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Inherited
A dancer in a wheelchair. A collector of corks. One woman seduced by a mountain and another by Freddo Frogs. A man who hears his dead wife's voice. A poet whose voice has disappeared. A photographer distilling grief in his lens. A sound designer stealing the sound of a room. *** Written by Amanda Curtin, these are stories concerned with the gifts and burdens we inherit from those we love and from the world at large, and what we, in turn, leave behind. Families, relationships, memory, secrets, memorialization, creativity, collecting, ageing, and obsession all weave themselves through these 19 short fictional gems.
- GenresShort Stories
237 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
1 person is currently reading
69 people want to read
About the author
Amanda Curtin
7 books72 followersAmanda Curtin is the author of Kathleen O’Connor of Paris (narrative non-fiction, 2018), Elemental (novel, Australia/NZ 2013, UK 2016), The Sinkings (novel, 2008) and Inherited (short fiction collection, 2011). She lives in suburban Perth, Western Australia—traditional lands of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation—and works in a backyard studio among magpies, doves and old trees.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 13, 2012
Review by Helen Hagemann
Amanda Curtin is a writer and freelance book editor based in Western Australia. She lives in one of Perth’s older suburbs, a former live-in shop, one in which she explains has a certain relationship that inspires her. Her love of history, houses and the spaces that people occupy drift into several stories, some uncover famous citizens, C.Y. O’Connor, Katharine Susannah Pritchard and the younger daughter of C.Y. O’Connor, Kathleen O’Connor. In Inherited, Curtin highlights the struggle of post-war artists returning to Australia who cannot afford the import duty on their art. In her story Paris Bled into the Indian Ocean, Kathleen O’Connor sends certain paintings to the bottom of the sea where they arise again years later in their individual, vibrant colours. Stories include motifs of soil, water, houses, trees, corks, ducks and dogs. Peace is a story about loss; a woman visits the place of a fatal accident only to find that her kneeling into soil, under her planted memorial tree, is thought of as crazy.
One of the most prominent parts of the discourse in Inherited is the varying subject matter. On the back cover of the blurb, we read just part of the list. A story about a dancer in a wheelchair. A collector of corks. One woman seduced by a mountain, the other by Freddo Frogs. A poet whose voice has disappeared. A photographer distilling grief in his lens, and A Sound Engineer who steals the sound of a room. One of the more creative historical stories is called On the Uses of the Dead to the Living. This story is about what the living inherit after death. The story compares the bequest of Jeremy Bentham whose body is preserved in a glass case in London to the narrator’s grandfather who is not preserved through cremation. The grandfather’s heredity is also compared to the loss of Tasmanian huts by fire. The Properties of Glass is about abjection: the sensitivity of widowhood, vexed feelings that are exposed by youth, and where the single aging woman can be as vulnerable as the changing composition of glass.
No words are wasted in Curtin’s prose which at times is very poetic. She has won the University of Canberra National Short Story Award (joint winner), the Katharine Susannah Prichard Short Fiction Award, the Lee Steere History Prize and the Golden Key Honour Society Excellence in Fiction Award. She has been a professional editor for more than 20 years working on such titles as Beautiful Monster (Kate McCaffrey) Fremantle Press, and The Legend of Lasseter's Reef (Mark Greenwood) Cygnet Books, to name a few. Her own first novel The Sinkings was published by The University of Western Australia Press in 2008.
I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and while I am writing a novel and a new poetry collection, I think I have to lift my game. 'Inherited' available through UWA Press, Collins Book Store and many others.
