Freeman's: California (Freeman's, 6)

“Sometimes when she woke from a flabbergasting dream Liz would lie very still to see if she could net it before it fled; perfectly still, eyes closed, not moving her head, as if the slightest shift would tip the story-bearing liquid, break its fragile meniscus and spill the night’s elusive catch”

Freeman’s Arrival is the first collection of short pieces (between one page and fifty-six pages in length) which are grouped loosely around the theme of arrival, edited by American author, poet, essayist and editor, John Freeman. The pieces include fiction, poetry, non-fiction and even a photographic contribution.

The fiction pieces vary greatly in their style and content, and while all are excellent, the standout stunner is the story by Fatin Abbas titled “On a Morning”. Her descriptive prose is wonderfully evocative: “William pointed out the important landmarks. There weren’t many: a mosque, a church, a police station, the small, dusty market…..Alleyways careening and twisting at random angles. Huts that didn’t look like houses so much as giant mushrooms that had sprouted from the earth. Goats that liked to perch high up in trees, snipping at leaves. A brown-green landscape, interrupted by the women’s bright-colored dresses in bursts of red and saffron yellow and rippling blue and orange” and she conveys the feel of Sudan with consummate ease: “People paused with their cups in midair. Spoons tinkled against plates. In the quiet, flies buzzed and zipped from one sticky teacup to another. It was close and hot, drops of sweat trickling down Alex’s jaw and into the hollow at the base of his throat, the tip of his nose gleaming”

The non-fiction pieces, too, are well written. From Colum McCann’s arrival in Dublin:“I began to feel what I can only call an emigrant’s panic. To be a man of two countries, his hands in the dark pockets of each, these were streets I used to know. Nothing was the same” to David Mitchell’s encounter with a ghost in a Japanese bedroom, to Aleksander Hemon’s description of his immigrant parents’ life: “Some native-born stranger versed in reality-TV diagnoses would see it as a place of hoarding, but everything in it makes perfect sense, not only to my father, but to me as well: The inside of The Barn is the inside of my father’s head, the clutter an emanation of his mind, the overpopulated territory of his personal sovereignty”, all are interesting, thought provoking and sometimes, hilariously funny, as Etgar Keret’s story, “Mellow” demonstrates.

Lydia Davis gives the reader an interesting take on learning a language when she explains how and why she learned Norwegian by reading a non-fiction novel by Dag Solstad, in Norwegian, without the aid of a dictionary, and with a less-than-rudimentary command of that language.

This collection is a good opportunity for readers to sample the works of writers with whom they are unfamiliar, although “names” like David Mitchell, Huraki Murakami and Colum McCann also contribute. Freeman states that his intention is produce such a collection every six months, so it will certainly be interesting to see what theme the next collection will explore, and which authors will contribute. Recommended.