Vheissu

As we come to the fifth story in the Six Stories anthology , it may have become apparent that my enthusiasm for these short stories has traced a parabola. It peaked with Sarah Hall's “ Evie ,” and it now continues its downward motion with one that has a wobbly title: “Call It ‘The Bug’ Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title,” by Toby Litt. Right off the bat, the title strikes me as overkill. There’s also the fact that the story is made up of a single paragraph. It is freckled with remarks packed inside parentheses: everything from short explanations (“in 2000”, “in London”) to adverbs tacked after a verb (“gradually, subtly,” “convincingly, gradually”) to metaliterary comments (this comes from the narrator directly: “Of course, this isn’t my usual reasoned view – but at the moment I cant, I just can’t”). Please take note of sentence one, which pretty much sets the pace for the rest of the story: “If my mother weren’t dying of ovarian cancer, and I ha...