The Vanishing Princess

September 15, 2017

Feminist writing lost a provocative, stylistic voice with the death of Diski (Nothing Natural) last year. She wrote not only several novels and varied works of nonfiction and memoir but also a regular column for the London Review of Books. This is her only collection of short fiction, originally published in Great Britain in 1995. The varied stories include some fairy tales in which the heroine remains passively trapped or consciously bucks the genre trope. Other pieces are less allegorical. A rebellious teenage girl is deposited in a mental institution during the swinging 1960s. An unadventurous housewife discovers her contempt for her husband while on a Caribbean vacation. Another figure achieves her life goal: the perfect, uninterrupted bath. A mom rationally introduces her teenage daughter to a discussion of drugs and sex. In the most memorable work, a competent hausfrau in the midst of a kinky affair with a college professor thoughtfully analyzes the ethics of betraying both her husband and her lover's wife. VERDICT Each story is told in Diski's clear, authoritative voice and explores how women strain (or not) against the bounds of a confining world. A great introduction to Diski's works. [See Prepub Alert, 6/26/17.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 2, 2017
The dozen stories of this excellent posthumous collection look at isolation, anxiety, sex, the roles women play, and the attempts of men to define those roles, all from a female perspective. Three stories feature fairy tale heroines: two princesses confined to towers, one miller’s daughter tasked with spinning straw into gold. The title story’s vanishing princess never asks about the world outside her tower. As the narrator explains, no one told the princess curiosity was a quality worth cultivating. A passing soldier brings food, and then another soldier brings a mirror. Etching the princess’s likeness onto the mirror, the soldiers create what Diski (1947–2016) calls the earliest example of cubist art. In “Leaper,” two women meet after another woman throws herself under a train. The budding relationship ends when one of the two women, a writer suffering doubts about her own writing skill, has reservations about her newfound friend. Some stories depict growing up in a disjointed, unloving family. In “My Brother Stanley,” a girl knows her dead half-brother only from photographs and a portrait. “Strictempo” shows a teenager expelled from school, abandoned by her parents, living in a mental health facility where dancing offers respite from thinking. Diski’s protagonists include ordinary women with unusual interior lives. In “Housewife,” Susan Donohoe indulges in wild sex fantasies during her affair with an English lecturer. One protagonist imagines the perfect bath; another obsesses over whether Mount Rushmore exists. Diski displays hard-edged humor, incisive perceptions, and a lively imagination.

Starred review from November 1, 2017
Although Diski is renowned across the pond, her defiant treatise against her terminal cancer, In Gratitude, published just before her 2016 death is, ironically, what earned her substantial stateside acclaim. Now available posthumously to U.S. readers is her spectacular 1995 collection of bizarre-to-rueful-to-stunning stories, bookended by two princesses living (and reading) in towers: the titular vanishing princess, who learns about food, time, and mirrors; and the Old Princess, whose long life is spent waiting. Another royal becomes Queen-meaning Mrs. King, as Diski alchemizes Rumpelstiltskin's tale into Shit and Gold, a wicked feminist reclamation. A single story, Strictempo, gets plainly autobiographical as it portrays a 15-year-old expelled from boarding school and returned to negligent parents. A writer has an afternoon tryst with a stranger after discussing the leaper who's disrupted rush-hour subway traffic. A woman manifests her lifelong goal of the perfect, all-day bath. A housewife enjoys a filthy affair, even as life went on as normal. A toddler's mother goes on a Caribbean vacation only to realize her husband is a dull disappointment. A teenager's mother matter-of-factly talks blow jobs and doing drugs with her 13-year-old. Memorable girls and womendamaged, truculent, curious, stalwartoccupy Diski's pages, claiming space, agency, and well-deserved attention.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 1, 2017
This short story collection from a beloved British author, published in the U.K. in 1995 but only now receiving a U.S. release, glimmers like found treasure--or a mirage.The princess in this insightful, imaginative, and wryly clever collection's title story, "The Vanishing Princess or The Origin of Cubism," may or may not be imprisoned in the circular tower room in which she lives in solitude, spending her time (of which she has no sense) placidly reading books on her bed, generally unaware of and remarkably incurious about the world outside, which she can glimpse from her small window. It is only after one soldier and then another turn up to pierce and fragment the innocent solitude of her existence--bringing food, a mirror, and a calendar, to satisfy their own pleasure--that she comes to perceive time and disappointment, to see herself as they do and consequently to disappear. Among the ideas percolating in this quirky, disquieting fairy tale is the way a sense of loss can attend the moment of being found. Readers just discovering Diski (In Gratitude, 2016, etc.), who died from cancer in 2016, through the dozen stories in this collection may perceive this acutely--the searing sense of finding her funny, flinty voice just as it has disappeared. Yet for Diski devotees existing and new, the far-ranging work the author has left behind here is something to savor. In "Shit and Gold," she offers a bold and naughty reimagining of "Rumpelstiltskin" in which the upwardly mobile miller's daughter takes action to create a far more fulfilling fate for herself and the strangely named fellow with the helpful ability to spin straw into precious metal. (The miller's daughter, it so happens, has her talents, too.) In "Housewife," she steams things up with the story of two people swept up in, but not away by, a ravenous extramarital affair. In "Bath Time," she brings us a woman in determined pursuit of the perfect bath. Yes, only that. But in Diski's able hands the modest plot yields riches, shedding glinty light on dreams deferred, pleasures denied, the way we can, if we are single-minded enough, take the straw of everyday life and turn it into gold.Regal, raunchy, revealing--the stories in this collection leave a lasting impression.

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