Prose dissolving into poetry - 'Dark Neighbourhood' by Vanessa Onwuemezi reviewed

Dark Neighbourhood is a debut in two senses – this is both Vanessa Onwuemezi’s first book of short stories and (I think I’m right in saying) Fitzcarraldo Editions’ first foray into short story collections (alongside their novels, novellas and essays.)

These seven stories make for an unsettling read. I read the opening titular story in August, just as the news was full of the catastrophe at Basra airport, with countless Afghans trying to flee the Taliban. Real world events gave an added sense of eerie desperation to the scene conjured up in Dark Neighbourhood, in which people seem to be queuing at the gate to another world after society has collapsed.

Onwuemezi is experimental in her prose style, the paragraphs of prose often dissolve into lines of free poetry and, in the opening story, the collapse of society is mirrored by a fragmentation – a collapse – of language and meaning. Punctuation is inserted as words – “enough of that (full stop)” – “washed of sweat and blood (comma)” and the author leaves extra spaces between words mid-sentence.

Whether you find these techniques to be effective and arresting or a self-conscious writerly affectation is a matter of taste. At times, I found this formal disruption a distraction from the narrative (in stories where the narrative is often already quite nebulous.) It also somehow made me care less about the characters, perhaps because it made me more aware of the writer behind them. Is it artful, or too clever by half? At the end of Heartbreak at Super 8 there is a final paragraph of prose where it would seem the confused and desperate protagonist has shot himself. His fragmented first-person, present-tense account is followed by a few lines of free verse in his voice. Onwuemezi’s insertion of lines of poetry into the prose reminded me of the way Western film director Sam Peckinpah used slow-motion in the more violent scenes of his films to create a heightened, stylised effect.

There is little lightness or humour in these stories although I did laugh at this rather childlike exchange between characters, which could almost have been some lines from Waiting for Godot:

            “... ‘You’ve not travelled?’

            ‘I have, to some places I remember. To Moscow.’

            ‘Ah Moscow, never been, but I’ve been to Sorrow.’

            ‘A feeling.’

            ‘What?'

            ‘Sorrow is a feeling, not somewhere to go. Perhaps you meant Glasgow?’...”

As one who enjoys the short story form I’m pleased that Fitzcarraldo Editions have, with Dark Neighbourhood, embarked on publishing short story collections. But, too often in reading these stories, I had the impression Onwuemezi would have preferred to have been writing poetry, that she somehow didn’t trust prose fiction enough to create all the effects she wanted to achieve.

Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi is published on 6 October 2021 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.