Xanthi Barker - The “things” Len, a roofer in London, wants back include his smashed-up “Green Goddess” van, the last three months of his life, his sturdy knuckles, his favourite corduroy shirt, his daughter as a baby, and “ah fuck” — later clarified as being his much loved ex-wife, Violet

Xanthi Barker, One Thing, Open Pen, 2019.
excerpt
THE UNREFLECTED

The one thing Len wants back is his wife, but today is her funeral, they divorced decades ago, and besides, he’s not invited. So equipped with a screwdriver, bad memories and a fixing of desperation, Len sets about reclaiming the one part of her that’s still his. It won’t be easy. But then nothing has been easy for Len.

One Thing is a novelette and working class tale of regret, loss, and the hope of redemption.

“A punchy, short and shocking examination of grief and its fallout, delivered in a brilliant and unexpected prose style. Highly recommended.”— Gary Budden

“Packs more punch than a book this short has any right to. Barker is frighteningly talented.”— Owen Booth

Xanthi Barker’s One Thing and Mazin Saleem’s The Prick are the second and third of the Open Pen Novelette series, coming after Shitstorm by Fernando Sdrigotti. The books in the series are all wrapped in Pierre Butin’s stylish minimalist designs, but this is where such minimalism ends. From the first page both stories make for great reading, quickly unfolding into modern absurdist fables.
‘There’s no word for what Len is’ — Barker begins One Thing using her words to tell us how her protagonist has been excluded from them. Len, our anti-hero, is sitting in a motorway service station café — a place no one would go to purposefully — listing the ‘things he wants back’, fragments of his identity as scattered as the ‘knuckles he left in chunks and blood in various towns across the country’. What follows is a journey closer and closer to his deceased ex-wife, as close as it is possible to get to someone from whom he was legally separated decades ago and, furthermore, is beyond the grave. Instead of tracking a grieving husband’s recovery as he gets further away from tragedy, Barker dives deeper into the grief, with the narrative seeming to gradually, but never fully, deconstruct. There are pockets of repressed absurdity, as he remembers the day his wife left:
‘She walked out and shut the door and he walked back along the hall and climbed inside the airing cupboard, shut that door like it was only a game of shut doors that they were playing, pulled the bristling orange padding out of the coat the boiler wore and stuffed it in his mouth and screamed’
What is this game of ‘shut doors’? It is one of the many figments of Len’s fractured imagination pulled to the surface and smoothed into the story. The padding isn’t bristly, but bristling — imbued with the energy Len can’t quite find himself. Barker uses form in an interesting way in One Thing, in that in allowing the prose style to fragment as it goes on, the sense of anxiety and dissociation in the grieving process grows and grows, feeling ever more real as the book progresses.
Len’s mind then links his ex-wife’s death with that of his father, said in such a way that it almost seems that Len is trying to validate his knowledge of the practical experience of grief: ‘funerals are regularly as short as forty-five minutes’, Barker tells us through Len’s thoughts, ‘his dad’s was a mean fifteen’.
Given the brevity of the text, Barker expertly sways between present and past, real and imagined, without losing any cutting clarity. At one point Len imagines himself a pseudo-Heathcliff, the impulse to ‘tear her from the coffin, tear off her expensive dress and press his warm body against her’ almost overcoming him. - Jessamy Gather

https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/review-one-thing-by-xanthi-barker-and-the-prick-by-mazin-saleem/

