Can one not marvel at Ruth Ozeki’s patently personable prose in her latest short story collection, THE TYPING LADY? It embraces grandeur and simplicity in one gigantic hug with kisses of crystalline wit and caresses of sagacity.
THE TYPING LADY (and other fictions) consists of eleven lovely stories, leavened with humour, elevated by the palpably human, enlivened by pithy prose. The collection begins with a tale titled The Typing Lady: An Author’s Note, a primer of things to come and a reflection on how, when we read a story, we bring our own lives to bear on it and make it ours, no matter what the writer might have intended.
‘Stories are like that. They are collaborations between people who read and people who type. They are how we co-create each other and dream ourselves into being.’
Ten more tales just like that follow, empowered by empathy, created to connect.
There’s a distinct avian strain snaking through THE TYPING LADY, from the colourful recurring cardinal in Leafblower, to the omnivorous magpie of Immortal, and titular cock of The Death of the Last White Male.
Poetry also courses through these precise prose pieces. The story titled One Art is named for Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, One Art, published at the beginning of the volume. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. But it needn’t look like disaster. Ruth Ozeki has a winning way with that thought.
Dead Beat Poet is a clever call to arms to create when the soul of a departed bard possesses a young publisher, arriving “in that third-eye place, midbrow, where Botox is injected, and where, in the old, pre-psychopharmaceutical days, they drilled holes to aerate the brain.”
Playful and profound,when reading THE TYPING LADY one is reminded of David Malouf’s poem, Typewriter Music, – “so quick off the mark, so spritely, the call to light fingered highjinks… breathless out of bounds take-offs into flight and giddy joyflight without stint. Another notch in the silence.”
THE TYPING LADY and other fictions by Ruth Ozeki is published by Text