Helen Hagemann (c) 2012
Amanda Curtin is a writer and freelance book editor based in Western Australia. She lives in one of Perth’s older suburbs, a former live-in shop, one in which she explains has a certain relationship that inspires her. Her love of history, houses and the spaces that people occupy drift into several stories, some uncover famous citizens, C.Y. O’Connor, Katharine Susannah Pritchard and the younger daughter of C.Y. O’Connor, Kathleen O’Connor. In Inherited, Curtin highlights the struggle of post-war artists returning to Australia who cannot afford the import duty on their art. In her story Paris Bled into the Indian Ocean, Kathleen O’Connor sends certain paintings to the bottom of the sea where they arise again years later in their individual, vibrant colours. Stories include motifs of soil, water, houses, trees, corks, ducks and dogs. Peace is a story about loss; a woman visits the place of a fatal accident only to find that her kneeling into soil, under her planted memorial tree, is thought of as crazy.
One of the most prominent parts of the discourse in Inherited is the varying subject matter. On the back cover of the blurb, we read just part of the list. A story about a dancer in a wheelchair. A collector of corks. One woman seduced by a mountain, the other by Freddo Frogs. A poet whose voice has disappeared. A photographer distilling grief in his lens, and A Sound Engineer who steals the sound of a room. One of the more creative historical stories is called On the Uses of the Dead to the Living. This story is about what the living inherit after death. The story compares the bequest of Jeremy Bentham whose body is preserved in a glass case in London to the narrator’s grandfather who is not preserved through cremation. The grandfather’s heredity is also compared to the loss of Tasmanian huts by fire. The Properties of Glass is about abjection: the sensitivity of widowhood, vexed feelings that are exposed by youth, and where the single aging woman can be as vulnerable as the changing composition of glass.
No words are wasted in Curtin’s prose which at times is very poetic. She has won the University of Canberra National Short Story Award (joint winner), the Katharine Susannah Prichard Short Fiction Award, the Lee Steere History Prize and the Golden Key Honour Society Excellence in Fiction Award. She has been a professional editor for more than 20 years working on such titles as Beautiful Monster (Kate McCaffrey) Fremantle Press, and The Legend of Lasseter's Reef (Mark Greenwood) Cygnet Books, to name a few. Her own first novel The Sinkings was published by The University of Western Australia Press in 2008.
I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and while I am writing a novel and a new poetry collection, I think I have to lift my game. 'Inherited' available through UWA Press, Collins Book Store and many others.
Helen Hagemann (c) 2012
Read
August 10, 2015These stories are tender and compassionate, giving voice to the damaged, the marginalised, the otherwise forgotten. There is a precision to Curtin’s prose, yet also a warmth there, a humanity.
There is a preoccupation with history in the collection, especially unwritten or untold stories. The stories explore loss, hollowness, and the complexity of relationships and are underpinned by a sense of wisdom when it comes to matters of the heart.
The collection is thoughtfully arranged in groups of two or three stories on the themes of keeping, wanting, surviving, remembering, breaking, leaving and returning.
The opening story, ‘Dance Memory’ is beautifully written, with a deeply moving finale and provides a wonderful introduction to a strong and diverse collection.
There is a preoccupation with history in the collection, especially unwritten or untold stories. The stories explore loss, hollowness, and the complexity of relationships and are underpinned by a sense of wisdom when it comes to matters of the heart.
The collection is thoughtfully arranged in groups of two or three stories on the themes of keeping, wanting, surviving, remembering, breaking, leaving and returning.
The opening story, ‘Dance Memory’ is beautifully written, with a deeply moving finale and provides a wonderful introduction to a strong and diverse collection.
February 7, 2017
I struggle with books of short stories. I often start them but rarely finish. This one I did finish - it was still a struggle at times but they were beautiful stories. I'm glad I finished.
October 1, 2012
Brilliant. Beautiful writing, stories and characters that are powerful and strange. Braided style and fragmented done seamlessly, history and the present living together. I am in love with this writing.
July 23, 2016
This collection of stories is that rare find where you reach the end and want to start over. Potent writing, haunting stories. Not a word wasted.
March 3, 2012
Some are humorous and quirky, some are achingly sad, but they are all beautifully written. This collection has restored my faith in the short story.
