“Sometimes a new underpass or a flyover or a shiny mall distracts me and that is good, but then I see a piece of wall I often passed when I was little and I am again pulled thinly, painfully, through that narrow corridor between the past and the future, between that which we can never change and that which gives us a chance to escape.”
People Want to Live is a collection that’s defined, I think, by its psychological acuity. Farah Ali writes about all manner of characters–bereaved, estranged, alienated, unsettled–in a sparse, measured way, her style deftly communicating a sense that every word in these stories has been carefully considered and chosen, is purposeful in what it is meant to convey and how it is meant to convey it.
It’s always hard to find a common thread that runs through all the stories of a collection, but I think what ties together Ali’s is her interest in the dissonance between and within characters: in “Heroes,” a bereaved mother tries to reconcile the media’s depictions of her dead son with the reality of what her son was like; in “Believers,” a young man grapples with the push and pull between faith and self-sufficiency; in “An Act of Charity,” a dissatisfied couple intervenes in the life of their friends’ maid. In all of these stories there is a sense of disquietude, and though a few do skew more dramatic in terms of their plot, Ali depicts them all in her keen-eyed, carefully controlled way. They are not “quiet” stories so much as they are precise, honed because they have been sharpened to their most essential parts, lean because any excess has been trimmed out.
As for which stories were my favourites, I think the absolute standout of this collection is “Present Tense,” a remarkably unsettling story about the often traumatic ways in which family impresses itself upon the past, and so also the present and the future. Here’s a quote that stuck with me,
It’s just the kind of short story that I love, the kind that tells you a lot without actually telling you a lot, the kind that is able to use its narrative surface to gesture at an immense depth. Another favourite was “Foreigners,” a story where a couple is interviewed (read: interrogated) by a man at the American Consulate in Pakistan. And oof, this one is just cutthroat in its depiction of how otherness becomes instated in a context like that, and the almost tangible sense of power that those doing the othering wield in those situations. (Other favourites also include “Believers” and “An Act of Charity,” which I’ve already mentioned.)
Though I loved a lot of this collection’s stories, though, there were a few that didn’t quite work for me: namely, “Tourism,” “The Effect of Heat on Poor People,” “Together,” and “What’s Fair?” (especially sad I didn’t like that last one because it was the one that ended the collection, and I wanted the collection to end with a bang). These are the stories I just didn’t “get”–not in the sense that they were challenging or confusing to understand, but rather that I just had no idea what they were narratively trying to do.
Overall, though, this was a really enjoyable and deftly written short story collection, with a lot of standouts, and with a psychological focus that I especially appreciated. If you love literary fiction and you love short stories, then you really can’t go wrong with this collection.
Thank you so much to McSweeney’s for sending me a review copy of this in exchange for an honest review!
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