A book a day: Caroline Blackwood: Not a word

Translation: Damian Tullio

Year of publication: 2010

Valoración: Advisable

Not a wordanthology in which Chai Editora compiles the best stories of Caroline Blackwood, has fascinated me. And it is that the stories gathered here are my type: they are disturbing, they address dark themes, present characters with chiaroscuro and oblique interactions, benefit from a satisfactory ambiguity, close with catharsis of the most doubtful and are excellently written.

Next we have eight stories headed by the word “fiction”: “The interview”, “The baby of the baby”, “My love, please, do not cry”, “Taft’s wife”, “Addy”, “Marigold’s Christmas”, “Compulsive Buy” and “The Automatic Automatic”. Although they all work very well, my favorite is “the interview”, because in addition to touching genius, he remembers vaguely, for his premise, characters and perversity, to the masterful “Ravishing“by Robert Aickman.

• “Not a word.” A professional professional jockey, who accompanies two rich girls when they are going to ride, asks one who meets with him in the middle of the forest.
• “Pig”. The school of male students in which, due to the avatars of the war, the protagonist ends up, becomes a violent place because of a thug that imposes his law.
• “Burned unit”. A woman expects, in the asepsis of a burned hospital, a miracle for her daughter.
• “The interview”. A journalist invites the widow of a famous painter to take something after the projection of a documentary about the life of the late artist, to ask what he found. The old woman, apparently pathetic, is revealed to disturb and embarrass her young interlocutor with her opinions, propositions and sarcasm.
• “The baby nanny.” A young woman falls into depression after giving birth and her husband hires a nanny, who is gradually taking over her home.
• “My love, don’t cry, please.” A woman undergoes an aesthetic operation against the will of her husband, who must still try to calm her while waiting for her in the hospital.
• “Taft’s wife.” An attractive social wizard, very delivered in his cases but lonely and jealous of his private life, finds the mother of an abandoned child, now married to a rich man, and concert a meal between the three.
• “Addy”. A woman assimilates the death of a dog for whom she felt special affection.
• “Marigold Christmas”. A single mother prepares to spend Christmas without her ex -husband for the first time, because she, even after divorce, always accompanied her and her daughter.
• “Compulsive Purchase”. A forty who wants to spend her husband’s money experiences all kinds of feelings with the solicitous employee offered to attend to her.
• “The answering machine”. A widow tries to overcome mourning with an eccentric ritual, which consists of calling itself from a sordid pub and leaves messages in the answering machine.

I already say that if I had to choose between any of the stories that make up Not a wordI would keep “the interview”, for its protagonist as fragile and senile as perverse and lucid, and perhaps also with “the baby’s nanny”, for the murky family dynamics that he captures.

Likewise, it would highlight the impact that “not a word” and “my love, do not cry, please”, the growing tension that erects “pig”, the psychological portrait of the protagonist of “Taft’s wife” and the Malrolleras catharsis of “Addy”, “Marigold’s Christmas”, “Compulsive Buy” or “The Automatic Automatic”.

You will have noticed that I have only been to cite one of the eleven stories of Not a word In the two previous paragraphs. And, although “Burned Unit” is a story more than solvent, adorned with very suggestive metaphors and reflections, in my opinion there is some body lacks his argument and protagonist.