A small child permanently loses all sense of direction after she falls out of a tree. Hungarian refugees learn the local idiom: shell be right; right as rain. The Social Welfare snoops around a boarding house where immigrant men weep for their homelands and a young child misses her father who is only across town.
Years later, an adult woman becomes obsessed with Vladimir Putin; another tries over and over to understand the relationship between her mother and the band of refugees who were under her wryly affectionate, and sometimes distracted eye in the 1950s.
In this new collection of flash fiction from Frankie McMillan family relationships are explored through exaggeration, humour, sur ...
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A small child permanently loses all sense of direction after she falls out of a tree. Hungarian refugees learn the local idiom: shell be right; right as rain. The Social Welfare snoops around a boarding house where immigrant men weep for their homelands and a young child misses her father who is only across town.
Years later, an adult woman becomes obsessed with Vladimir Putin; another tries over and over to understand the relationship between her mother and the band of refugees who were under her wryly affectionate, and sometimes distracted eye in the 1950s.
In this new collection of flash fiction from Frankie McMillan family relationships are explored through exaggeration, humour, surreal eddies of simile and metaphor that broaden the pieces out to look askance at politics, culture, and history. Although there are genuinely laugh aloud moments, usually the humour is clandestine: looking at human vulnerability and oddity, spotlighting miscommunication, yet doing so withfondness and empathy: a delight in all the rough edges between us that proximity can heighten and yet which intimacy tries to soothe away.
Frankie McMillans small fictions capture disjunctions between child and adult, between cultures, personality types, man and woman. These compressed, often comiccapsules of narrative convey a rich sense of family connection and also a childs evolving self-awareness in a fractured, yet still enchanting, world.
Featured in the 10 October 2016 New Zealand Newsletter.
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Alfred Street (University of Auckland Store)