Pumping Up Napoleon: and Other Stories

This is an assured first collection of fifteen short stories, with an offbeat take on human relationships. “Offbeat” includes growing your own four-foot son for organ transplants, dog massage and a university lecturer’s touching relationship with a resurrected Napoleon Bonaparte. Donovan’s prose style is deceptively direct, even tongue-in-cheek, making the most bizarre, horrific or amusing situations sound everyday. She achieves a great deal of humour, but also wry smiles, sadness and empathy. Her subject matter is diverse and unexpected, offering unlikely takes on universal themes such as love, growing up, death and art, in settings ranging from the deeply domestic to intergalactic space travel. In a manner reminiscent of a Kate Atkinson short story, she skips over boundaries between the real and imagined as if they do not exist – using the freedom created to focus the reader’s attention exactly where she wants it.
Some stories explore the lives of single women, tentatively reaching out for romance they may or may not want: farcically in “The New Adventures of Andromeda” (Perseus is badly late and then wants to reschedule) and more tenderly in “The Love I Carry” and “The Dancing King”. Death is a recurring theme, whether macabre, bitterly funny (“Burying Dad”), sad or peacefully hilarious (“The Transit of Moira”). But the author’s light touch allows a darker strand to surface repeatedly – dislocated, lonely lives, out of sync with their surroundings – set alongside the oddity and tenderness of human relationships. Maria Donovan’s writing is mature and structured. Even her titles (“My Cousin’s Breasts”) or first sentences (“When she hears she is going to die soon, Mother decides to hold a party.”) instantly command attention. Her understated style and extremely well-crafted stories constantly surprise and engage, producing a fine, hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking collection.