I could not help but think of James Salter and his heralded ability to break a reader’s heart with a single sentence. The conclusion of the story is shocking and leaves a lasting impression. The story keeps peeling itself back, moving into stranger and more surreal territory, as the two strangers bond while discussing notions of suicide, death, selfishness, and the difficulty of living until words finally fail them. After the heartbreak of the first story, one that seems antiquated and yet timeless, we are plunged into the contemporary urban world of the second story, “Leaper.” One of the collection’s strongest tales, it traces the connection that forms between two women after they pass a subway station in which a person has jumped to his/her death. What makes this collection so special and readable is its versatility. The brevity and simplicity of the story provoke a powerful response in the reader. Diski’s knowledge of philosophy, psychology, and feminism is woven seamlessly into the princess’s transformation from purity and contentment to self- consciousness and insatiable longing, a process that many women can relate to. By the end, this paradigm ends up erasing her and trapping her, literally, in an image of herself. She exists there in a state of perpetual peace, not realizing what she is missing outside, while she is slowly conditioned by her suitors to see the world in terms of fragmentation and attachment.

The lead story, “The Vanishing Princess or The Origin of Cubism,” is the allegorical tale of a princess locked in a tower. Almost all of these stories, once started, are impossible to put down. Diski’s ability to explore and consequently explode stereotypes of femininity, carnality, desire, marriage, and innocence lost seemingly has no bounds. Originally published in 1995 and now reissued a year after the author’s death, it’s a slim volume, but it demonstrates the range of her astonishing talent and her refined, precise, jewel-like prose. THE VANISHING PRINCESS, acclaimed British writer Jenny Diski’s sole collection of short fiction, keeps the reader off balance in the most pleasant and unpredictable of ways.

Jenny diski the vanishing princess