Jonathan Francis Finch

Love and Other Afflictions Jonathan Francis Finch

Literary short stories about love, madness, delusion, romance, loneliness, isolation, science, metamorphosis, and more. The settings for these short stories are England, Ireland and Italy. The protagonists are generally outsiders who are trying to regain or maintain mental stability without much success. There is first person narrative and third person, too. The narrator is occasionally omniscient. The stories show the influences of Gogol, Kafka, and Dostoevsky as well as Mansfield and Beckett. The tone is serious overall but with some humour. The collection will appeal to readers with classical tastes in short fiction and to those of a serious literary appetite. Some of the stories in the collection were chosen for publication by British literary magazines. The characters are similar in that they are mainly obsessional-compulsive types with existential problems who attempt to deal with their reality in the oddest ways possible. For example, a madman who wants to be a great writer takes to alcohol and vandalism. A scribbler follows his master's orders and writes a tale similar to an abortion. A frustrated, young man torments a girl who likes him, then goes and vandalises the office where he works. A man named He provokes outsiders and barely escapes a brawl. Some characters meet a violent end while others suffer interminably because of their faults and choices. There are confrontations and clashes galore, so much so that the depicted world is as bleak as "The Waste Land" but the collection has a saving grace in that its irony helps induce the reader to detach himself and see the collection as a warped but wryly entertaining vision of humanity's eternal problems which centre around aversion, delusion and greed.