Attrib. and other stories

Though most of the stories take place against a background of failing or failed relationships and often feature death or disease, this is a playful collection of linguistic fancies. Eley Williams either takes normal situations (two boys playing hide and seek or two lovers standing in front of a painting) and gives bravado performances of linguistic gymnastics or she takes weird setups (strangers meeting around a beached whale, an ortolan chef arguing with her boyfriend) and sees where they lead.Through a playfulness with language, she finds the weird in the everyday and the everyday in the weird.

wonderful

This is such a smart and fresh compilation of stories. Both moving and so, so funny, I had to pace myself so as not to swallow it whole and have it last a while.

What a strange little book. But what a fun romp through the playground of language. In Attrib. and Other Stories, Eley Williams plays Hamlet on the stage of language—words, words, words. The opening story, “The Alphabet (or Love Letters or Writing Love Letters, Before I Forget How to Use Them or These Miserable Loops Look So Much Better on Paper Than in Practice),” is narrated by a young woman with aphasia, who is losing language itself. In “Synaesthete, Would Like to Meet,” the narrator suffers from a severe case of synesthesia that negates his ability to deal with the world around him. The only effective treatment, which he has recently discovered, is the presence of a particular girl, who seems to quiet all sensation. The narrator’s therapist, jealous of the girl, tries ever more bizarre treatment.In many of the stories in this collection, the narrator speaks directly to an absent lover, and that occasional second person “you” popping up in the narrative brings the reader to a sense of loss or of potential loss, hinting that the story isn’t for the reader but for the absent lover. The narrator ponders, explores the possibilities. At times the sense of lost lover is mixed with a sense of lost self. The narrator searches the landscape for clues to her own identity.Williams’ novel, The Liar’s Dictionary, established language as not only the medium of her work but as a central character. The style and structure of the narrative itself sometimes reflects the influence of the dictionary. Mostly, Williams exhibits a love for the way words evolve and flex and create their own possibilities. If you are a word lover, reading this book will be fun.

Couldn't get interested in reading it.

I was very attracted to this cover & Eley Williams' books have great covers all around.This is a collection of stories that focuses on details - colors explained vividly and creatively, and words that you've never heard of. Each story focuses on an emotional peak of every day life.While I'm not upset I've read it, I didn't care for this collection too much.Thank you to netgalley & the publisher for this arc.

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.

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.

Those who read my gestalt reviews regularly over the years will already know much about the various versions of synaesthesia in life and in literature. And this story of a woman, I guess, is the perfect expression of synaesthesia of sight-to-mind’s colour-object over-synergy. Bravo!This story — about tantamount-to-dating with a blank man who, when in his presence, expunges her disabling but spectacular synaesthetic condition, and with her doctor, who trials her condition in certain public entertainment situations — is enthralling. A fine oblique fable, with today, in retrocausal hindsight, a moral that startlingly involves a blinding kiss!The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.

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.

The envy I felt for Eley Williams knowledge of and luxuriance in language, her boldness in its use, the freshness she put such knowledge to, I am sorry (and ashamed) to say marred my enjoyment of this a little - why oh why had I not grasped the opportunities given to me as a child and developed such skills myself?Not that every story in this collection was a pleasure. Some felt self-indulgent to a point beyond comprehension; the practicalities and dimensions of an airing cupboard puzzled me, but so many others impressed with their apparent knowledge not only of language but also, for example, of bomb disposal, and overall this was a joy to be re-savoured more than once.

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.