Fen

by Daisy Johnson

Paper Book, 2017

Library's rating

Publication

London : Vintage, 2017.

Physical description

191 p.; 20 cm

ISBN

9781784702106

Language

English

Collection

Gelezen in 2019

Description

Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a well what?

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

User reviews

LibraryThing member Dreesie

3.5 stars. Short story collections are so hard to rate.

The stories in this collection take place in the fens of England. These stories are largely about people/animal connections and how close mature is to the people in the fens, with a touch of small town life as well. A girl in love with a fish;

brothers who fight like animals; an albatross. These stories are unsettling and somewhat open-ended, some are creepy. They feel like folklore.

One story is written with a backward timeline (Seinfeld, anyone?), which I read start to finish and then finish to start. It was my favorite, but you will need to find it yourself--it's a little confusing on the first read.

For Reading Envy Summer Reading 2019 "swampy"

Show Less

6 more

LibraryThing member jeterat

I didn't love this one. The stories are creative in places, but in others rely too heavily on grotesque tropes to carry the meaning. A few of the narrators lacked proper character development or seemed to closely related to the narrator of the previous story. While the plots were intertwined by

places, or even seemed to be a retelling of the same person's life in different circumstances, I couldn't tell in points if this was purposeful or accidental. However, the language was beautiful in many places and kept me reading until the end. Johnson is a talented new writer and I think as she matures, she will produce some very beautiful work. While the stories are not successful when read together, and some are not successful at all, there were a few that were quite beautiful (I thought that "The Scattering" was extremely well done and this collection is worth the read just for that one). While I did not like this collection overall, I am excited to see more from Johnson and I think that she is a new writer to watch. Recommend this read for anyone interested in new writers or interested in how to push the limits of language in a short story, some of these have experimental elements, but not for the average reader or someone looking for a more mature/easier-to-read collection.

Show Less

LibraryThing member ThomasPluck

Imaginative and dark, some great stories here.

LibraryThing member icolford

Daisy Johnson’s debut fiction, Fen, is a collection of stories set in eastern coastal England, in the Fenlands, a naturally marshy region that several centuries ago was drained and converted to low-lying farmland and is currently protected from flooding by dykes and an elaborate drainage system.

Johnson populates her Fenland of the imagination with farmers, young women—often sexually curious and on the cusp of womanhood—and a variety of wildlife. The stories are frequently violent, and have a folkloric aspect to them, as if the characters are driven to behave as they do by some mysterious elemental force or ritualistic instinct, rather than according to their own wish or design. In “Starver” we go back in time to when the Fens were first drained, and men harvested eels for food. But almost as if wreaking revenge on man for interfering, the captive eels refuse to eat and provide little by way of sustenance. The focus then shifts to the present day and a girl named Katy who refuses to eat until her situation reaches a crisis, at which time she undergoes a magical, inexplicable transformation. “Blood Rites” features a group of three girls who have moved from Paris to England (drawn by the language: “None of us would ever fall in love in English. We would be safe from that.”), who lure men to their house in order to eat them. “The Scattering” is a long story about three teenage siblings, twin brothers Marco and Arch and their younger sister Matilda. For Matilda, her brothers are a puzzle, always itching for a fight, always looking for an excuse to go off on each other. Eventually Marco finds a partner and has a child. Arch goes in search of other sparring opportunities, showing off his scars to his family. He dies while out hunting for a fox, but then returns transformed. And “The Cull” is the brutal, harrowing tale of a farmer trying to rid his property of foxes, told from the perspective of his inquisitive wife. Johnson’s stories are loosely structured and, as these summaries indicate, frequently veer off on unexpected, extravagant flights of fancy. The book is filled with beauty and savagery, blood and lust. The land and sea and their feral inhabitants are never far from the minds of the characters, and, one could argue, represent restless and mischievous forces of nature that humans will never be able to tame. Johnson writes with great assurance. Her style is potently atmospheric, at times seeming every bit as untamed as her subject. But her prose is also marked by instances of wilful obscurity. The author, relentless in her quest for startling and unsettling effect through indirection and abrupt shifts in focus, occasionally leaves her reader floundering for meaning. But this is a trivial caveat and should not discourage anyone from seeking out this book. Fen remains an impressive, praiseworthy and highly original volume of short fiction that heralds an important new literary voice.

Show Less

LibraryThing member viviennestrauss

Fantastic and haunting.

LibraryThing member modioperandi

A very unique collection of stories. Very one-of-a-kind. Sometimes in my view short stories can feel like anyone could have written it. Especially when approaching an author you have never read before. Fen by Daisy Johnson feels like it could only have come out of Daisy Johnson. Totally unique and

folk-tale ish and just beautifully put together as a collection of stories. Totally great. Loved all of the stories and they are paced good too - attention to pacing is so obvious that one story is totally supposed to follow the next. Keeps the reader, at least this reader totally engaged.

A very unique collection of stories. The writing is lyrical and the turns of phrase and the insights of the characters was very good. Be ready to suspend disbelief and have a good time reading the stories in Fen.

Show Less

LibraryThing member Ken-Me-Old-Mate

I am very wary of books of short stories. On the plus side they can be one way of telling a story through many different facets. On the down side they can be disjointed and jarring. Fen by Daisy Johnson was more like reading someone's dream diary.

I liked the constant refrain of the fen which was

never far away. The darkness that inhabits that land and water which holds such a deep fascination of so many people. It is like history, mythology, and subconscious, all of them together, and running under your feet.

Show Less

Fewer