From mimetic punctiliousness to imaginative free play

Abstract

Book Title: The edge of things Book Cover: [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Author: Arja Salafranca Publisher: Dye Hard Press, Sandton, 2011, 279 p., ZAR185.00 * * Book price at time of review ISBN: 978-0-620-49506-6 In 1958 Randall Jarrell, the American poet, edited and brought out a collection of stories, Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories, which contains a famous introduction. The book was long out of print but has been recently republished as a New York Review Books Classic (2002). It is, naturally, very difficult to generalise about a book such as the one under review, but there is one section of Jarrell's introduction that seems pertinent to The edge of things, in its mixture of complexity and comprehensiveness: It is so good, our stories believe, simply to remember: their elementary delight in recognition, familiarity, mimesis, is another aspect of their obsession with all the likenesses of the universe, those metaphors that Proust called essential to style. Stories want to know: everything from the first blaze and breathlessness and fragrance to the last law and structure, but, too, stories don't want to know, don't want to care, just want to do as they please. (Jarrell 2002: x) The range of the story: from mimetic punctiliousness to imaginative free play. Aria Salafranca's task, as compiler of The edge of things, is not to ponder the nature of short fiction; it is to present as many works as possible, with an eye on quality, in order to promote the genre in this country. She notes that the stories submitted for publication in the book showed 'an astonishing variety of narratives and approaches, shifting from realism to playful absurdity and crossing the boundaries from the strictly fictional to something that sits just beyond fiction, but isn't quite nonfiction either' (p. 7). Jarrell would have approved. Looking at the stories themselves one finds it hard to pick out those that deserve special mention, but let me refer to some. 'Bounce' (p. 9), by Jayne Bauling, is a curiously gripping account (perhaps because this reviewer has tried to do the same) of the attempted rescue of a baby lourie, psychologically bound to the loss of a murdered partner. Salafranca's own 'The Iron Lung' (p. 18), juxtaposes two first-person accounts, those of mother and daughter, about life with the iron lung device; the device assumes a figurative significance. Cunningly different from other stories is Liesl Jobson's 'You pay for the view: twenty tips for super pics' (p. 30), a life story constructed around the said tips and moments captured as camera events. The events begin with '1. …