November 10, 2019
There are historical writers, literary writers, and then there are historical-literary writers. Amanda Curtin is certainly the latter. It's not often you see a list of works cited in a book of short stories, but you'll find one here. One of my favourite stories was 'The Prospects of Grace', which is about the suicides of famous personages such as Virginia Woolf, CY O'Connor and Hugo Throssell. 'Live Forever' is about the life and art of the Famous Politician's Wife (the politician presumably being John Forrest). 'Renovation' is about the lives of an old colonial house and its various inhabitants over the decades. Those are just three, but there are fourteen others. Each is beautifully written and meticulously researched.
UWAP, publisher of this fine volume and hundreds like it, is currently under threat of being shut down. If you want books like Inherited to be published in the future, please support the #saveuwap campaign on social media.
UWAP, publisher of this fine volume and hundreds like it, is currently under threat of being shut down. If you want books like Inherited to be published in the future, please support the #saveuwap campaign on social media.
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January 28, 2012I keep coming across articles heralding the return of the short story. From a literary journal perspective, short fiction has always been in vogue. There are many reasons for this. Short stories are perfect for time-starved attention spans, easy to read and fast to engage in stolen moments between appointments. Most of all, however, the short story is concentrated. As a reader, you get a full novelistic experience in a succinct bite. Amanda Curtin's stories in Inherited are perfect examples of this. They're intense, self-contained, and rich. The characters draw you into their tales of grief, their loss, and their desire, leaving you hungry for more, but also, strangely, sated. Death pervades the book, working simultaneously as setting, character and conflict. Death is everywhere, underlying the action, motivating the living, and drawing the action forward towards the inevitable denouement, and yet, as the protagonist Paige in "Live Forever" finds, "without loss, there can be no value". It's the ever-present presence of death that gives meaning to life.
There's not a single story in this collection that doesn't take the reader to the edge of experience: tragedy, loss, fear, loneliness. Many of the stories brought me to tears, but despite the darkness, this is not a depressing collection. Instead, at the heart of every story, is a sense of what remains when we're stripped clean. Each story is populated with memory, artifact, and a tiny bit of magic – a little hint at immortality that pervades the spaces these characters live or have lived in. This might be the memory of superb gracefulness: what it's like to “dance a story”, or it might be a few trinkets: “a tortoiseshell comb, a pipe, the handle of a frying pan.” The senses are in full play as we border on the indelicacy of extreme taste and distorted hunger in “Hamburger Moon”. The 'sight sense' is prevalent as flaking uneven patchwork plastering gives rise to the memory of a lost cow, or paintings thrown into the Indian Ocean become a conduit to the healing of grief in “Paris Bled Into the Indian Ocean”:
We experience touch in the horrible flint-sharp boulders against skin in “Rush, and sound in “The Sound of a Room”:
Memory is critical in each of the stories, recycled into new experiences, and reworked into new memories, twisting, in and out of view, but never lost—nothing is ever lost. The setting brings history into the present day as modern characters uncover clues about the past that lead to self-awareness. In “The Prospect of Grace”, Charles Yelverton O'Connor's widow Susan Letitia might not have achieved the fame of her husband but, despite her pain, the tears that “dissolved onto the black taffeta—stained sand, and were borne elsewhere by the tidal breathing of spirit children”, she stood and survived. All of these stories are about the grace and inherent value of survival, even in the face of tremendous loss.
In “Cradle of Shadows”, a woman tries to understand how her great-grandmother could have drowned her infant born after wartime rape, while she contemplates her own abortive act in a double helix of shame and a loss that unmakes memory: “I remember a house of four generations. There will be no-one to remember me.”
In “Synapses”, a woman struggling with her own advancing age tries to piece together her missing mother through tiny flakes of information that don't add up to enough – not to “heart, blood pressure, plaques, tangles” - those things that constitute a real life; a history.
In “Custodian” a granddaughter visits her dying grandmother—trying to link her grandmother's perception to the person she is.
