Mud: Stories of Sex and Love

by Michèle Roberts

A jilted lover skirts the edges of time and place as she walks the streets of London at night; a woman returns to the scene of her honeymoon without her husband; a bereft daughter traces her relationship with her mother as she slowly packs up a house in the aftermath of death. In this brilliant collection of intimate and intense stories, Michele Roberts takes us to nineteenth century Venice, 1970s England, modern-day France and beyond.
Here too are Tristram and Isolde with a twist; George Sand, sick in Venice with her unfaithful lover; and the bitter maid taking care of young both forced out of Rochester's home to make way for the passions of Jane Eyre. . . With her subversive, often witty, exploration of women's desires, memory, grief, love and betrayal, Michele Roberts demonstrates once again why she remains one of Britain's most invigorating writers.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

226 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Michèle Brigitte Roberts is the author of fifteen novels, including Ignorance which was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction and Daughters of the House which won the W.H. Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her memoir Paper Houses was BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in June 2007. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud: Stories of Sex and Love. Half-English and half-French, Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Reviews

[Nicole Field · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't help but feel as though this book of short stories was misrepresented. The covers says Stories of Sex and Love, and although there was a lot of sex, and a little bit of love in this compilation, what I feel would have been more accurate a statement would have been Stories of Feminism and Abuse.

I came across this book because the name was one I recognised from one of the authors featured in the FutureLearn course Start Writing Fiction. I thought it would be interesting to see how this author did what she said about describing characters in her own prose.

There was at least one story that I couldn't read at all because, just from the opening paragraphs, it was too obviously upsetting that I didn't want to put myself through it. This, mind you, was after at least one another story with a disturbing incest twist at the end and before another where the start seemed like it was going to go to a nice place, and ended up showing the trajectory of the downfall of a relationship that seemed to express the message: Don't trust men, even the ones that seem nice are going to turn out horrible.

I was surprised by how much I despised this book by the end, because the stories at the start were really good. Evocative, sensually written pieces that were self contained and interesting, with characters who seemed diverse and showed different parts of a woman's life. There was also one, later, that impressed me which was a Beowulf retelling. The second star is only there to represent these stories.

However, from about the fourth story onwards I really felt that the stories went from slow, to actually bad and finally to worse and the point where I was begging for the book to end.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

read on the plane to Sardinia - good, maybe three stars a bit harsh... more later..

have decided that 3 stars is too harsh for this is a poetic, teasing and sensuous book, getting down to the core of desire and appetite in people. It flits around in history, one story dropping through a hole in time with London becoming filled with horse shit and carriages after the modern character's night out in a theatre. There are stories about George Sand and Collette and fictional characters like Jane Eyre and Emma Bovary.

The quote on the back (that I half remember) - about two lovers writhing in an estuary at low tide, ‘imprinting our bodies into the mud’ while sailors on boats going by catcall - gives you a flavour of it. (again I have returned the book so can’t quote much – should have written down some of the thrilling sentences).

So why did I start by giving this three stars? Well maybe because what put me on to this was the brilliant story in ‘Best British Short Stories 2011’ – again a story about lovers, but with a shocking twist that made you read it over, immediately. The others in this collection are just as good, but maybe I felt they ploughed the same furrow, the sex and food one, and maybe because I thought some were over-poetic. I read most of them in a short space of time, crammed on an aeroplane. I will probably go back and re-read at a more leisurely pace and in a more comfortable setting which would allow more savouring of the delicious detail. I am recommending to notgettingenough simply for the food and sex, because I know those are two of her preoccupations.

[Libre Paley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mud: from mudde, a low-Germanic word for earth, the soft earth in which we plant and grow, but become cognate with something that is of no value, dirty, even polluting. In Roberts’s Mud: Stories of Sex and Love, ‘mud’ is all of these things: something earthy, fertile, the stuff we are made of, and also unclean, perhaps unhealthy, contaminating. That, I suppose, is the common dichotomy in our, in many societies’, attitude to sex. It is natural, healthy, necessary, but also… defiling, sinful. The latter, in particular, has been attached to women. The ones that 'should have known better'.
And the stories in this collection are all of these things. The woman’s experience is at the centre of each, passionate; walking the shadowy night-time London streets; finding new freedoms; avenging wrongs; even re-imagining a below-stairs character from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and passages from the lives of George Sand and Collette. Mud then, filth, in all its forms - pleasurable, subversive, and deliciously, lewdly naughty. And erotic, voluptuously written, all the senses aroused, from the scents of rose and tobacco and horseshit; the tastes of ‘Salt and oil and lemon’ left on the tongue (Roberts is always wonderful when describing food); the – yes, again – mud squishing between the toes.
Roberts’s sensual style may be too intense, too verbose, for some tastes, but I loved this.

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Three stories from this new collection as aired by Radio 4 and read for us by Siobhan Redmond.

2.5*

[Saturday's Child · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recommended to me this was a great read in between novels.

[Peter White · Rating 5 out of 5]

English (or should I say London?) short story collection that's well worth reading. A couple of the early short stories fall flat, but the good ones are so good it's worth 5 stars.

[Alden · Rating 2 out of 5]

The stories kinda reminded me of Bernhard Schlink's Flights Of Love.

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hodgepodge of female protagonists set around a theme of 'lovers' and differing narratorial placement , short story form.

[Mira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skillful sketches of many different kinds of love some surprising, some sad, mostly enchanting.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thing with collections of short stories is that they differ in their appeal which means on the one hand not every story will appeal but on the other the reader gets to sample a wider range of the author's craft.
I found a variety within these covers and all were written with extreme talent and sensitivity and which left impacts on my soul ranging from a feather's touch to a high speed train.

[John Kaye · Rating 2 out of 5]

My daughter used to be taught by Roberts, and didn't like her style, and neither do I!