The Loudest Sound and Nothing

by Clare Wigfall

The absences from Clare Wigfall’s masterful debut collection of stories resonate almost as powerfully as what is present. A brooding sense of loss recurs throughout. Sometimes information is withheld from the reader: in 'Night After Night', the narrator’s husband is arrested for an unspecified (and consequently more disturbing) crime. And sometimes the narrative revolves around what is missing: in 'Safe', babies are vanishing, all over the country, without explanation.

This sense of incompleteness tugs on the reader’s imagination, presents us with enough information to darkly conjure the rest. Then, when things are found – a baby in 'The Numbers', a body in 'When the Wasps Drowned', they too prove to be the result of hidden crimes. It seems that both secrets, as well as their unveiling, contain their own unique horrors.

Omissions, in any case, are no problem when you have a writer able do so much with so few words. Two of the very best stories in here, 'Caro at the Pool' (in which the surface of the pool catches the light 'in a way that looked almost like a sound too high to hear.') and 'A Return Ticket to Epsom', cover only seven pages between them, but in each Wigfall conjures a scene which provokes a wide range of emotions in the reader. Perfectly formed and coolly elegant, these two stories linger in the mind long afterwards, reminders of how short stories can be such a uniquely rewarding art.

Taken together, these stories read like expressions of a unique and compelling artistic vision. It almost conceals the impressive range covered in the collection. 'The Party’s Just Getting Started' is set in contemporary, high society LA, 'Night After Night' in post-war Britain. The stories range still further – to the nineteenth-century Paris of 'The Ocularist's Wife', and then, with the opening story, 'The Numbers', into a remote Island community in an uncertain time. There’s something otherworldly about this story, a brooding atmosphere also tapped into by the title story.

Wigfall moves between these territories effortlessly, creating her worlds with a wonderful economy, the perfectly weighted use of details and voice. She conjures an earthy dialect for 'The Numbers', and an easy twang for the Clyde Barrow-narrated 'Folks Like Us': 'I wouldn’ve put myself a man who believed in destiny or nothing…' he begins.

The Loudest Sound and Nothing is the finest debut collection I’ve read since Clare Keegan’s Antarctica – and like Keegan, Wigfall seems to have emerged as a talent fully-formed. These are sorrowful, disturbing and darkly beautiful stories, and they deserve, absolutely, to be read.

Publisher: Faber

Clare Wigfall

Following in the footsteps of Polly Dunbar (and previously, Evie Wyld, Nii Ayikwei Parkes and Patrick Ness), award-winning author Clare Wigfall is Booktrust's fifth online writer in residence.

Clare Wigfall's highly-acclaimed debut book of stories The Loudest Sound and Nothing was published in the UK by Faber in September 2007. The collection’s opening story 'The Numbers' was awarded the 2008 BBC National Short Story Award and she was later nominated by William Trevor for the 2009 E.M. Forster Award. Most recently, she received the K Blundell Trust Award for a writer under forty whose work enhances social consciousness, and was longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Bank Short Story Award. Her longlisted story is taken from a new collection that she is currently working on for Faber, together with a novel set in British Malaya in the early half of the last century. In November of this year, Walker Books will publish her first children’s picture-book Has Anyone Seen My Chihuahua?

Clare was born in Greenwich, London in 1976. She spent her early childhood in Berkeley, California before returning to the UK. Since graduating from Manchester University, she has lived in Prague, Granada, Norwich, Berlin, and now Edinburgh. She won the Curtis Brown UEA fellowship to study on the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Master’s Programme.

Her work has been been published in Prospect, New Writing 10, the Dublin Review, ExBerliner, A Public Space, and Clare has also written for BBC Radio 4 and NPR Berlin. Alongside her writing, Clare has also worked in various roles including assistant and editor to the late President of Mensa, British assistant to a Czech contemporary art gallery, as a writing tutor to children and adults, as a voice-over actress, and also founded and ran Prague’s first face painting company. She currently lives in Edinburgh with her husband, baby daughter, and dog.

Clare Wigfall