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Welcome noise in short-story debut by a local author

Prague writer Clare Wigfall shows impressive range in styles and settings

By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
September 26th, 2007 issue

The Loudest Sound and Nothing

By Clare Wigfall
Faber and Faber, 230 pages
The author will do a reading and book signing at the Globe Monday, Oct. 1, at 8 p.m.

Clare Wigfall’s debut short story collection, The Loudest Sound and Nothing, is an assortment of styles. Wigfall is a writer who can move from the slipstream of Angela Carter to Carveresque realism in the turning of a page, all with a commanding fluency.
Indeed, that the same author of a macabre tale of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War is also responsible for a wry, first-person narrative by gangster Clyde Barrow, can often only be guessed from such clues as Wigfall’s singular preoccupation with the legs of prone characters and for a fondness of the word “squall.”
The danger with such a dazzling, chameleonic performance would be to dismiss Wigfall as simply ventriloquial — a gifted channeler of voices from fiction’s stacks. While there is certainly a mimetic quality to a few of the pieces, there is also a bracing originality in this collection, including stunning metaphors and arresting images that are wholly Wigfall’s.
The first story, “The Numbers,” is as grim as Synge. On some unnamed Gaelic isle off Britain, a young woman, a gutter of fish, finds an abandoned baby near a peat bog.
Such a discovery, in a culture shaped as much by potato blight as ample whiskey, comes with peril. “Folk will not take well to that bairn,” the girl’s brother warns her. “There is some darksome magick surrounding her and she’ll bring bad luck to the island, that’s what they’ll say.” “The Numbers” becomes a countdown to an act of feral violence.
This gloom-laden isle gives way to the scorching sun of the U.S. Southwest in “The Parrot Jungle,” a classic road-trip tale, wherein a German academic and a middle-aged fortune-teller manage to transform each other’s lives while on a journey to a Florida theme park.
Wigfall’s evocation of life in the American desert is perfect. The sun-blasted furnishings of the fortune-teller’s Arizona tract house give the German an “odd feeling of staring in at a dated Polaroid photograph.”
As if under that same sun, “Caro at the Pool” is a beautifully crafted vignette of a young woman flirting at the side of a public pool, all the while being watched by her young sister. “Caro” is as crystalline as it is succinct, ending with this startling, synesthetic description: “Caroline watched the surface of the water as she walked back to the changing cubicles. It shimmered brightly, catching the light, she thought, in a way that looked almost like a sound too high to hear.” Echoes, you could say, of a David Hockney painting.
“The Ocularist’s Wife” returns us to a dark, interior Europe. Madame Pontellier, crinolined and tubercular, starves herself as all of Paris hungers during the war with the Prussians. Her body is as much under siege as the city surrounding her, though her husband’s best friend, a zookeeper, reluctantly keeps them in meat.
The fin de siecle despair is palpable. Madame Pontellier will suddenly nibble on meat with her hands when her husband isn’t looking, careful to avoid splashing its juices on her dress. In another instant, she falls to the floor and begins licking the carpet. She is repulsed, however, when one of her husband’s customers tries on his new glass eye, his eye socket hungrily grabbing the glass fake “like a greedy sea anemone.”
In Wigfall’s stories, there is often something unspoken, an absence in the plotting that allows her readers’ imaginations to run riot. Why are babies disappearing in “Safe”? In this Carter-like variation on a Grimm folk theme, it might be due to rats. And then again …
The wife of “Night After Night” finds her life altered by her husband’s crimes. What horrors he committed can only be guessed at, just as we cannot know why the children in “When the Wasps Drowned” don’t tell the police of the buried girl in the yard adjoining their house.
The title story, “The Loudest Sound and Nothing,” is a dark, poetic story of a widow and her blind son, possibly a seer, who, with his pupil-less, pulsating soured-milk eyes, stares blankly upon the world. The woman, Aureline, never strays far from the sound of the sea that claimed her husband. Its roar and its quieter ebb underline both the characters’ lives and Wigfall’s lyrical prose.
Halfway through the collection, like an unwelcome entr’acte, is “The Party’s Just Starting.” This comical, contemporary retelling of the Adam and Eve and Lilith story is the only piece of Wigfall’s that seems forced. Seemingly included to prove that the writer is also capable of comedy, it suddenly makes the collection feel like an audition. Still, to find only one disappointment in a debut book of 17 stories is rather unheard-of odds.
The British Wigfall, a longtime Prague resident, is best-known locally as the teacher-director of the Ancient Geeks, a kids’ writing group. What’s impressive about the Geeks is how surprisingly well-versed these young writers are in literary styles and genres, mastering, as they have, the Petrarchan sonnet as easily as suspense-horror.
As evinced in The Loudest Sound and Nothing, this versatility clearly stems from their teacher’s own great talent for transmuting the library of fiction into something uniquely hers. Lucky kids. Luckier readers.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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