Great idea for a story, Mom suggested this one ( )

These felt like very personal stories, meditative and focused on loss and growth and change. I quite liked them, the way I like everything Hall writes: surprised at this new exploration of voice. ( )

Sudden Traveler is a collection of seven short stories by award-winning Sarah Hall, whose short fiction has been justly described as luminous and erotic. This small sampler demonstrates her flexibility with styles and subjects that vary from the deeply moving and accessible to the more obscure and elusive. Interwoven in each piece is a recurrent theme of women’s experience in snapshots of important stages of life, both as it is perceived by the women themselves and by men who can only guess about them from a remove. Some of the stories feature fantastical elements with prose that is heavily metaphoric and lyrical. Others are more realistically grounded and are thereby starker in their depictions of violence and physical frailty. As with all collections, some of the stories are stronger than others, and a few cross the border into pretentiousness with Hall’s sometimes excessive use of perplexing symbolism. Still, Sarah Hall is obviously a wonderful and creative writer with a strong message and the skill with which to convey her point of view. Sudden Traveler is a nice short introduction to her work and will encourage an open-minded reader to seek out her other offerings.

Gonna have to reread this. I ran through it so fast that it was utterly lost on me. ( )

“We are, all of us, sudden travelers in the world, blind, passing each other, reaching out, missing, sometimes taking hold.”

Reviewing a collection of short stories isn’t an easy task. With a few exceptions, short story collections tend to feel like they need to be read over a longer time than it takes to read a book. For example, read one story, take a break and go read something else. Then come back to another story after that breather.

And in a collection such as this slim volume by Sarah Hall, a lot of breaks are needed, as the stories take on such varied settings, some weird and otherworldly and a bit experimental, some more rooted in the every day. Is that why the title is such? That as we read the stories, we are, too, “sudden travelers”, having to switch our perspectives completely?

For these stories are set in Turkish forests, Cumbrian villages, some that seem more like dreamscapes with weird transformations.

There is no doubt that Hall is a great writer. The stories are full of beautiful writing. For myself, as I am not much of a reader of more experimental turns, I was more drawn to her more ‘real’ stories like Orton and, especially the penultimate story, Sudden Traveler. And her writing pulled me in deep to those stories, tears falling, even, for one of them.

So while I stumbled during a couple of stories, unsure of where these pieces were leading me, the end result was worth it. ( )