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The Carnal Fugues
A wayward, wanton selection of stories grounded in displacement, desire, and the wish coursing through us to accede to the state of love. There is torment and illness, crude reality and distant fragrant places, peopled by characters that reside close to our bones, our psyches, our flesh. A Japanese soprano has lost her voice and seeks repose on a sailing boat in Corsica. A South African advertising executive learns the ropes at his Accra office. Destructive lovers interview a renowned musician in dusty Bamako. Lovers meet, fade, delude. We are weak and defiant beings, ever-learning, ever-lustful.
Fine stories, rank with exotic air, bursting like old fruit. - Bruce Pascoe
McNamara's work has a fierce, vital beat, her stories robust yet finely worked, her voice striking in its confidence and originality. She writes with sensuous precision and a craft that is equally precise. This is fiction that can stand up in any company. - Hilary Mantel
Fine stories, rank with exotic air, bursting like old fruit. - Bruce Pascoe
McNamara's work has a fierce, vital beat, her stories robust yet finely worked, her voice striking in its confidence and originality. She writes with sensuous precision and a craft that is equally precise. This is fiction that can stand up in any company. - Hilary Mantel
Kindle Edition
Published November 1, 2023
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About the author
Catherine McNamara
6 books22 followersCatherine McNamara grew up in Sydney, ran away to Paris, and ended up in West Africa running a bar. She was an embassy secretary in pre-war Mogadishu, and has worked as an au pair, graphic designer, translator and shoe model. Catherine's short fiction collection The Carnal Fugues was published in October 2023 by Puncher and Wattmann, Australia. The Carnal Fugues is a compilation of award-winning stories from her three collections - Love Stories for Hectic People, flash fiction published by Reflex Press (Best Short Story Collection, Saboteur Awards 2021), The Cartography of Others, published in 2018 with Unbound UK (finalist in the People's Book Prize UK, winner of the Eyelands International Fiction Prize, Greece), Pelt and Other Stories, published by Indigo Dreams in 2013 (semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize USA). Catherine's stories have been praised by Hilary Mantel, Chika Unigwe, Cathy Galvin, Tom Vowler, and shortlisted in the Royal Academy/Pin Drop Award, the Hilary Mantel/KWS Short Story Competition, the Willesden Herald Internation Short Story Competition, Short Fiction Journal and others. Her stories have been Pushcart-nominated and published in the U.K., Europe, U.S.A. and Australia, and speak of the sensual boundaries between people, and the alluring otherness of place. Catherine lives in Italy.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 25, 2023
Catherine McNamara’s sumptuous collection The Carnal Fugues reveals her piercing observations of life and its possibilities. Short stories are challenging beasts to wrangle. Although there’s an implicit sense of what they are, their creative potential is unwieldy. Perhaps instead of trying to define what they look like; it’s easier to understand a short story by how it makes us feel. One of the best descriptions I’ve heard is by Australian short story master Robert Drewe, who describes a short story’s power by its ability to ‘set up a need in us that we weren’t aware of – and then fulfil it’. That is, I think, a perfect description of the stories in The Carnal Fugues.
The stories traverse unfamiliar landscapes. Falling into them, we are transported, mirroring the characters’ displacement. To a sailing boat in Corsica with a Japanese soprano who has lost her voice, a woman left dangling in a motel room in Hong Kong, characters rolling in from Johannesburg, a lover who falls into a dead faint at an Athens train station. Even on what feels like more familiar territory, vacillations and rebellions disrupt the status quo. McNamara’s sense of place is vivid, tactile, the perfect antidote to the bland, suppressed style favoured by some.
Despite the often-exotic settings, the stories are peopled by relatable if not recognisable characters – flawed, fractured, leaky, navigating desires, misunderstandings, loss, and disappointment. In the short story ‘The Coptic Bride’, a brother returns to Sydney with a fiancée from Ethiopia ‘not a fumy supermodel like David Bowie’s wife, but a ‘small, chesty’ woman with ‘bad skin and an unattractive nose’. At a train station in ‘As Simple as Water’, Vasilis feels ‘a charge of sadness’ as his collapsed lover is examined by a doctor with ‘black hair with dandruff captured at its roots’. In moments of distress, McNamara can be blackly humorous, as witnessed in the same story where ‘Vasilis still has Marj’s saliva in his mouth and some (she is a vigorous kisser) has dried on his cheek and neck’. Her characterisation is on perfect display in ‘On Being Eaten Alive’ where McNamara relays, in telling detail, the self-absorption of an unnamed ‘tall, esteemed, white, award-winning author’. Reading this collection is the most delicious form of people watching, seamlessly achieved through McNamara’s unique voice, which is lyrical, assured, and more than a little bit wicked.
