I really loved these Cheever stories from the 50s set in his beloved/behated suburbia but it was strange, mostly he seemed to throw away the endings. I really loved these Cheever stories from the 50s set in his beloved/behated suburbia but it was strange, mostly he seemed to throw away the endings. Each time I wanted a few pages more! ...more
Cathal, the averagely nasty, averagely appalling jerk in this book, moans constantly about how much this thing or that thing cost him – for example whCathal, the averagely nasty, averagely appalling jerk in this book, moans constantly about how much this thing or that thing cost him – for example when the jeweller presents a bill for the adjustment of the engagement ring he bought for his lovely bride-to-be, so that they have a row about it. (“Do you think I’m made of money?”) Alas, the spirit of Cathal was surely somewhere in the room when this tiny book plopped through the letterbox. Huh, 47 very large font pages and that’s it? I muttered. This better be real good!
Well, it was pretty good but it was a short story. A nice bitter misogynyskewering short story, right up my street....more
The young Ray Bradbury was obsessed with children and death, and when he does write about adults they are often simpleminded, childlike weirdos. (You The young Ray Bradbury was obsessed with children and death, and when he does write about adults they are often simpleminded, childlike weirdos. (You can hear the influence of Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson on every page.) When he inevitably combines children and death together you get the best story here, “The Man Upstairs”, where this kid (he’s around 10 years old like in all RB stories) lives in a house where they rent a spare room to a strange guy, and the kid conceives the notion that this tenant is not human, and so why, just naturally, the kid takes a long kitchen knife and visits the tenant and proves his point. He disembowels the guy and brings bits of what he finds back downstairs :
”Grandma, what’s this?” She glanced up, briefly, over her glasses. “I don’t know.” It was square, like a box, and elastic. It was bright orange in color. It had four square tubes, colored blue, attached to it. It smelled funny.
I like the casual way the ordinary American kid turns into a murderer just because he thought there was something wrong with that guy.
The other freaky story here is “The Handler”, in which a mortician gets sneered at and belittled continually by the people of the town and so naturally gets his revenge on them after they die, by doing all kinds of nasty stuff to their bodies. In the light of the (UK) David Fuller case from last year, and of course, the Jimmy Savile scandal, this story has many more horrific reverberations to it than Ray Bradbury intended, but what he intended was quite unpleasant enough....more
The story "User" is really stomach-botheringly great and gets a Best Horror award from me, a five star classic, but the rest of this collection for meThe story "User" is really stomach-botheringly great and gets a Best Horror award from me, a five star classic, but the rest of this collection for me was full of too many people or things eating each other. (The things are always carefully not quite described. One had eight legs, could have been a big spider, and another had fur and quills, so maybe an echidna.) I always think modern horror writers should make sure they read a few books by Theodore Sturgeon before they accidently rewrite some of his stories.
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If it was an echidna, it had unusual tastes, and it could talk....more
The characters in these stories are sharper, funnier and more piquant and the situations more deliciously appalling than those found in twenty novels The characters in these stories are sharper, funnier and more piquant and the situations more deliciously appalling than those found in twenty novels I was misled by skilfully placed reviews entirely made of vile misleading hype into reading. William Trevor has effortlessly vaulted into the much sought-after Favourite Short Story Writer position (sorry George Saunders, Number Two is still very high in the charts you know).
So for all readers who like the miniature pleasures of the perfectly carved short story, this guy is the guy to try.
(I wish I had the edition with the fabulous swinging London cover.)...more
What a shame. Zhu Wen's first collection I Love Dollars was great, some real vitriol and major aggression in every story, I loved it. This second collWhat a shame. Zhu Wen's first collection I Love Dollars was great, some real vitriol and major aggression in every story, I loved it. This second collection was just not as punchy. Yes, everybody was miserable. But just not miserable enough. I am so unreasonable. ...more
There are some forms of literature that are deader than a thousand dodos. They died after the novel Pied-Pipered away every reader's attention, greedyThere are some forms of literature that are deader than a thousand dodos. They died after the novel Pied-Pipered away every reader's attention, greedy seducer that it is. The deadest I think is the long poem, those book-length epics by Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Wordsworth and the appropriately named Longfellow. Wow, who reads those bad boys now except with the equivalent of a gun at your head? Then there are essays, they used to be snorted up by the well-read, such stuff as "On the Pleasures of Hating" by William Hazlitt or "Secular Knowledge Not a Principal of Action" by John Henry Newman or "My Little Pony" by Dr Samuel Johnson. The third type of writing which used to be rock and roll and now is mostly a grant-aided niche is the short story. There were huge names at one time who were as famous for their short stories as for their novels, and some didn’t write any novels at all. John Cheever, O Henry, Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle, and so on. V S Pritchett was one of them. He was famous for decades. There’s an eyewatering blurb by no less an eminence than Frank Kermode:
He is by such a margin the finest English writer alive that it hardly seems worth saying so
Take that, absolutely everybody else!
But I don’t think many people read this guy any more.
I did struggle with seeing the point of some of these stories but there is one which went straight into the P Bryant Hall of Fame, it’s called “When My Girl Comes Home”. VSP certainly had a flair. (I loved his style more than his actual stories.) Here he is describing one of his characters
He was a short, talkative, heavy man of forty-five with a wet gold tooth and glossy black hair that streamlined back across his head from an arrow point, getting thin in front. His eyes were anxious, overworked and puddled, indeed if you had not known him you would have thought he had had a couple of black eyes that had never got right.
And here he is on the girl who came home (and who they all found to their horror had turned from an ordinary English girl into, well, an adventuress) :
It was disturbing, in a face so anonymous, to see the eyes move, especially since she blinked very little, and if she smiled it was less a smile than an alteration of the two lines at the corner of her lips.
And he can come out with some great one liners :
The war for him was something that spoiled fishing.
I think VSP is essential for anyone wanting a collection of curious snapshots of English life in the mid-20th century and I will certainly get round to reading more of him but, er, not for a while....more
1) She almost has a whole different style for every one of these 12 stories. That was impressive.
2) Two of them will be officially entered into the li1) She almost has a whole different style for every one of these 12 stories. That was impressive.
2) Two of them will be officially entered into the list of My All Time Favourite Short Stories at a ceremony to take place at 4pm this coming Thursday. Refreshments will be provided.
3) It must be admitted that while she is always assured, lyrical, accurate and compassionate, she doesn’t lose much sleep over plots. This will not bother some readers but it might bother you. It kind of a little bit bothered me now and then, but I wouldn't admit that in public.
4) This has nothing to do with the quality of the stories here but Katherine Anne Porter had an interesting life. She eloped at 16, he turned out to be violent so she ran away from that guy at 24 and then was diagnosed with TB and spent two years in a sanatorium but they found it wasn’t TB, it was bronchitis, but anyway at 28 she caught the Spanish flu and nearly became one of the 50 million who died from that; at 30 she got involved with the Mexican leftist revolutionary movement; then age 40 she married another guy and divorced him 8 years later and immediately married another guy who divorced her within three years when he found out she was 20 years older than him, which it seems he had not realised. At age 72 she published her one and only novel Ship of Fools and after 30 years of enormous praise from the critics and miniscule sales (probably exactly the same for all other great short story writers) suddenly she had a HIT and it was made into a movie in 1965 starring Vivian Leigh in her last performance and Simone Signoret – Sidney Kramer directed it – and finally age 90 she died in 1980. A few ups and downs, you might say. I am always much more encouraged to read an author who had a turbulent time of it than one who became an associate professor of comparative literature at age 27 and currently teaches creative writing at Yale....more
On Thursday evening I am in Mindy’s on 54th and 6th as that is where guys go who are enjoying a particular Hungarian beef goulash as it is a place whe On Thursday evening I am in Mindy’s on 54th and 6th as that is where guys go who are enjoying a particular Hungarian beef goulash as it is a place where this may be enjoyed by one and all when into this joint is coming none other than Harry the Horse who is a guy I am known to be associating with from time to time in such matters as liquid merchandise distribution and ducket retail and one thing and another. I give Harry the big hello and he commences to ask what is it I am scribbling in writing in a little notebook I seem to be having in front of me and am so intent upon this matter I am having no inclination to lay my peepers on the chorines who are to be found almost destitute of clothing in Mindy’s at that hour of the night.
I say it is a review of a book by a scribbler called Damon Runyan and Harry is wanting to know which top class publication he may be reading this review in when it is done, not that he is knowing a book review from a bookie’s marker, but he is always a guy to take an interest. So I say it is not for no kind of publication but it is for a website on the internet. So he is asking me what potatoes I will be getting for this and I explain of course no potatoes are involved. I can see he is not connecting with this idea well, and his pan is commencing to froth in a slight way, with eyebrows going all the way up, and he commences to speak in this way
"Why do you be writing any kind of review stuff and not get any potatoes? This is a crime against all hard working guys."
So I explain about how many guys and dolls do exactly this and all this makes for a great amount of jollity amongst the citizens who like to push their beaks into a book from time to time and for these people it is like a day at the races for the likes of Harry the Horse. Then Harry the Horse says like this
"There is no doubt that fun can be had when parties interested in a particular activity will exchange frank views and what not but I am thinking that there is some scratch being made somewhere, and frankly this whole racket sounds like a racket, so may I enquire who is owning this website where you give your reviews and do not get in exchange any potatoes whatsoever?"
So of course I say well this website is owned by that famous other website called Amazon. Even Harry the Horse has heard of that although he disapproves as he prefers to deal strictly in cash transactions in a personal manner, in which on occasion he is having to pull out a large roscoe to complete a deal, as many parties around and about this town can testify to.
So then Harry the Horse is asking one further question which is who is it that is owning this Amazon, so naturally, I say Jeff Bezos, and Harry the Horse is asking who he is, not personally moving in those particular circles, and I am explaining to Harry the Horse that Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world. So Harry the Horse is looking inquiringly into my pan as if he is seeing parakeets perching on the top of my noggin and he is asking me and it is sounding to me like his heart is nearly breaking
"So you and many other citizens who are not being put inside any funny farms are spending your time giving the richest man in the world something for free?”
Then he is getting up from his seat and walking away and muttering and leaving most of his plate of goulash which I am happy to scoff rapidly as who will not like something for free. ...more
There are four stories in this book and disturbingly, two of them are about teenage girls becoming obsessed, besotted, infatuated with inappropriately There are four stories in this book and disturbingly, two of them are about teenage girls becoming obsessed, besotted, infatuated with inappropriately older men. The title track, “Letter from an Unknown Woman”, is early-Pedro-Almodovar melodramatic to say the very least, gothically morbid and full of unacceptable behaviour. Well, what would you call it if (view spoiler)[a 13 year old girl is besotted by a 25 year old man and remains so obsessed that she never gets married, becomes a call girl and meets up with this guy years later, and is hired by him for three straight nights of high intensive physical interconnectivity, he not, of course, recognising her as his shy 13 year old former neighbour, and she, of course, not divulging that she has stalked him for years and is now, in the most lurid of circumstances, living her dream. As we are now in full-on soap opera mode, of course she conceives a child, of course. Now read on! (hide spoiler)]
The other, “The Debt Paid Late”, is gentle, sweet, sad and altogether wonderful. Best long-short-story I have read in an age. Brought tears to the eyes.
Come to think of it, there is a third long-short-story here all about underage sex. Hmmmm. ...more
You might think that a book called Evenings on a Farm Near Dinanka was not a guaranteed bestseller but that’s because you aren’t from 19th century RusYou might think that a book called Evenings on a Farm Near Dinanka was not a guaranteed bestseller but that’s because you aren’t from 19th century Russia. They were gagging for evenings on a farm in 1832 in Moscow so Gogol’s first book made him famous at age 22 and he was on all the chat shows and was seen throwing shapes in all the best night spots. Then he wrote "The Nose" and a bunch of other stuff, he was firing on all cylinders, and then a play The Government Inspector which made all actual government inspectors hate him unto death and he became the right wing press’s favourite hate figure so he legged it to Italy and wrote Dead Souls and "The Overcoat", two more smash hits.
But he had some funny ideas. He thought God had appointed him to improve Russian society by means of satire but then he got writer’s block and thought that God was tired of him writing funny stuff and wanted him to be meaner so his next book was Selected Passages from Correspondence with My Friends (he had such a way with titles) and it turned out that (surprise!) he had become a conservative and was now supporting all the authority types he used to slag off. But this is quite normal, young firebrands always turn into reactionaries, look at Elvis. Anyway everyone hated this new version of Gogol.
By then the God thing had started to ruin Gogol’s brain to the point where it was impossible to tell if he went mad because of religion (the kind that makes you think everything is the work of the Devil), or got his crazy version of religion because he was mad. He wrote Dead Souls 2 : Deader than Ever but then he decided it was evil or something and he burned it up and died age 42.
***
“The Nose” is really something. This is a Monty Python sketch 133 years before Monty Python. A guy wakes up one day and his nose has vanished. He looks for it all over the place, can’t find it, tries to put an advert in the paper asking for information leading to the recapture of the nose, then the nose is seen here and there in the town, all dressed up in fancy clothes. This is far out humour.
“The Overcoat” delivers a gut punch I was not expecting. The first half is forlorn and pathetic and funny too, but then it turns savage and bites the reader in the soft parts. And right at the end Gogol adds a paragraph trashing his story and pointing out all its absurdities. I wasn’t expecting that either.