A mother loses her son and gathers his memories around her in “Gratitute”. She is just another “sadling”, and, like the photographer who narrates the story, we are mere voyeurs to her grief, but the act of remembering brings her boy back into the present.
Not all stories provide answers. Though they aren't unsatisfying, each story holds back a little, leaving the reader to imagine the rest. The stories stand alone and can be read in isolation, but taken together they form a coherent and powerful whole, connected by the strong themes, and the imagery, of birds, of colour, of art in its many forms, of family, and of course inheritance: not just the things we inherit but the memories, the genes, the vision. Inherited is an exceptional collection of beautiful stories, written with the intense spareness of poetry. Each reading reveals new truths, new twists, and another way of perceiving both the ordinary, and the extraordinary that is everywhere in our not so very short lives.
Article first published as Book Review: Inherited by Amanda Curtin on Blogcritics.
There's not a single story in this collection that doesn't take the reader to the edge of experience: tragedy, loss, fear, loneliness. Many of the stories brought me to tears, but despite the darkness, this is not a depressing collection. Instead, at the heart of every story, is a sense of what remains when we're stripped clean. Each story is populated with memory, artifact, and a tiny bit of magic – a little hint at immortality that pervades the spaces these characters live or have lived in. This might be the memory of superb gracefulness: what it's like to “dance a story”, or it might be a few trinkets: “a tortoiseshell comb, a pipe, the handle of a frying pan.” The senses are in full play as we border on the indelicacy of extreme taste and distorted hunger in “Hamburger Moon”. The 'sight sense' is prevalent as flaking uneven patchwork plastering gives rise to the memory of a lost cow, or paintings thrown into the Indian Ocean become a conduit to the healing of grief in “Paris Bled Into the Indian Ocean”:
Hundreds of colours, thousands of them, perhaps—some newly exposed in the slick-wet sand, others uncovered from some hidden core as the wind scours dry ripples—each seam the touch of a brush, a figment of tree, of flower, a hat, a picnic, a fountain, a chair, and easel. Raviissant.
We experience touch in the horrible flint-sharp boulders against skin in “Rush, and sound in “The Sound of a Room”:
He gazed up, around, taking in the dimensions, and put his ear to the plasterboard wall. He walked the room's perimeter, judging ratios, gauging the shifts in ambience from door to wall, from corner to corner. He stood on a reclining chair beneath moulded cornices, hearing the air curve. Listening intently, trying to isolate each aural particularity, he bemoaned the fact that his spectrum analyser was not, for once, in the boot of the car. This space—it was a gem. (58)
Memory is critical in each of the stories, recycled into new experiences, and reworked into new memories, twisting, in and out of view, but never lost—nothing is ever lost. The setting brings history into the present day as modern characters uncover clues about the past that lead to self-awareness. In “The Prospect of Grace”, Charles Yelverton O'Connor's widow Susan Letitia might not have achieved the fame of her husband but, despite her pain, the tears that “dissolved onto the black taffeta—stained sand, and were borne elsewhere by the tidal breathing of spirit children”, she stood and survived. All of these stories are about the grace and inherent value of survival, even in the face of tremendous loss.
In “Cradle of Shadows”, a woman tries to understand how her great-grandmother could have drowned her infant born after wartime rape, while she contemplates her own abortive act in a double helix of shame and a loss that unmakes memory: “I remember a house of four generations. There will be no-one to remember me.”
In “Synapses”, a woman struggling with her own advancing age tries to piece together her missing mother through tiny flakes of information that don't add up to enough – not to “heart, blood pressure, plaques, tangles” - those things that constitute a real life; a history.
In “Custodian” a granddaughter visits her dying grandmother—trying to link her grandmother's perception to the person she is.
A mother loses her son and gathers his memories around her in “Gratitute”. She is just another “sadling”, and, like the photographer who narrates the story, we are mere voyeurs to her grief, but the act of remembering brings her boy back into the present.
