Book Review: “Attrib.” by Eley Williams

Attrib. by Eley Williams

I really liked Liar’s Dictionary, liked it a lot.  I had high hopes for this collection of Williams’ earlier short stories.  (And I do mean short:  the longest is 15 pages.) 

Unfortunately, I was left unsatisfied.  I wanted more and I got less.

To be fair, these works are all deliberately built as tiny, implied stories, which deliberately don’t follow up to tell us what happened after or before.  Williams does a good job with this style, but a whole book of them is, well, not much to chew on.

Another problem is that these stories appeared separately in different contexts.  Packed all together, they tend to highlight Williams’ predilections with word play, dictionaries, and so on.  These things are not really supposed to be in the foreground.

And finally, I’ll note that the stories are depressing.  The people are unhappy.  It’s not fun to read of so many break ups, so much death, so many empty lives.  Again, this comes out so strongly because the individual stories are juxtaposed.

Alright. Enough. I didn’t like this collection, even though the individual stories were well executed.

The good news is that, if this collection is early works, and Liar’s Dictionary is the beginning of mature work, we can look forward to great stuff from Williams in the future.

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1. Eley Williams, Attrib. and Other Stories, New York, Anchor Books, 2021.

Sunday Book Reviews

First Quarter 2021 Round up

Blogging continues, though it isn’t clear if anyone is even looking at what I post.

Hits are wa-a-y down.  Where is everybody?

Obviously, the posts are better than ever ( : – ) ), so what’s going on?

Is this pandemic related?  Is this something to do with global politics, e.g., blocking in China or EU? Or maybe changes in WordPress reporting.  I dunno.

Band Names

As always, I noted some Dave Barry tribute band names, taken from real scientific and technical publictions.

Stochastic Parrots
Neanderthal ears
The Laschamps Excursion (Pronounced Las Champs, or in SoCal, LA’s Champs)
The Chicxulub Impactors  (Or just Impactor)

Books Reviewed

Fiction

Smoke by Joe Ide
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler
Trio by William Boyd
Outlawed by Anna North
Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams
Tropic of Stupid by Tim Dorsey
The Sun Collective by Charles Baxter
Aphasia by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem
Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by Julián Herbert

Non-fiction

The Light Ages by Seb Falk
Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
The Last Million by David Nasaw
New Money by Lana Swartz
Extraterrestrial by Avi Loeb

Book Review: “Liar’s Dictionary” by Eley Williams

Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams

I really liked this charming little novel (and not just because it is short-ish  : – )).

Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary is a ‘British Treasure’, though perhaps honored more in the breach.  Despite decades of work, it was never really completed.  The dictionary and the building still exist, though neither is really useful or in use.

A century after first publishing, Swansby’s is being digitized.  Young Mallory is hired as an intern, happy for a job that pays anything.  Her assignment is eccentric, to say the least.

David Swansea has discovered non-words in the dictionary.  I.e., someone has deliberately inserted definitions of made up words.

We learn that these are called ‘mountweasels’, and including one is a standard lexicographer’s trick to prevent copying.  One.  Not dozens.

Mallory is called upon to search the whole corpus, to root out these mountweasels.  Of course, there are lots of obscure words, so she has to figure out which words are just new to her, and which ones exist nowhere but Swansby’s ED.  This involves looking up problematic words in other dictionaries—which, when you think about it, is hardly an iron clad methodology!  : – )

These fake words must have been deliberately added by one of the earlier lexicographers.  But, who, and more importantly, why?   Was this a joke, or sabotage, or what?

In the novel, we learn that Woodhousianly-named Peter Winceworth did it, though Mallory will never know.  Winceworth’s life is a confused mess, including a faked lisp that has become ingrained, unhappy work life, and lonely home life.  But a little romance is on the way, ready or not.

Mallory has her own romance with lovely Pip, who is out as out gets.  But happy as she is, Mallory struggles with coming out.

Crazy stuff happens to Winceworth and crazy stuff happens to Mallory.  (Who knew the life of lexicographers was quite so action packed?!)

This story has personal secrets, hidden and revealed.  Love is beautiful but can be confusing and troubling in any age.

But above all, there are words, words, words.  Real words, obscure words, words that are left out of dictionaries, and made up words that are put in dictionaries because they are needed.

These charming lexicographers remind us that, after all, all words are made up.

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1. Eley Williams, Liar’s Dictionary, New York, Doubleday, 2020.

 

Sunday Book Reviews