Tag: 20th century fiction

short stories, Twentieth-Century Women Writers

Oh, dear: On Lydia Davis’ Collected Stories

Lydia Davis book cover Collected Stories

If you’re masochistically inclined, and enjoy soulless stories, lacking heat, heart and blood, then ohhh boy, is this collection for you. Thought not. It’s as if a writer of product manuals, structural engineering reports or business continuity plans decided to turn to fiction, and this book is the result. Yay.

Innumerable times Davis uses the continuous present tense – first person, second and third – but, rather than draw you into the story and character’s viewpoint, you soon end up thinking – again and again – that these stories are purely exercises in technique, in the mechanics of storytelling. A clever mind writing them with a Montblanc fountain pen, to amuse herself while occasionally genteelly sipping a china cup of Earl Grey tea, and a madeleine with tiny finger pointed up. Clever in the same way some people whizz through and complete a daily newspaper crossword and then think no more of it.

Sadly, I can’t think of a single story in this collected edition that made me marvel at the writing either for its virtuosity or for its characters. Depressingly, however, I can think of far too many that irritate for their lack of life and feelings, and absence of any real care or consideration for the albeit rice paper-thin characters.

Probably the most disappointing, irritating, pretentious, insipid, tedious, painful and banal short story collection I’ve ever read by an author so adored by the critics.

abuse of women, books, horror, serial killer, strange / unusual

On Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God: Purple prose in hindrance of its master

Brilliant for its Appalachian Tennessee vernacular, its compelling country characters, their lives dessicated, limited, dull, as well as for the vivid impressions of a landscape of backwoods, mountains, and caves afflicted by the harsh temperament of weather. And, most of all – for conveying the rapidly deteriorating, twisted impulses of a hypothalamus-ordered mind in the shape of Lewis Ballard, outcast, bitter, serial killer and necrophiliac.

Um. Maybe not?

Depressingly, it’s also let down by intermittent, obtrusive break-outs of ugly purple prose so bloated with highfalutin phrases they ruin an entire scene and atmosphere McCarthy has otherwise done wonders to portray. Without those terrible moments, this would be a five-star fiction. With them, it’s a three but still worth reading for what it does achieve as an early work by an important writer.

authors, books, Death on the Instalment Plan, fiction, literary classics, Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Celine’s existential nightmare novel on the human condition

To buy with free worldwide delivery, just click on the book image. Nice!

This was Celine‘s second novel after Journey to the End of the Night and is a prequel to it. It focuses on Ferdinand Bardamu‘s (Celine’s fictional alter ego) troubled childhood and youth in Paris.

Reading Celine, you experience his incredibly intense emotional and intellectual understanding of our desperate, existentialist and unresolved – conundrum – human condition.

Celine makes it clear he sees no escape and that humanity – what there is of it – is pathetic, disease-ridden and without hope. The one consolation? To grasp a few moments of joy in a life of poverty and hardship. It is a story that is powerfully told, and you can’t help but be overwhelmed by it.

His raw, unadulterated, yet poetic style of writing – the use of ellipses and hallucinatory scenes mixing with the gutter and destitution – worked powerfully with his themes of desperation and poverty. In the 1930s there was no one with whom to compare him or to match him for the depth, complexity and violent negativity of his impoverished world.

You find yourself being drawn into and compromised by Bardamu’s viewpoint, anger and hatred. You drown with him and his constantly argumentative father and are at a loss to help his exhausted-to-the-bones mother.

You also can’t forget Celine’s deep and abiding compassion and that he later qualified and practiced as a doctor who worked only in the poorest, most deprived neighbourhoods of Paris (about which he writes so effectively in Journey to the End of Night). Nor, too, the fact that he was himself persona non grata before and after his “profession”; and you are further troubled by knowing that, besides, he lost his reputation as a writer – shunned by the literati of Paris – in his own lifetime because of his fascistic views (even though it’s important to note that in practising his medicine, he attended to everybody, irrespective of whether the person was Jewish or otherwise).

And while Celine and Bardamu both hated “humanity”, both were always specific, explicit and thankful for those few people that made a difference in their lives, including the wonderful characters of certain women, who plied the trade of prostitution, Violette, Lola (in Journey), and others.

It is a compelling novel, and in some ways is even darker and more troubling than his first, and most famous novel. If you come to this having been impressed by Journey, you will be all the more so when you finish reading this prequel.