Not all stories provide answers. Though they aren't unsatisfying, each story holds back a little, leaving the reader to imagine the rest. The stories stand alone and can be read in isolation, but taken together they form a coherent and powerful whole, connected by the strong themes, and the imagery, of birds, of colour, of art in its many forms, of family, and of course inheritance: not just the things we inherit but the memories, the genes, the vision. Inherited is an exceptional collection of beautiful stories, written with the intense spareness of poetry. Each reading reveals new truths, new twists, and another way of perceiving both the ordinary, and the extraordinary that is everywhere in our not so very short lives.
Article first published as Book Review: Inherited by Amanda Curtin on Blogcritics.
December 22, 2024
I don't remember how I came upon "Inherited," but it's been in my TBR pile for over a decade. I finally decided I should actually read it, and what a delight. Amanda Curtin - an Australian writer - gifts the reader poetic prose and deep gazing into the human psyche in these creative, powerful short stories. My favorites included Dance Memory, about an elderly dancer who is now in a wheelchair and her menagerie of ducks; Sarah's Ark, regarding a woman who annoys her family by collecting corks; and a series of interrelated stories under the section called "remembering" about motherhood in impossible and tragic situations. Beautiful work.
April 11, 2022
Short stories to make you think and appreciate. That keep you guessing and show that the story is never over.
A book you can pick up anytime and open to any story for something that resonates.
Enjoyed the subtle references to Perth, Western Australia.
A book you can pick up anytime and open to any story for something that resonates.
Enjoyed the subtle references to Perth, Western Australia.
July 11, 2016
Precision is what comes to my mind, first.
Amanda Curtin likes to write about connections, between person to person, between person and object, person and landscape. And about how those connections make us feel. Or why they are unique to us. Why they don’t make any sense or at least a different kind of sense to others. The back cover blurb for the book tells us:
Inherited brings together stories about the gifts and burdens we inherit from the world or from those we love, and what we, in turn, leave behind.
Inherited is her latest collection of short stories. And every word in each story belongs there and feels as if it has been placed there on purpose. Writing always solicits a reaction in the reader and in each short story, she manages to tease out the reaction she wants throughout, building up until you get to the pay off.
I remember a house of four generations. There will be no-one to remember me.
- Excerpt from Cradle of Shadows, in Inherited by Amanda Curtin
This is not a book you can expect not to be deeply involved in. She takes you in and if you don’t come quietly, she will drag you into the landscape of her stories. Dance Memory makes you catalogue the confusion, the fear, the struggle to understand what exactly it is that is important to certain people. At That Point gives you a lesson in different kinds of love and the choices about priorities you don’t ever want to make. Synapses gives you an insight into just how curiosity can become a habit and in how there is a hole left in your identity if you have nothing to relate yourself back to, no one to hold a mirror to and catch the bits of your reflection in.
Perhaps my mother was a Parisienne whore.
Perhaps my mother was minor European royalty and I, her bastard princess.
Perhaps my mother gave birth to me the day before she was hanged.
Perhaps my mother died a virgin and I was a holy child.
I could play that game forever.
- Excerpt from Synapses in Inherited by Amanda Curtin
There are other stories here – stories about sound designers recording the silences in rooms, about men who hear dead wive’s voices, people who collect corks. Things that all sound strange and odd and weird but when you read Inherited you realise that this is normal, these are the quirks real people have, these are the stories people could tell you if they thought anyone was interested in listening. And in the last story Gratitude we find exactly that as a journalist dives deeper into the grief of a mother who lost her son to a hit and run accident.
Henry Carlson’s mother told him she’d had a boy who was a pirate, who had an interest in petunias and liked Star Wars and was picky about his muffins, and she’d loved him for seven years and loved him still, and he was everywhere now.
- Excerpt from Gratitude in Inherited by Amanda Curtin
The short story is an exercise in restraint and evocation, a lesson in the bootstrapping of words so that every word on the page earns it place. The readers must be told a story in a set number of words – a story, not an impression, or an idea, but a story with characters, with action, with resolution. It must leave them wanting or wondering what the sequel is, how it would continue on, what happened next to these people they meet in such a slapdash, dropped into your life for a brief moment kind of way.
