Vincenzo’s Garden (John Clanchy, UQP, $22.95 pb, ISBN 0702235156, April) HHHHH

If you were looking for a collection of perfect short stories, you could hardly do better than to pick up John Clanchy’s new book. The seven tales in Vincenzo’s Garden are uniformly controlled, beautifully constructed and masterfully executed. In ‘Late Cruising’, a middle-aged man revisits his past, a disastrous driving tour of southern France, when his insecurities over money and sexuality led to a breakup with his best friend. Twenty-five years later, his dashed artistic dreams all but forgotten in the monotony of a life he never wanted, he embarks on a journey to meet his friend, and everything changes when he picks up a young hitchhiker. For me, the three shorter pieces, ‘Radinsky’s Will,’ ‘Leaper’ and ‘Burnt Offering,’ are the highlights. Madness, guilt, art and infidelity are recurrent themes and the tortured life of Vincent Van Gogh features in a number of stories, including ‘A Portrait of Adeline Ravoux’, which tells of Van Gogh’s final days from the perspective of the girl in the blue dress. Clanchy draws out character and nuance with never a wasted word and always leaves you thinking at the end. This is an outstanding collection from an award-winning story writer and novelist.

Lachlan Jobbins is a freelance writer and reviewer and former bookseller

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2005, Thorpe-Bowker