Attrib. and other stories

wonderful

One part prose poetry, one part meditation. Williams holds your attention and your ear without making a sound.

Lovely and careful and poetic. Mostly love stories, sometimes sad, sometimes romantic, and often funny. Just very good.

Couldn't get interested in reading it.

This is something that I feel will be regularly returned to, carried around, dipped into in the same way that a favoured poetry volume is always close to hand, like some sort of talisman. Every line is charged and the words hum and vibrate with an energy created via their improbability as partners. Williams plumbs the depths of frozen moments and attempts, with success, to define the fleeting and elusive qualities that make us feel alive for an all too brief split second amid the mundane minutes and hours that fill our days. This collection is like a catalogue of those instances, but she is a curator who keeps her specimens very much alive rather than pinned or suspended. Particularly loved 'Bulk'. Stimulating, mischievous, formidable.

One of the most accomplished, intelligent collections I've read this year. Focuses on what can't be said easily using wit, distraction and side lining in memorable narrative form. Vivid constructions of synaesthetic experiences give movement and richness to language with lyrical originality. Deconstruction of language, word play and semantics give words a playful, fresh significance and discerning analysis. Would recommend this to strangers at bus stops and for anyone who is, like me, woefully obsessed with words.

I read this because I very much enjoyed Eley Williams being interviewed by Dr Alex Lawrie of Edinburgh University, as part of a MOOC that is run each year on ‘How to Read a Novel’ in association with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, which this book won. The interview was inquisitive and same-sex flirtatious, and Eley Williams had plenty to say. Attrib. expresses the strangeness of the world for the introvert and the pain of communication. It is the achievement of mastery through vocabulary, alliteration and allusion. Wants are not fulfilled – “I wanted to tell them about the beetles.” Everything connects, one thought exploding into another, often preventing action. The acute sensations of synaesthesia in one story may be a get-out, the ultimate excuse for paralysis: “don’t ever kiss me goodbye because I cannot promise it would not leave me blinded.” Words build up under pressure, so it seems as if each story might explode rather than exhale.

Good review in The Guardian prompted me to purchase this collection. I’m always open to new styles of the short story discipline, however, this collection left me disappointed. Found the “wordplay” styling of the text ultimately frustrating. Layout of the printed pages didn’t help - text set too close to the page trim and too many widows.

Without meaning to slip into hyperbole, this is quite probably one of the greatest books I've ever read. Each story has a beautifully crafted turn of phrase, an insight into another world, and a visceral emotional connection which is deftly established in the space of each few pages. I'm in awe of Williams' skill.