Devotees of Hilary Mantel’s most famous work, the Wolf Hall trilogy, about the life of Thomas Cromwell, might be forgiven for not focusing first on her stylistic mastery—there are, in these novels, many remarkable elements to praise...But those who’ve delighted for decades in Mantel’s fiction revel in her chameleonlike facility with language, her ability effortlessly to evoke wildly diverse characters, settings, and atmospheres—not only the court of Henry VIII, but also the French Revolution, the stifling experience of an expat white woman in late-twentieth-century Saudi Arabia, or, in her new collection, Learning to Talk, the pinched and parochial society of England’s postwar north...The stories overlap, each a differently angled account of childhood trauma...Implied throughout is the pull of social ambition, a recognition that the stepfather, difficult as he was, enabled improvement in the family circumstances...The overall effect of the collection is of a palimpsest, the powerfully atmospheric evocation of an unhappy mid-twentieth-century childhood in northern England...Situation and prospects were determined by the binding nets of social class, bourgeois morality, and religion: to be cast out, lost, was both a terror and, perhaps, the only hope in a world replete with loss and unspeakable silences, simultaneously drab and deeply strange.
How unexpected, how consoling, that one of the best-selling British novelists of recent decades should also be such a peculiar, stringent prose stylist—and gothic affronter of authority ... Mantel evokes beautifully a place ingrained with the soot and sweat of labor, a time populated with racist landlords and 'dental cripples,' when relatives were the only domestic visitors, and one’s parents seemed to have no actual friends ... The drowned village is one of the larger conceits in Learning to Talk; usually, Mantel’s imagery is less allegorically freighted, less amenable. Her particular, unsettling skill lies in discovering queasy equivalents for physical sensations and emotional states—the body is always there, as metaphor, to remind us of its unmetaphorical heft and threat ... The innocent cruelty of childhood, youth’s horror at the alien predicaments of adult bodies and adult lives: Mantel conjures all this with nerveless precision ... Sickness also haunts Learning to Talk: an intermittent presence in childhood, a horizon, perhaps, toward which everything is moving. It’s part of the wider project or tendency in Mantel’s work: to explore, as she does so lucidly and strangely here, the hinterland between emotional history and anxious embodiment.
Hilary Mantel’s short story collection Learning to Talk was first published in Britain in 2003, before long-overdue prizes and international fame came her way. It shares the qualities of the contemporary novels she wrote for 20 years: sharp observation, alertness to the tomfooleries of class and gender, an uncanny capacity for the child’s-eye view, a door always open to the supernatural. And like Mantel’s most famous books, these stories are dark and absurd, the piping children’s voices brewed in wisdom and worldliness ... an exemplary use of the passive voice ... In this more or less autobiographical time frame of the 1960s and 1970s, Mantel remains a historical novelist, which is to say one always thinking about how politics, trends and events shape character, one who knows in every sentence that the political is personal and vice versa, one who inhabits bodies shaped by the specificities of time and place. Part of her consistent brilliance lies in her attention to ghosts and mortgages, the light on the moors and 1980s educational policy, adolescent self-discovery and irregular accounting. These stories hold worlds as wide as those of her longest novels.
... a decidedly different yet equally rich treat ... These are evocative, precisely drawn, ghost-ridden tales about impoverished, difficult times, yet they are also filled with a growing awareness that better things await ... an unusual and ultimately fascinating amalgam of fact and fiction as Mantel sorts through the puzzle pieces of her past.
... opts for the wonders and epiphanies of smaller canvases, intimacies tucked away ... these deeply personal stories underscore her courage and mastery, exposing herself with little more than art and trust in her readers to buoy her ... Mantel’s language is rich, discursive, expressive. Here it’s elegant and elegiac, as befits the shorter form. Less is more. Learning to Talk, then, is another potent gift to readers, one that slips gracefully into the luminous oeuvre of a leading stylist and thinker.
The stories of Learning to Talk are told in the voice of a feisty child who believes in what’s good and true — fidelity, grace, kindness — in spite of everything she’s seen. She also believes that God walks beside her, and an angel sits on her shoulder. But her God is not a magician, and shouldn’t be asked to fix things, she says, 'like some plumber or carpenter.' The life Mantel narrates is part waiting game, part deliverance story, and all wonderful.
Mantel manages to describe life in an insular village in northern England in the 1950s as if it too were history and, even in its trivia, not to be trifled with. Although this effort is more modest than that of the great trilogy, there’s the sense of a lost place and time recaptured here as well ... a deal of mordant wit ... There are many lines one wants, while shivering, to quote ... Few contemporary authors have so stern and spare an aesthetic, even when the language grows —as in these quotations—ornate. What Mantel provides in Learning to Talk is a vision of constricted life that enlarges on close viewing. Thomas Cromwell—that gimlet-eyed witness to human ambition and folly in the 16th century—would find an inheritor here.
... expertly crafted ... Mantel clarifies the significance of ordinary lives, showing how each of us is a fuse (burning faster or slower) and how each of us can hurt ... A highly recommended collection quietly probing our deep, everyday sorrows.
In just under 160 pages, Mantel offers seven incisive, observant glimpses of aspects of her characters’ early lives in the north of England that display her talent in the shorter form ... For all the pleasure the tales in this volume provide, one can only hope that more of them will emerge soon with a little more ease.
In seven deftly crafted stories that she calls 'autoscopic' rather than autobiographical, two-time Man Booker Prize winner Mantel takes a distant, elevated perspective” on her life growing up in the English Midlands region...Organized chronologically, most of the stories are narrated by a woman evolving an increasingly astute perception of her own reality and the truths obscured by family myths and lies...Mantel’s narrators are melancholy or resentful, misunderstood or ignored, vulnerable and cynical...'Mercy,' one observes, 'was a theory that I had not seen in operation'...Sharp, unsentimental tales from a writer haunted by her past.
Two-time Booker winner Mantel departs from the broad canvas of Tudor history for a revelatory collection drawing on her childhood in a northern English moorland village...Mantel quotes Thucydides one moment, Shakespeare the next, or St. Augustine, and high and low fit together comfortably in 'Curved Is the Line of Beauty,' in which the narrator remembers seeing the Arthur O’Shaughnessy poem referenced in the title on a jar as a child, which brings solace during a tough time ruled by Catholic guilt and limited means...Throughout, the author’s humanity shines through.
