Book Review DAN Rhodes Anthropology

BOOK REVIEW – DAN RHODES – ANTHROPOLOGY. 2005 Canongate Books.

It’s a lovely surprise when a book given away free at a bookshop proves to be better than the books you actually paid for. Anthropology is an obscure little gem worthy of greater attention. It is a collection of 101 love stories, set out in alphabetical order from the title story to ‘Words’. Each story is a single page long and themed around the Narrator’s various girlfriends, their strange hobbies, the reasons why the narrator broke up with them, or the strange deaths that befell them.

Most of the stories are laugh out loud funny, and a few are sad. Some are quite macabre and a few manage to be all of these at once.

In Pieces, the girlfriend is kidnapped. The abductors try to show that they mean business by chopping bits off her and posting them to her boyfriend with their ransom demands, but as she lessens in body, he finds her value as lover and in ransom worth diminishing. 

Most of the stories work extremely well, though a few fall short of true genius. A favourite of mine is Museum, where the narrator turns his house into a tourist attraction showing off all the items his last girlfriend failed to take away with her when she moved out. It may be a personal shrine or a public gallery. He keeps that ambiguous.  In Drawing, the lover is too distressed and mournful over a bicycle she used to own, lamenting for it as if it was a real person, long after most people would get over the loss of a bike. She constantly draws pictures of it, loving the lost bike more than her comforting needful boyfriend.

This is the finest flash fiction, creating a sense of mood, character and space in less than a hundred words, concise, precise and poignant. The whole book can be read in an hour but it’s worth just having by a bedside for flicking into every now and then, drawing out a story at random.

The author has his own website at www.danrhodes.co.uk

Arthur Chappell.