Them or These Miserable Loops Look So Much Better On Paper Than in Practice) is narrated by someone who has lost the plot – and her glasses – describing the disintegration of her world after a diagnosis of aphasia. It has a list of the letters of the alphabet and the shapes they each describe.
Swatch features a boy worried about the multi-coloured flecks in his eyes – even after his father has shown him the definition of the Scottish word glaiks (flashes) on his phone screen.
In Attrib. a Foley artist commissioned to provide the sound effects for the audio of an exhibition of huge reproductions of Michael Angelo’s works is annoyed by the sounds she has been asked to add to the description of The Creation of Eve.
Smote (or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front Of A Print By Bridget Riley) is a stream of consciousness of someone in a gallery standing before that artist’s Movement in Squares – “a painting the surface of which itches with vertigo” – being too self-conscious to kiss their companion. The story is shot through with black-and-white images.
Bs are the thoughts of a half-awake woman in her partner’s bed as she is disturbed by the noises of a bird outside and a bee trapped the night before in a used Nutella jar.
Alight at the Next has non-standard typography. It presents the thoughts of someone about to get off a tube train beside their lover, who is standing very close, but a man obstructs them by trying to get on. Our narrator places a finger on the man’s forehead to stop him.
Concision invokes words from Finnish, Bantu and Rapa Nui to describe the feelings of the recipient of a telephone call staring at the dots on the receiver while being unable to respond to the caller, whom we assume is a lover or spouse.
In And Back Again the answer to an easy question about love brings to the responder’s mind a lyric from the musical Oliver! and conjures the fantasy of a trip to Timbuktu to prove the extent of devotion.
Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef is exactly what its title says, an enumeration of the thoughts of a chef who – highly illegally – “drowns ortolan in Armagnac” before cooking them to be eaten by diners who cover their heads in blankets while doing so.
Synaesthete, Would Like to Meet is narrated by someone who had the Yellow Pages dropped on her head aged 8 and ever since suffered from synæsthesia. Until, that is, a reply on a dating service and the subsequent date provides relief. Her therapist is not so happy about that.
Bulk sees a group of people with varied purposes converge on the carcase of a whale washed up on a beach early one morning.
In Platform, someone recalls the moment their friend left them forever via a poster made from a blown-up photograph taken at the time. The photograph reveals details of the scene unnoticed at the time.
Rosette Manufacture: A Catalogue and Spotter’s Guide is exactly what its title says. An employee of a rosette manufacture describing its wares.
Scutiform follows the thoughts of a museum attendant on their habitual route taken on their daily break past three particular statues.
Mischief features the consciousness of someone in charge of rats which have been trained to detect landmines.
Spines describes a small incident involving a hedgehog in a swimming pool on a family holiday to the south of France.
Spins opens with Johnson’s Dictionary definition of the word ‘spider’ complete with the letter ‘s’ rendered in that old style I can only reproduce as f. The fpider concerned is noticed by someone lying on a bed for hours trying to think of what could have been after a lover had slammed the door on their way out following an argument.

Pedant’s corner:- “millions of potentials colours” (potential colours,) Blu-Tack (x 2, Blu-Tak,) “the chew of a maw” (maws do not chew; they are stomachs,) “the Tube doors, doors shut” (the repetition is not needed but may be an attempt at ) “lickerish plastic” (lickerish means dainty, tempting or lecherous. Williams has her spellings confused; she had previously described the plastic as having the colour of liquorice,) “the hotel might provided” (might provide,) Areopagitca (Areopagitica,) “pulled the door close behind me” (closed?) “the woman with the urn ask the group” (asked.) Synaesthete (I’d prefer Synæsthete,) “you are not here any more to remind me that the plural should be croci” (the character has this wrong, the plural of crocus in English is indeed crocuses. In any case, crocus is derived from Greek [krokos] not Latin: the Greek plural would be krokodes.) “‘The bakers was shut’” (baker’s,) staunch (stanch,) “is an ‘an insect’” (has ‘an’ once too many.) In the acknowledgements; skillfully (skilfully.)

Dedalus, 2012, 166 p. Translated from the Italian L’ultimo dei vostiachi by Judith Landry.

Marani wrote one of the best novels I read last year – any year – New Finnish Grammar. His interest in Finland and its language is again in evidence here. In many ways this novel is the one which the title of New Finnish Grammar promised it would be. It may in fact be unique in having a plot which depends on comparative philology for its motor.

The titular last of the Vostyachs is Ivan, survivor of a gulag in which, twenty years before, his father was killed trying to escape. For all those years, until the guards quit due to lack of pay and left the gates open for the inmates to wander off, Ivan did not speak. He is a misfit in the locality, communes with animals and believes the wolves are other Vostyachs who changed form to evade the world and cannot get back. Olga, a Russian linguist studying the Samoyedic languages thereabouts is asked to help understand what he says. She recognises his speech as Vostyach, the long thought extinct oldest language of the Proto-Uralic family, a kind of linguistic missing link between Eskimo-Aleut and Finno-Ugric.

Trusting to his scientific curiosity, she writes to tell Professor Jarmo Aurtova, organiser of an imminent Finno-Ugric conference in Helsinki, of her discovery, making great play of Ivan’s velar fricatives and retroflex palatals, his use of the fricative lateral and labiovelar appendix. (Somewhat improbably, given the time scale involved, she suggests to Aurtova, “Perhaps your ancestors included some Sioux chief who fought at Little Big Horn!”) She tells him Ivan has problems with the modern world, does not like aeroplanes in particular, so while she attends a meeting in St Petersburg she will despatch him by train to Helsinki, and asks Aurtova to meet him at the station.

Aurtova has a portrait of Finnish wartime leader Marshal Mannerheim on his wall and thinks Finland and Finnish the pinnacle of human development, that Finns were the first Europeans, connected to neither Mongols nor Eskimos. As a result he does not take kindly to the prospect of a living rebuke to his beliefs. The scene is set for a tragedy, played out in the coldest night in Helsinki for fifty years and involving the release of animals from Helsinki zoo.

This may seem forbidding but the novel flows extremely smoothly and, despite the instances of linguistic vocabulary, is very easy to read. Marani creates compelling characters, can structure and tell a story and the translation (with a couple of exceptions*) serves him very well.

Marani has Olga express the preciousness of a language. During their encounter within the book she tells Aurtova that Vostyach has a word, powakaluta, for “something grey glimpsed vaguely running through the snow,” a word which will vanish if Vostyach does – though the thing it describes will not. And that disappearance would be terrible. She also reminds him that Finnish doesn’t have a future tense. (Something which is apparently common. English hasn’t, but can utilise an auxiliary verb to enable one.)

If I have any criticisms it is that the book may be romanticising slightly both Ivan’s relationship with nature and that of native North Americans and that Aurtova’s actions are perhaps a little unbelievable.

The Last of the Vostyachs was a delight to read just the same.

*The issues with the translation were firstly that ice hockey isn’t played on a pitch and its scoring system does not have points, “a few points short of victory,” plus the sentence, “One of the six thousand languages still spoken on this earth die out every two weeks.” Dies, surely? In a book dealing with philology, it’s perhaps as well to nail down the grammar. And that “ancestors” isn’t the correct word; “many times removed cousin” is nearer the mark.