Over the last 31 years, renowned lit mag Granta has published 115 issues on topics from “The Rolling Stones” to “War Zones” , as well as the “best of” collections it’s famous for.
This is the first time it has turned its beady eye to feminism, declaring “it’s more than unmade beds and laundry; it’s more than speaking your mind; more than breaking through the glass ceiling. The f word is about power”.
Power is all relative, here as anywhere. In Taiye Selasi’s The Sex Lives of African Girls, the prose is luxurious (“The smells of things-night-damp earth, open grill, frangipani trees, citronella-seep through the window”) but the story is a dark and angry tale of the twisting powers of sexuality, of the grown-up women around the 11-year-old protagonist, but mainly of “Uncle”, the central abuser/patriarch of a wealthy African family.
In A Train in Winter, Caroline Moorehead reimagines the true story of 235 women arrested on 24th January 1943 and bundledonto the only train that took women of the French Resistance to the Nazi death camps. It is a gruelling tale of fear and fortitude, of learning to survive by stealing stockings and washing in snow and never giving up.
While Lydia Davis’ The Dreadful Mucamas, told in the voice of a petulant woman struggling with her Bolivian maids, is a masterclass is self-justification and spiralling fury.
The collection of stories, essays, poems and illustration is a classy celebration of women’s writing, nimbly cosmpolitan: the stories follow the hijras of India to Glaswegian 1970s schoolgirls, while the authors, span the extremes of fame and age, from A S Byatt and Jeanette Winterson to debut author Tea Obrecht. It would have been nice to have some male writers’ interpretations of “the f word”.
The only one that didn’t work for me was Helen Simpson’s, which is a shame, because her collection Four Bare Legs In A Bed is one of my favourites. Written as the interior monologue of a husband and father, as the alarm clock’s “straight-sided digits floated, gloated” through a sleepless night, Night Thoughts is set in alternate world, or future, when women are dominant. “If he got the wrong tone of voice she shouted and refused to listen,” the narrator frets. “It was like treading on eggshells. Feminine pride.” He is distressed by the media’s obsession with men’s “paunches and spindleshanks”, is worried about his son’s low self-esteem, has a racing heart caused by the contraceptive pill. This was the only story that didn’t work for me , it’s overtly political message (see how you like it, chaps!) a strident klaxon when quiet words do just as well.