- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber (2 Aug 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571196306
- ISBN-13: 978-0571196302
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 13.2 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 671,604 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Time Out
'Very, very good. The quality of the writing grips you from the beginning ... redolent of Ian McEwan at his best.'
Guardian
'Provocative, terrifying and bold ... Real fears, dark secrets, beautifully interpreted.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely Brilliant,
By TheMagus (Terra Firma) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Loudest Sound and Nothing (Paperback)
I have been fretting about writing this review. I am not a book reviewer and when something this beautiful and elegiac comes into your hands you really want to do it justice. I shall give it a go anyway.I understand some people do not enjoy reading short story collections. I am not one of them. I find a well written short story to have much more impact than a novel. For an author to impress in a few short pages seems like the height of the craft. Clare Wigfall more than meets that criterion. She writes with such mastery that I would have expected to find she has been writing for decades. Not so - this is her debut. I don't feel I am exaggerating when I compare her to Flannery O'Connor at her best. Perhaps it is her peripatetic upbringing that allows her to evoke time and place and, particularly, local dialect with a pitch perfect ear. Wherever her talent springs from it is prodigious. The stories in The Loudest Sound span time periods from 1870 to, possibly, the present. There is a sting inherent in each of these gems and they sneak up on you gradually, some in the very last line. Clare's characters are not sunny and they are all doomed in some way yet this is far from a depressing book. Rather it is extremely thought provoking, so much so that one can only thank the universe for providing us readers with such gifted storytellers. If you love reading real literature you should read this book. Patience is not one of my virtues and I will be eagerly awaiting Clare's next offering.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Synaesthesia: 'The Loudest Sound and Nothing' by Clare Wigfall,
By
This review is from: The Loudest Sound and Nothing (Paperback)
Clare Wigfall's debut collection is a masterpiece of multiplicity. The narrators and protagonists range from fictional re-imaginings of historical figures (Folks Like Us) to the muted thoughts of a young girl on a tiny Scottish island who has a mania for maths (Numbers). The range and scope of the work is achieved through the proliferation and sensitivity of the voices. It is easy to understand why both the full collection and single stories have been nominated for prizes (the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the BBC National Short Story Award) and why the stories have been anthologized and recorded for radio. The lightness and ease of the telling of these tales betrays a depth of imagination and the accretion of storytelling skill throughout years of writing.The thing which struck me most about the collection when I first read it was the synaesthesiac quality of the work. There are three occasions where the author describes 'seeing sound', and several more occasions where there is a blurring between the senses. The title of the work relates to sound of course, and Clare Wigfall has said that she finds music a catalyst to work. This parity between writing and music in this collection is heightened by the stories which invoke parties, dancing and song, ranging from the desperate decay of 'Hero I Have Lost' to the rhythmic clarity of Bonnie's poem in 'Folks Like Us' and the eternally distracting music in 'The Party's Just Getting Started'. One of the most beautiful lines in the collection is in 'Caro at the Pool': 'Caroline watched the surface of the water as she walked back to the changing cubicles. It shimmered brightly, catching the light, she thought, in a way that looked almost like a sound too high to hear.' 'On Pale Green Walls' can be read as an antidote to all the music, a sublimation of all sound into silence. By expertly unfurling the truth, we learn from the writer that the narrator's thoughts are available only to us, that she is a mute child. Her pain, frustration and above all delicate imagination are all misinterpreted by those around her. This study of voicelessness becomes paradoxically one of the stories most concerned with communication. If this is a story without sound, it is vivid with colour and visual detail. The silent narrator creates her world and words through images. These stories haunt like a melody and manufacture a kind of nostalgia. The characters are not easily forgotten, but recur in voice and phrase like a half-forgotten tune.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Small but perfectly formed,
By
This review is from: The Loudest Sound and Nothing (Paperback)
What The Loudest Sound And Nothing has made me realise is that, though many collections of short stories contain a lot of variety, they always have some identifiable style or wording or topic which is unmistakably consistent. Not so Ms. Wigfall. She covers so many periods, personas, styles, situations, nationalities and (though I haven't counted) no great imbalance in gender of narrator too. If they do share a common trait, it is the focus upon the unspoken. That's rather a truism of all literature post-1950, but rarely have I read it done without being irritating or merely included for effect. Wigfall's stories allow glimpses into lives, and wherever the image hinges on an untold aspect of these lives, it is the surrounding existence which grabs out attention. Sure, we don't know, say, what it is the barman tells the girl in 'Free'; we don't know what Mr. Turbridge's crime is in 'Night after Night' (though one can perhaps guess); we don't know what's going on in 'Safe', the most enigmatic story of them all. But in each of these cases, and throughout the collection, the portraits are complete enough to leave you satisfied. Not every story has an omission to illuminate the rest - in 'On Pale Green Walls', for example, understanding what's happening, when the narrator doesn't, is the crux.Whichever way the story is structured, they all involve the reader in a way which I hope Wigfall can bottle and sell to potential writers. Because they're such a varied bunch, each must stand on its own merits - and I found that all but one of them did. Within sentences, Wigfall creates a miniature landscape of narrative, and even stories which last a few pages feel like complete entities. This is how the modern short story should be written.
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