England and Other Stories, by Graham Swift


Graham Swift FRSL (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature) was born in 1949 in London, England. He was educated at Cambridge, and later the University of York.

One of his most important works is Waterland (1992), which was adapted as a film, starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal (father of the actor Jake Gyllenhaal and of the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal).  It’s the story about a teacher in a secondary school, and it’s situated in the Fens, a marshy region in the east of England. The teacher, a tormented person because he feels guilty of a sad incident, teaches history and mixes his lessons with the history of his family.

Another novel that has also adapted as a film is Last Orders (1996), starring Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins and Hellen Mirren. It’s about a group of friends who have to scatter the ashes of a deceased friend in the sea. The story goes backwards and forwards, this way remembering the old days of their dead friend. The novel got the Booker Prize in 1996 and this was a cause of controversy because of its similarities with the novel As I lay Dying, by Faulkner. The title of Swift novel alludes to the will of a defunct and also to the phrase said by the bartenders at 22:55 to prompt the patrons to order one last drink, because at 23:00 the pub will be closed.

He wrote several novels more, and also two collections of short stories: Learning to Swim and England and Other Stories.

Swift is more an English than a world writer, because he writes mostly about English subjects and situates his stories in British soil. The events (murder, adultery…) of his novels are treated with decorum, in an almost puritanic fashion. We can use the saying “Still waters run deep” for his narratives: at first sight all is calm, but the tragedy is underneath. His characters are “typical British”, phlegmatic people.

Technically, Swift does not innovate. His novels are mostly conventional. And that means he is understandable to everyone. But his novels are full of mystery: you don’t know the reasons why the people act and react, and these reasons will be revealed only gradually. In this case, sometimes you think that the author is playing with you: if he knows the solution, why doesn’t he tell us about it from the beginning?

 

About him:

He went to live in Greece for a year with the purpose of becoming a writer, and he went back to England with a horrid (according to him) manuscript.

He was influenced by Isaac Babel when he was younger, and kept a photograph of the Russian writer on his desk.

 

About himself:

“I believe it would be a bad day for a writer if he could say, “I know exactly what I'm doing”.

“I hope my imagination will always surprise and stretch me and take me along unsuspected paths.”

“When you're reading a book, you're on a little island.”

 

About England and Other Stories

“All these stories are bits of England, but they are bits of different Englands.”

His short stories are an affectionate chronicle of everyday lives.

A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories.

In most of the stories, ‘Englishness’ has a less concrete nature, a bittersweet quality.

This is a sharp, beautiful collection: every story quick and readable but leaving in the memory a core, a residue, of thoughtfulness. Some are wicked, some are funny.

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