The short novel or story can be so condensed it requires multiple scans, just like a poem. I read Xanthi Barker’s nouvelle three times and each time had a different response. Now I feel that I understand the book less than when I started, since the falsely realistic façade cracked into something stranger and more abstract. There’s no empathetic narrator or firm plot, but that’s not the point here. Reading almost as a prose poem, containing multiple layers of interpretation, Barker explores the more impressionistic, introspective direction that a nouvelle might take.
On first read, One Thing tells the story of a man named Len, grieving for his ex-wife and grappling with the general disintegration of his life. The piece seems a character study, an exercise in realism, a portrait of desperation. “The list of things he wants back could go on forever. He counts six before he’s had a second sip of coffee,” the matter-of-fact narration informs us. The “things” Len, a roofer in London, wants back include his smashed-up “Green Goddess” van, the last three months of his life, his sturdy knuckles, his favourite corduroy shirt, his daughter as a baby, and “ah fuck” — later clarified as being his much loved ex-wife, Violet.
This is a mood piece, and the tone is accelerated and desperate, albeit with moments of self-deprecating humour. As a slice of life, it works. But something escaped me. I read the book again.
This time it seemed to me a philosophical tract, with its meditations on what a “thing” is. Len says he misses certain things, and some of these are objects, but the “thing” he misses most of all is his wife — not a thing at all, of course. The question that really underlies the book is how one can grasp hold of intangible experiences without physical bodies or objects. There’s a deep anxiety about what is left of a person after he or she is gone from this world, in the case of a wife, or just out of sight, as in the case of a random woman Len happens to meet. What truly remains beyond “a handful of incomplete memories”?
Len’s frantic search for his ex-wife’s ruby wedding ring at the house of her current partner is an exercise in futility, not just because he doesn’t find it — all he locates is her vodka — but also because even if he did, the ring wouldn’t bring his wife any closer. The relationship ended years ago, in any case. What does he hope to achieve now?
Only on the third read did I grasp how deeply unreliable the story is. Something shifts in and out of focus. The thing sought is both there and not there. Violet is described as the love of his life and then as a bad mother to his affectionate but suspicious daughter. The new man, Ivan, comes off as cruelly cold but also beautifully supportive. The phosphorescent waver of descriptions becomes even more wobbly as Len swills vodka. The plot grows tipsy. Violet comes back at the end in a fantastic, sensual moment, along with the perfectly intact “Green Goddess” van and the gleaming ruby ring.
Len’s behaviour is outwardly condemnable — he breaks into a shed, crashes a funeral while drunk, etc — but the brisk charming voice of the omnipotent narrator makes him seem forgivable, if not entirely likeable. I wonder if the book would have been stronger in the first person, to amplify the sense of strangeness and the questionable credibility of events. There’s no good reason that Len is being described from the outside. What is the perception that is filtering everything? Our man in London comes to seem just another thing, a character to be manipulated by an author with a charismatic knack for words. He becomes an object, perhaps ultimately the “One Thing” of the title.
On closing One Thing, the entire world seems to shimmer at the edges. - Jessica Sequeira
https://www.berfrois.com/2019/06/jessica-sequeira-xanthi-barker/

On the morning that I pulled the mirror down on my head and should have been knocked unconscious but instead remained awake to witness a thousand shattering shards of myself begin to eat into the naked skin of my stomach and legs, I thought, you know what, maybe it’s time I was leaving.

I’d screamed, of course, and he’d come running, but in the sliver-hop of his lazy nudity I’d read reluctance and finally jerked awake (and not from a dream but from the shock-numb of it), to feel at once the pain that was not nothing but immense.

Paradoxical by Xanthi Barker

Xanthi Barker’s story Paradoxical was highly commended for the Life Writing Prize 2018. Here she tells us about the story, writing, and the personal benefits it brings her.

I was trying to get to the bottom of a feeling I had about what it means for someone close to you to be dead, a realisation that it wasn’t anything like the gulf of monotone sadness I’d imagined, more like being dropped into another world. For months after my dad died I heard him laughing, like he was hiding in the corner of the room. Perhaps I was a typical case at the denial stage of grief, but I felt very clearly that it was everybody else who was in denial about the nature of death. I felt closer to my dad than I had for most of my life. Yet recognising this meant acknowledging that I might have felt differently if he hadn’t been an absent father.
Because of the way our relationship was, nothing much changed in my life after he died. He’d always been a voice in my head, a man made of emails, and he still was. I didn’t know what I’d lost. For the first six months it seemed very likely he would call me up and want to see me. The last words he said to me, two nights before he died were “We’ll have a meeting!” It was the kind of grandiose way he made arrangements. He had drunk a lot of wine and was necking morphine from the bottle, having just given a reading of his poetry. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to turn up. It just seemed like the kind of thing he would do. At the same time I was furious with him for leaving, doubly furious that he’d done it not once but twice. It was partly an attack on him to say that nothing had changed. Writing this piece I was trying to think about that ambivalence, to put that anger and resentment at the centre of the love I felt for him, and see what it all added up to. Apart from that, I think I really believed I could prove he wasn’t dead. In fact, now that it’s written, I don’t have the same conviction. My feelings have shifted. He still stands at bus stops, waving at me, regardless.
There’s something inherently lonely in being a person, secluded inside your own head. Literature is one of the ways we get to know what it’s like to be someone else. Life writing has the further intimacy of being without disguise. It feels illicit. It breaks that boundary, so that it’s possible to come into contact with much more of the other than is usually possible. - https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/xanthi-barker-on-paradoxical/




And Yet (story)