Such people can be expected to topple over at any minute, and then it will be certificates to the rescue.” Not that Nell and Tig expect to be of any use in such a crisis. The guests on the cruise ship, they reflect, will be “older than Nell and Tig. When we meet Nell and Tig they are on a first aid course: they need a certificate to give talks on a cruise ship. (The book is dedicated to Atwood’s partner, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019.) The Nell and Tig stories tell the tale of a long and loving marriage, and what comes after. The book is in three parts: a miscellaneous collection of stories is sandwiched between sections called Tig and Nell and Nell and Tig. There are chips and fragments of lives, full of sass and sadness. Most of the characters in Margaret Atwood’s latest book are old, or heading that way, and their stories unwrap what TS Eliot called the gifts reserved for age. Ian Williams £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Escoffery could have been content to tell these stories in a straightforward way – they’re weighty enough to hold our attention – but his exaggerated stylishness takes us beyond wan empathy to identification. It’s a genius move, when you consider it. He cannot convincingly narrate from the I position because that would presume that he inhabits a self. Less obviously, because you essentially stands in for I, it confirms the estrangement Trelawny feels from himself. Obviously, the second person brokers empathy between reader and character – you put yourself in Trelawny’s shoes. His family is a case study in marital estrangement, parental favouritism and sibling rivalry. For the most part, the collection follows Trelawny, a racially ambiguous Black man, who is constantly served the question: “What are you?” His economic and romantic prospects are dim. It advances in short, impressionistic scenes, and much like viewing a Seurat, you’re lured in by the dazzling surface before needing to step back for relief. Unless you’re Escoffery, a young American in whose hands the second person is arresting, intimate, adventurous, attuned, sophisticated and, yes, still self-conscious.īooker-shortlisted If I Survive You is a stylish debut of eight linked short stories set mostly in Miami during a recession. Just don’t do it, writing instructors warn. The second-person point of view risks being contrived, distracting, presumptuous, scratchy, puerile and self-conscious.
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