Amanda Curtin has mastered it.
Amanda Curtin likes to write about connections, between person to person, between person and object, person and landscape. And about how those connections make us feel. Or why they are unique to us. Why they don’t make any sense or at least a different kind of sense to others. The back cover blurb for the book tells us:
Inherited brings together stories about the gifts and burdens we inherit from the world or from those we love, and what we, in turn, leave behind.
Inherited is her latest collection of short stories. And every word in each story belongs there and feels as if it has been placed there on purpose. Writing always solicits a reaction in the reader and in each short story, she manages to tease out the reaction she wants throughout, building up until you get to the pay off.
I remember a house of four generations. There will be no-one to remember me.
- Excerpt from Cradle of Shadows, in Inherited by Amanda Curtin
This is not a book you can expect not to be deeply involved in. She takes you in and if you don’t come quietly, she will drag you into the landscape of her stories. Dance Memory makes you catalogue the confusion, the fear, the struggle to understand what exactly it is that is important to certain people. At That Point gives you a lesson in different kinds of love and the choices about priorities you don’t ever want to make. Synapses gives you an insight into just how curiosity can become a habit and in how there is a hole left in your identity if you have nothing to relate yourself back to, no one to hold a mirror to and catch the bits of your reflection in.
Perhaps my mother was a Parisienne whore.
Perhaps my mother was minor European royalty and I, her bastard princess.
Perhaps my mother gave birth to me the day before she was hanged.
Perhaps my mother died a virgin and I was a holy child.
I could play that game forever.
- Excerpt from Synapses in Inherited by Amanda Curtin
There are other stories here – stories about sound designers recording the silences in rooms, about men who hear dead wive’s voices, people who collect corks. Things that all sound strange and odd and weird but when you read Inherited you realise that this is normal, these are the quirks real people have, these are the stories people could tell you if they thought anyone was interested in listening. And in the last story Gratitude we find exactly that as a journalist dives deeper into the grief of a mother who lost her son to a hit and run accident.
Henry Carlson’s mother told him she’d had a boy who was a pirate, who had an interest in petunias and liked Star Wars and was picky about his muffins, and she’d loved him for seven years and loved him still, and he was everywhere now.
- Excerpt from Gratitude in Inherited by Amanda Curtin
The short story is an exercise in restraint and evocation, a lesson in the bootstrapping of words so that every word on the page earns it place. The readers must be told a story in a set number of words – a story, not an impression, or an idea, but a story with characters, with action, with resolution. It must leave them wanting or wondering what the sequel is, how it would continue on, what happened next to these people they meet in such a slapdash, dropped into your life for a brief moment kind of way.
Amanda Curtin has mastered it.
September 7, 2014
Several memorable stories here, told with great skill. The genre of short fiction can lend itself well to the kind of narration in which this author excels, where much of the action takes place inside a person's head as an interior monologue. One of the most powerful stories, I think, is 'Cradle of Shadows': the narrative foreground seems at first to comprise merely a woman's reminiscences about her maternal predecessors, especially her great-grandmother, but folded into her rumination is a startling episode from World War 1, a tale of violence, pain, infanticide and guilt. Reflecting on the opacities of this episode and anticipating the consequences of a decision she herself has just made about her own pregnancy, the narrator recognises that in families the 'burdens laid down by one generation must be shouldered by another.' This is a writer of real substance.
January 24, 2012
Beautiful writing and sensitive human stories. A lovely read.
June 6, 2012
A collection of stories that unfurls like a roll of silk. The writing is haunting and beautiful. The minute I finished it I wanted to read it again.
December 18, 2021
Interesting vignettes of believable and very human characters. Warm and insightful.
April 19, 2012
This is a little bit brilliant
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews