FICTION

WHEN A MONKEY SPEAKS and Other Stories from Australia by Damian Sharp (HarperCollins West: $15; 213 pp.). Quirkiness is a positive attribute in fiction, highlighting the multifarious, idiosyncratic ways in which writers, readers and characters view the world. The oddness permeating “When the Monkey Speaks” is only intermittently effective, however, for some of the stories collected here are too peculiar to make sense, Damian Sharp’s evocative writing and scene-setting not always enough to overcome sketchy, seemingly pointless narrative. Sharp is at his best when writing about physical challenges, perhaps because living in the Australian outback, where he spent a lot of time, requires such strength. In “Carter’s Creek,” a man sets out to swim the length of the 2,000-mile Murray River; in “The Defeat of Big Flo,” a stranger arrives in a shanty town and vanquishes a frighteningly powerful aboriginal woman; in “Boxing,” an angry young man attempts to dissipate his aimless energy by volunteering to fight an aborigine at a carnival. Sharp, a native Australian now living in the San Francisco area, has certainly captured what he calls at one point “that heat-soaked inertia, that state of half-dreaming, that basic bedrock Australian indifference to everything,” but over the course of 11 stories this virtual apathy grows tiresome.