Note : the very famous 1001 Books You Must Read before the Second Wave of Corona includes "The Nose" but it’s not a book, not a novel, it’s a short story. So if they’re going to list one great short story, what about all the others. 1001 Books editorial policy can drive you slightly crazy. ...more
Richmal Crompton is one of the funniest authors ever, but this delicious collection of eight William stories sometimes casts a melancholy light on theRichmal Crompton is one of the funniest authors ever, but this delicious collection of eight William stories sometimes casts a melancholy light on the way things have gone since 1950 when this book was published.
Every day for the past week William and Ginger had come in to Hadley to glue their noses against the window of the junk shop and gaze in rapture at the penknife.
“Four blades!” murmured William ecstatically.
I would bet that a modern story about kids would probably not feature a scene where two boys look longingly at a knife for sale.
William was fixated on the device on the penknife for getting stones out of horses’ hooves. “That’s not much good without a horse,” said Ginger. “You never know when you’ll get a horse,” said William.
The idea that William and Ginger might be pressured into joining a county lines drug distribution cartel and would be using the four bladed penknife on rival cartel members was not in anyone’s remotest imagination in 1950. In that year boys thought about getting stones out of horses’ hooves, not packets of cocaine.
There’s another story in which William and Ginger are playing along the railway tracks – this is something they do in the normal course of a long summer day. I can remember I did the same. You would put a penny on the track and wait for a train to come and flatten it. Nowadays you’ll find barriers and fences and giant warning notices to dissuade all wannabe penny-flatteners.
Then there’s what you might call The Problem Story called "A Witch in Time". William has an air rifle and unintentionally (I stress) shoots a cat called Hector.
Trembling with apprehension, he approached his old foe and examined him. There was no doubt about it, Hector’s troubles were over.
There follows much humour regarding the disposal of the dead cat, getting mixed up with other similar cats, hypnotised cats, and so forth. So shooting a cat dead is played for laughs. This will I think clash dissonantly on our seventy-years-later sensitivities. It ain’t very woke.
Then there’s the language. Who were these kids in the 50s who read William? They were faced with words like
impecuniosity
and stuff like
Any officious neighbour, meeting him, might demand to know the nature of the strange excrescence beneath his coat.
(It’s the dead cat again.)
Well, jarring 1950s attitudes aside, this collection was a joy to read and I am sorely tempted to read another William, then another, but I am a grownup now, so I really shouldn’t.
Fans of William books will be glad to know that in William the Bold Violet Elizabeth Bott still has a lithp, still is thickth, and still threatens to thcream and thcream until thee ith thick (and she can!) if she doesn’t get her way.
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"Purple with fury, the General advanced on them, brandishing a carrot."...more
Every one of these 14 short stories is filled with a terrible tension – however nice and lovely and polite the white people are, and however smilinglyEvery one of these 14 short stories is filled with a terrible tension – however nice and lovely and polite the white people are, and however smilingly subservient the black people are, you know nothing is going to end well, and it doesn’t, ever. Two of these stories end with ultimate violent strange-fruit horror but most of the others are filled with the poison of the condescending disdainful patronising sweetness of white people to their black servants, the cooks, the maids, the janitors, the musical prodigies taken up and toyed with, the mixed race bastards, the nameless members of that other race the white people know by definition they can boss around and not have to be near if they don’t want to. These stories are doorways into the endless nameless insulting and sneering and belittling and casual truncating of lives of the black people who we might remind ourselves didn’t volunteer to go to America to be insulted and manhandled and raped and thrown out and shortchanged. I wish I’d read this book years ago, it came out in 1934, so I really have no excuse.
This reads very fast because Langston Hughes stands aside and lets his stories tell themselves, he has no need for rhetorical flights or thunderous denunciations of racism, not at all, the most he permits himself is a bitter smile.
A rich white family called the Pembertons have a catastrophe happen in 1919. They had two perfect Negro servants who did everything. And the man was killed in the war, and his wife then up and died of something or other. And they were left with their servants’ young boy on their hands.
”Poor little black fellow,” said Grace Pemberton to her husband and her sister. “In memory of Arnold and Amanda , I think it is our Christian duty to keep it, and raise it up in the way it should go.” Somehow for a long time she called Arnie “it”.
The word gets round about this adoption.
One would think that nobody in the town need ever again do a good deed: that this acceptance of a black boy was quite enough
And
All the grown-up white people made their children be very nice to him, always very nice.
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