If you can survive the lurid cover, Granta is worth reading

David Blackburn

Friday, 3rd February 2012

The cover of Granta’s latest issue is, without putting too fine a point on it, abominable. See for yourself. It’s a mess of blood orange, purples, pinks, reds and puce. There is no coherence. A picture of what looks like a bullfight competes for prominence with some fleshy swimmers and the front and rear ends of a lumpen American car. This lurid collage is supposed to illustrate the issue’s title: ‘Exit Strategies’. No, me neither.

Granta’s surreal covers have had the literati scratching their heads in bemusement. The convoluted sketch that adorned the previous issue seemed to have been pulled out of the On the Origin of the Species, while the cover marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11 looked like the Test Card in wonky high definition.

But, if you can survive the covers, Granta is full of delights. The last issue had contributions from Paul Auster, Stephen King, Will Self and Don de Lillo — a line-up that can’t have been matched since Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens dominated the pages of All the Year Round.

The current edition is also strong, despite yesterday’s rather damp launch party. Alice Munro is the headline act, with her short story ‘In Sight of the Lake’. But Claire Messud’s essay on her family’s 70 year relationship with Beirut is a real star turn, worth Granta's £13 cover price. Her account of life in the Levant is timely, coinciding with the centenaries of Lawrence Durrell (of Alexandria Quartet-fame) and the Egyptian Nobel laureate, Mahguib Mahfouz. It’s an enthralling and original piece of historical writing.

Granta still devotes some space to new writers. This issue introduces Vanessa Manko and Chinelo Okparanta. Manko’s piece is called The Interrogation, and the story is told via a question and answer form. It’s intriguing, though slightly self-conscious in its execution, which proves to be a distraction.

Meanwhile, Okparanta’s ‘America’ opens with the meaningless phrase ‘We drive through bushes’ and grows more incomprehensible. It’s not that Okparanta can’t write — there are some delicate touches, particularly when describing the destructive longing caused by sexual obsession — but there’s far too much effort spent to make every sentence, every phrase memorable. This leads to over-writing or, worse, writing that doesn’t make sense. The misuse of collective nouns is glaring: ‘splatters of small shops’ or ‘tufts of pineapple leaves’ are two examples that stick in my mind.

‘America’ is the most captivating of the two stories, but it would have benefitted from the self-control that is probably gained by experience. I want to read Okparanta’s next story.

Blog Tags: Art , Fiction , Literature , Short stories