‘The Prologue’ is a wonderful piece, barely a page in size. Is this merely a temporary reunification? Has the mother pulled the son over, or is it vice versa? Open to interpretation, there is no doubting the intensity of emotion packed into this short. Mother and son are reunited but what lies ahead is left hanging. Help me, I say at night, lying in the lonely bed, the marriage bed of not-John and me. She longs for his deceased father to be alive again, to help her understand. A mother worries as her son has begun to sit under a tree all day, distant and withdrawn. ‘Under the Tree’ is one of the longer pieces at over three pages. In ‘My Uncle’s Son’ a young man regards life from the periphery until someone reaches out to drag him into the living.
Hershman writes with a lyrical precision that slices apart what it is to be human. This tale is more cautionary than comical. It’s a tight story, playful, but the premise isn’t too outrageous. People were having dreams about browser pages that had words missing, their names had wings and had taken flight, like heads off a goldfish. Google fuels ego, and the narcissistic need to look at what others say is interwoven into everyday life, ultimately to replace sexual satisfaction. The opener, ‘The Google 250’ is a modern take on personal gratification as technology supplants sex to satisfy our base desires.
I was hooked before the book had even properly begun, sucked into the introductory note on the font that is used – Crimson Text – and its backstory. They spark ideas in the reader that linger afterwards, like ball lightning coring into your mind.
These are sculpted fictions that fizz with intelligence. Instead she plunders from science and the arts, creating dense philosophical microcosms that have more to say about the human condition than the attempts of some lengthier works.Įach sentence is stripped back their words scraped or polished until the paragraphs are whittled into shape. Hershman’s writing is cross-discipline, eschewing a specialist streak that in lesser hands might have resulted in sets of navel-gazing motifs or a hermetically sealed collection. Her short-short stories and micro-fictions are concise, impressively constructed examples of the form stories with soul despite their brevity. Tania Hershman’s My Mother was an Upright Piano compacts 56 stories into 136 pages.
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