The stories traverse unfamiliar landscapes. Falling into them, we are transported, mirroring the characters’ displacement. To a sailing boat in Corsica with a Japanese soprano who has lost her voice, a woman left dangling in a motel room in Hong Kong, characters rolling in from Johannesburg, a lover who falls into a dead faint at an Athens train station. Even on what feels like more familiar territory, vacillations and rebellions disrupt the status quo. McNamara’s sense of place is vivid, tactile, the perfect antidote to the bland, suppressed style favoured by some.
Despite the often-exotic settings, the stories are peopled by relatable if not recognisable characters – flawed, fractured, leaky, navigating desires, misunderstandings, loss, and disappointment. In the short story ‘The Coptic Bride’, a brother returns to Sydney with a fiancée from Ethiopia ‘not a fumy supermodel like David Bowie’s wife, but a ‘small, chesty’ woman with ‘bad skin and an unattractive nose’. At a train station in ‘As Simple as Water’, Vasilis feels ‘a charge of sadness’ as his collapsed lover is examined by a doctor with ‘black hair with dandruff captured at its roots’. In moments of distress, McNamara can be blackly humorous, as witnessed in the same story where ‘Vasilis still has Marj’s saliva in his mouth and some (she is a vigorous kisser) has dried on his cheek and neck’. Her characterisation is on perfect display in ‘On Being Eaten Alive’ where McNamara relays, in telling detail, the self-absorption of an unnamed ‘tall, esteemed, white, award-winning author’. Reading this collection is the most delicious form of people watching, seamlessly achieved through McNamara’s unique voice, which is lyrical, assured, and more than a little bit wicked.
July 4, 2024
The stories in this book are brief but not fleeting. Some are only a page long but they stay with you as you go about your day. Catherine McNamara writes with such sensuality and tangible details about people you feel like you might know. She has an amazing ability to make her characters real, tapping into that silent part of us and exposing things we may have thought but never shared. I pick up this book often, reading one or two stories at a time, and each time I feel better, satisfied, temporarily transported somewhere else in the world. Highly recommend.
March 8, 2024
I absolutely loved the short stories in The Carnal Fugues.
It was a surprise and a pleasure read such sharp, thoughtful, dense AND light, delightfully earthy and yet poetic, nuanced writing. They are also very original and finely crafted stories.
There seems to be a huge depth of experience (and/or an incredible imagination) behind these stories, which traverse the globe and cover a diversity of human experience.
I heartily recommend this book and look forward to reading more of Catherine McNamara's work.
It was a surprise and a pleasure read such sharp, thoughtful, dense AND light, delightfully earthy and yet poetic, nuanced writing. They are also very original and finely crafted stories.
There seems to be a huge depth of experience (and/or an incredible imagination) behind these stories, which traverse the globe and cover a diversity of human experience.
I heartily recommend this book and look forward to reading more of Catherine McNamara's work.
August 21, 2024
There's not a single story in this collection that's going to lull you into a feeling of ease, or familiarity, or predictability. These are fascinating stories, often with a gut-punch of truth, sometimes an unpleasant truth about how imperfect we are, in our passions, capacity to fool ourselves, or lazinesses. The stories range in setting from Ghana, to Mali, to Italy, one or two in Australia. On yachts, in cars, on roads, in bedrooms and kitchens, with characters who're wealthy, poor, black, white- a feast of nations here and a lot of fascinating politics.
McNamara's stories range in length from very smart flash fictions, to longer stories that explore a person's life and character in just a few thousand words. Almost all of them satisfying.
The syntax of her writing is fast-paced, words never wasted, a kind of urgency seems to fill every page.
The collection curates years of writing and creative achievement. Thus - the 5 stars!
McNamara's stories range in length from very smart flash fictions, to longer stories that explore a person's life and character in just a few thousand words. Almost all of them satisfying.
The syntax of her writing is fast-paced, words never wasted, a kind of urgency seems to fill every page.
The collection curates years of writing and creative achievement. Thus - the 5 stars!
May 16, 2024
In The Carnal Fugues, McNamara demonstrates a remarkable wit and deeply humane insight, while employing an adept finesse of language brilliant and evocative. Our characters throughout this collection are each uniquely haunted travelers (either of the globe, or of the hard-to-navigate storms of life) fumbling toward and away from their happiness with a believable and flavorful realism that's at moments magical, at others surreal, and always affecting. McNamara brings moments to multi-layered life, capable of imbuing a moment of silence with incredible depth, and offering a masterclass in the art of "showing" writing, with not a sentence wasted, and even the simplest phrases revealing (or hinting at) mysteries of the human spirit. If you're looking for a soul-stirring travelogue or an intimate unraveling love, it's here in The Carnal Fugues.
February 2, 2026
These stories invited me in, not as a reader but a participant. I was happy for the opportunity to reach my own conclusions on very short, seemingly unfinished stories. Set globally but resonating through all continents, each well-fleshed out character, each story brings an atmospheric flavour unique to its geographical surroundings.
I would have pitched THE CARNAL FUGUES as "Eat, Pray, Love" meets "Babel."
I would have pitched THE CARNAL FUGUES as "Eat, Pray, Love" meets "Babel."
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews