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Helen Simpson

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Cockfosters: Stories Kindle Edition

by Helen Simpson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

3.5 36 ratings

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A wickedly wry, tender new collection from one of our finest internationally acclaimed short story writers.

Nine virtuoso stories that take up the preoccupations and fixations of time's passing and of middle age and that take us from today's London and Berlin to the wild west of the USA and the wilder shores of Mother Russia; stories finely balanced between devastation and optimism.
In the title story, long-ago school pals take the London Underground to the end of the Piccadilly line--Cockfosters Station--to retrieve a lost pair of newly prescribed bifocals ("The worst thing about needing glasses is the bumbling," says Julie. "I've turned into a bumbler overnight. Me! I run marathons!"); each station stop prompting reflections on their shared past, present, and possible futures . . . In "Erewhon," a gender-role flip: after having sex with his wife, who has turned over and instantly fallen asleep, a man lies awake fretting about his body shape, his dissatisfaction with sex, his children, his role in the marriage . . . In "Kythera," lemon drizzle cake is a mother's ritual preparation for her (now grown) daughter's birthday as she conjures up memories of all the birthday cakes she has made for her, each one more poignant than the last; this new cake becoming a memento mori, an act of love, and a symbol of transformation ... And in "Berlin," a fiftysomething couple on a "Ring package" to Germany spend four evenings watching Wagner's epic, recalling their life together, reckoning with the husband's infidelity, the wife noting the similarity between their marriage and the Ring Cycle itself: "I'm glad I stuck it out but I'd never want to sit through it again."

Editorial Reviews

Review

Extraordinary acclaim for Helen Simpson’s
COCKFOSTERS

“If it were easy to explain what Helen Simpson can do with a story, more writers would be fashioning such jewels . . . Extra bravas for such heartfelt authenticity . . . deeply funny . . . unpredictably tender . . . What more does one want in a short story besides memorable characters, comic timing, originality, economy and poignancy? And heart. All there. Done. The reader thanks Simpson’s eye and ear for such generosity.”
—Elinor Lipman, The New York Times Book Review

“Time is the essence of this spare, subtle short story collection . . . Sharply written . . . Incisively sly and clever . . . Although Simpson’s stories are timely and rooted in their British milieu—strongly evoking the personal and cultural struggles of today's middle class—they are also far-reaching and timeless, addressing matters of loyalty and mortality that are universal and deeply human. Simpson’s stories pack a quiet emotional power that extends beyond their pages.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Wonderful . . . Her sixth collection continues to delight with her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and delicate handling of weighty subtexts . . . A vital (and pleasurable) voice.”
—Melanie White, The Independent on Sunday

“Sad, funny, and true . . . if Simpson were an American short story writer, she’d be hailed as a genius.”
—Max Liu, The Independent

“Exquisitely tender . . . A breakthrough collection.”
—Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times

“Elegant fable-like pieces about the nitty-gritty of middle-class family life . . . Truthful, funny and sharp . . . Elegant, sane, and—while remaining firmly rooted in ordinary life—gently ground-breaking.”
—Theo Tait, The Sunday Times

“Remarkable . . . Humour is never far from the surface . . . Joy and its flipside, pain, are frequently glimpsed together . . . Simpson has a fine ear for the cadence of everyday speech and for the truths that may lie behind the most mundane of expressions.”
—Emily Rhodes, The Times Literary Supplement

“Simpson has assembled a body of work over the course of a quarter century that delivers one of literature's richest accounts of the post-war lives of girls and women.”
—Sarah Crown, The Guardian

“Witty, hilarious and deeply discomfiting.”
—Neel Mukherjee, The Spectator

“A virtuoso of the short story . . . Simpon’s stories are little miracles that cut straight to the heart of the matter without ever losing their mystery . . . Tenderly measured and entirely human. It’s this tightrope balance between our outer lives and inner expanses that continues to make her writing sing.”
—Justine Jordan, The Guardian

About the Author

Helen Simpson is the author of five previous collections of short stories. She spent five years writing for Vogue. Simpson is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in London with her husband.

www.helensimpsonwriter.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

MOSCOW

Get my knee fixed then get the fridge-freezer fixed, that was the plan. I’d set everything up for a couple of days off on the basis that the medics had suggested a week. Might as well make myself useful, I thought; for once be the one to wait in for the repair man. God knows Nigel has had more than his fair share of it over the years—waiting in.

Don’t run on it for six weeks, don’t do this, don’t do that; then the nurse was making me practise going up and down stairs with a stick for a good half-hour before the op. Waste of time! I was fine. The bruising was fairly dramatic, mustard-coloured below the knee—English mustard too, not French—and purple-black above. But it really didn’t hurt that much.

The freezer man arrived right on time which I wasn’t expecting, Nigel having warned me there was a less than fifty-fifty chance of this happening in his experience. Plain black T-shirt and jeans, close-cropped hair, he was rather short and very strongly built. Martial arts? I thought to myself.

“Water’s dripping into the top salad drawer from somewhere and freezing hard,” I told him. “Then it melts and freezes again.”

I’d have gone away at this point and put in a few calls to work if it hadn’t been for Nigel instructing me to stick with the process throughout. His reasoning was that it helped if you were able to explain to them what had gone wrong next time it happened, and the only way to under- stand what the problem was was to go through the whole boring process with them in the first place and ask ques- tions and try to understand it. He himself took notes, dated, before he forgot; he had a special file for them. Nigel’s an academic, he likes writing things down. His last published article was “Islamic Historians in Eighth- and Ninth-Century Mesopotamia and Their Approach to Historical Truth.” I haven’t read it yet but I know it’ll be brilliant, like all his work. Anyway, I resigned myself to doing things his way this time, seeing as it was once in a blue moon that I was the one hanging around.

The man refused coffee when I offered but asked for a glass of water instead. All a bit of a novelty for me, this. I couldn’t quite place his accent: East European, but not Polish.

He opened the door to the freezer compartment and our eating habits were laid bare. Sliced bread, because you can toast it from frozen; litre cartons of skimmed milk so we didn’t ever run out; several tubs of ice cream (cookie dough for Georgia, mango and passion fruit for Verity, raspberry sorbet for weight-conscious Clio). Not much else except frozen peas and a bottle of vodka. Not much actual food. Oh well, everyone seemed healthy enough. The vodka was officially Georgia’s now she was eighteen, for pre-drinking with her friends; better here where we could keep an eye on how fast it goes down, we’d reasoned, than hidden in her bedroom.

“So where are you from?” I asked, setting the glass of water down beside him.

He looked up from the fridge drawer for a moment.

He had very dark eyes, like a watchful bird. “Russia,” he said.

Snow and ice, I thought; appropriate. “Where in Russia?”

“Nearest city Moscow,” he said; then, with fleeting mockery, “three hundred kilometres.”

“So you’re from the countryside?” He nodded.

“I’ve been to Moscow,” I said, but he’d turned back to the freezer.

That time I thought we might get into emerging mar- kets, invest in commodities, get a piece of the action, I couldn’t believe how long it took to get there. Not the flight but the actual drive from the airport into Moscow. The roads were atrocious; it took almost three hours in the cab for what should have been a forty-five-minute journey. The crawl through the gridlocked suburbs was teeth-grindingly slow. Then when I visited Mr. Petrossian in his office there were a couple of security guys with sub- machine guns in reception. The secretaries and support staff, all female of course, were trussed up in pencil skirts, tottering around on stilettos. It was like a surly version of the fifties. Embarrassing.
The man was lying spreadeagled on the floor now, shining a little torch into the gap beneath the freezer from which he’d neatly wrenched the grille. Seen from this angle it was obvious he worked out. I found myself wondering what sport he played and at what level.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01LZXCHCW
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (June 6, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 6, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2757 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 194 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,812,307 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,291 in British & Irish Literary Fiction
- #2,708 in Literary Short Stories
- #2,775 in Women's Short Stories

Customer Reviews:
3.5 36 ratings

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3.5 out of 5

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Jill I. Shtulman

The geography of transformation

Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2017

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

Many of the short stories in Helen Simpson’s collection are titled with geographic locations (Arizona, Berlin, Moscow), but the author’s real target is the geography of transformation and loss. Most of the characters are middle-aged and many are dealing with the indignities of aging: a first set of bifocals, for example. Peppered in are strong observations of – among other things – gender inequality, the problems inherent with out-of-control capitalism, the pressure to identify a successful albeit unfulfilling career.

Helen Simpson’s prose is easy to read, which belies, of course, the fact that all effortless prose takes a good deal of effort to make it that realistic. And whether a reader loves or merely likes this book will, in large part, depend on what he or she seeks in a short story.

For me, I wanted a little less in-your-face “here’s how to think” narrative. Take, for example, Erewhon, where Ms. Simpson takes the so-called natural order and turns it on its ear, with the woman firmly ensconced in the man role, working too hard and not understanding her put-upon spouse. Yes, it was fun to read and yes, it revealed how the unequal set-up is not a good thing, but I wanted more subtlety. Kentish Town is about a book club meeting – focusing on Dickens – and again, the sense of subtlety is missing: “We’ve allowed a pack of shameless greed-merchants and a few brainiacs with maths PhDs to rig the entire system over the last twenty years so that nobody can understand it.”

The last and longest story – Berlin – in which a middle-aged couple travels to see Wagner’s entire “Ring” cycle, a catalyst to tearing down the emotional distance they’ve built up, was, for me, the most satisfying. But for the most part, these stories reminded me of a luscious dessert at the end of a hearty meal — the taste lingers for a little while and then is too-soon forgotten. 3.5 stars.

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Lulu168

4.5 Stars!

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2018

I have always enjoyed well written short stories because they make me reflective and send my imagination soaring high more than any other literary forms. The author’s stories here have done that and more. The last one of them especially resonated with me.

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Sesho

SLICE OF LIFE THAT CUTS DEEP

Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2020

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

Helen Simpson's stories appeare on the surface to be fairly simple. A woman and her actupuncturist talk about getting middle-aged. A woman leaves her glasses on the subway. A man suffering from insomnia begins to question his unsatisfying marriage. A lawyer tries to talk the son of his friend into studying pre-law. It seems like everyday stuff we all deal with but somehow Simpson is able to make it interesting. The Theater of the Banal in some respects. The characters in the stories really stumble upon some deeper questions of what it means to be human as they scramble for lost happiness or lost time. I found the stories very amusing and crafted really well. Are any of them going to be in the Western Canon in 100 years? Probably not. The book is worth reading even though I couldn't make it through the last and longest one in the collection, "Berlin". I HATE italics in a lliterary work and that story is full of them as a couple watches a long series of Wagner operas. To me, when writers put something in italics, and by that, I mean entire PAGES of text, that tells me that this information is unimportant and doesn't belong in the flow of the work. So it automatically turns me off. While I enjoyed the rest of the stories, I didn't enjoy them enough to seek out another work by the author.

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Cynthia

One Excellent Story but a Few Others Don't Shine

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2017

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I'm conflicted about these stories. Each story is named for a city it takes place in or I suppose I should say som of the stories were previously published under other names but retitled for this collection. There were a few which were a tongue in cheek gende flip which I dint enjoy because they dint provide any startling insight. The longest an best entry is called Berlin about a mature English couple on a vacation to Germany to attend a week long Wagner Ring Cycle performance with like aged people. It's as much about their lengthy marriage as their impressions of the music and her Simpson shines with insight, in fact this story alone makes this collection worth while.

3.5/5 stars

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Leslie Lindsay

Wry Ruminations and Authentic Musings about/from Women in their 40s-50s

Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2017

Quiet, honest and wry short stories about women in middle-age is as tender as it is disturbing.

Helen Simpson has been writing short stories for a long time--in fact, COCKFOSTERS is her *sixth* collection--and I've just now been introduced to her?! She's British, and that might be part of it, but still. I see her as a contemporary to Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, and perhaps maybe Lorna Lanvick (ANGRY HOUSEWIVES EATING BON-BONS) and maybe even Joyce Carol Oates.

Each story is a perfect 'sit' for a read. That is, you cruise through any story (except maybe the last) in about 20-25 minutes, so a great pick if you know you'll be short on time (in my case, I read this on the plane and it worked nicely for my people-watching-airport-attention-span). Hummm...maybe I'll write a short on *that?!* But really,that's what many of the stories in COCKFOSTERS are: stories about nothing (kind of like Seinfeld in that sense).

The stories included are mostly about women in their 40s and 50s, revolving around identity, reinvention, changing bodies/sex lives, empty-nesters.If those topics don't resonate, then maybe not the best pick for you.

I was completely poised to give this collection a 5-star rating because the writing is really superb, but the meaning of the last story was lost on me and also, I didn't find a common thread tying any of the stories together, except *maybe* the age thing.

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