Short story collection review

Pieces for the Left Hand

By J Robert Lennon

Published by Granta Publications

After the frenzied intensity of his last book (Mailman), Lennon presents us with one hundred very short, beautifully crafted vignettes that aptly capture the oddness of everyday life.

In his introduction, the author tells us that some of the stories are true, but he also admits that 'some have been embellished, or fabricated entirely.' (Is he being honest about this, though?) The stories certainly have the appearance and feel of truth, and this I sense is the most important thing about them.

A man describes the beauty of his town’s sunset to a visiting French man, only to discover that the tourist was asking for the whereabouts of a toilet, not twilight; three people witness a crime, but they all remember details of the incident differently; a chef goes to great lengths to cook the perfect meal for a condemned man, but it is returned to the kitchen uneaten; the residents of a town are careful not to intrude upon the privacy of a celebrity resident, who takes this as unfriendliness and moves on.

Prosaically put, Lennon's point – if indeed he is trying to make a point – seems to be that life is full of strange conflicts, misunderstandings and coincidences, and that these experiences, common to us all, can and do enrich the seeming mundanity of our existence.

Just to prove the point, here's three of my own:

Postcard

I worked in a secondhand bookshop for a year. One day I was tidying up the Women's Studies books (I always tidied too much according to the shop’s owner) and for some reason pulled off the shelf a copy of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, a book I have never had a particular urge or cause to read. Upon opening the book, I found a postcard – presumably used as a bookmark – addressed to a friend of mine; she was as amazed and surprised to get it back as I was to have found it.

Sherlock

I have only read a few of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, but came across The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans in an anthology very recently. In this adventure, Holmes and Watson discover that the dead body was placed on the roof of a passing train from the window of an apartment in Courtfield Gardens. Last weekend, we visited my wife's parents for coffee as we sometimes do; during our conversation (which was in no way connected to Conan Doyle or his creation), it emerged that my father-in-law had lived for many years in a small room in Courtfield Gardens before he married.

Go West

I moved to Bristol in 1993 to work in a bookshop. Not long after I had been there, a man came in and asked to be shown the Weston books. Quietly priding myself on my newly-acquired geographical knowledge of south-west England, I took him to our local interest section and handed him several glossy titles about Weston-super-Mare. 'No, no,' he said, looking puzzled and slightly alarmed at the same time, 'books about cowboys and indians; you know, western books.' Meekly I took him to our small display of Louis L’Amour titles in the fiction section before retreating to the safety of the staff room.

And one from Juliette at Signature Books:

Lost and Found

I lost an address book on a plane on the way back from my holidays. One of the plane cleaners found it; while looking through it, she found her niece's address – my schoolfriend! She turned up to school the next week with my address book.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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