The Fat Artist and Other Stories by Benjamin Hale

Book Review by Rosie Barron | 07 Sep 2016
Book title: The Fat Artist and Other Stories
Author: Benjamin Hale

Building on the success from his award winning first novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, Benjamin Hale brings something delightful and disturbing to the table with his collection The Fat Artist and Other Stories. Bulging with humour and swollen with poignant comments on life and death, this new book sets to be another – in hopefully a long line of – successful publications for the young writer.

Hale captures something dark, wicked, and quite frankly human in the seven tales that make up this collection, one that brings a feeling of violence and menace to the surface without ever losing the delicate quality of its characters and themes. Seamlessly funny and harrowing, it is full of understated beauty and intergrity and its subtly reflective outlook allows this modern collection to echo a dreamlike ancient quality. In that respect not too unlike the late great Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but with a modern dystopian quality that will appeal to the contemporary generation of Pokémon Go and Theresa May.

Although reeking of the kind of creative mastery that comes through literary and academic learning, Hale's collection of short stories is fresh and blunt in its depictions of the human being, in a way that may be all too familar for some readers. A must read. [Rosie Barron]

 

Out 8 September, published by Picador, RRP £12.99