A Common Reader is . . . . . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England. It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and books and currently receives over 5000 unique visitors each month. So far 213 book reviews have been published.
I am an Amazon top 25 reviewer. My Amazon reviews can be found here.
To read more about me see my About page.
Recommended independent publishers
|
My only knowledge of Lydia Davis, before coming to The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, is that she was the translator of Marcel Proust’s Swanns Way, in the Penguin edition which adorns my shelves – and its one of the six volumes of Remembrance of Things Past which I’ve actually read (only three to go).
However, I have now learned more about her from her Wikipedia entry and also from an interview with her in The Guardian on 4 August.
This is a lovely book, nice and thick (733 pages of text), and with countless short pieces which you can dip and out of. For while many of the stories are a few pages long, quite a few of them are just a paragraph or two, or even just a few lines, expressing depth with concision as with a Japanese Haiku.
The stories cover a vast range of subjects and it would be impossible to even begin to categorise them. A few samples might cover short portraits of a relationship, jury service, motorcycling, journeys, music and just about anything else you’d like to think of – its probably somewhere in there.
This is one of the few reviews when I can actually quote a whole story as an example of the authors work. This one is called simply “Love” -
A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years. It was not enough for her to brush his coats, wipe his inkwell, finger his ivory comb: she had to build her house over his grave and sit with him night after night in the damp cellar
Continue reading Review – The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Share on Facebook 
Share on Facebook
This is the 200th full-length review I’ve published on A Common Reader. A sort of milestone. . .
I have been subscribing to Granta magazine for quite a few years now and enjoy its quality writing on a vast range of subjects. Its a well-produced journal, not the sort of thing you want to throw away, and I find with most editions that there are one or two articles which still in my mind and make me want to come back to them, often years later. Articles (both fiction and factual) are written by a wide range of writers, including such notables Jonathan Raban, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, Lionel Shriver, Paul Auster, Elaine Showalter and countless others.
Every so often a book comes your way which is satisfying in many different ways. In Are We Related? The New Granta Book of the Family the writing is excellent and the variety of pieces is sufficiently wide that every one comes as a surprise when you read it. The physicality of the book is pleasing – it feels big and substantial, the typeface and layout work well. Its a book you can dip in and out of and as you read it, you know its going to remain on your shelf to be dipped in and out of for years to come.
Liz Jobey (Associated Editor of Granta) has selected 27 pieces about the family, taken from Granta magazines from 1995 to the present day, all of which, whether fiction of non-fiction, explore the complexity of family relationships and the stresses and strains they generate (and occasional joys).
Continue reading Review – Are We Related? Granta Books
Share on Facebook
Share on Facebook
 The Dalkey Archive Press is a unique enterprise, being a publisher of literary fiction that is both independent and non-profit making. This gives them the freedom to publish a unique range of title which, to quote the website, “in some way or another, upsets the apple cart, that they work against what is expected, that they in some way challenge received notions, whether those are literary, social or political”.
Best European Fiction 2010 is a case in point, being a fascinating collection of short fiction which very much pushed the boundaries of this reader at least, and much to his reading pleasure.
The idea is simple, but executing it must have been a huge exercise:
- take one author from every European nation and publish a short work from them all,
- provide a biography of each author, together with a personal statement,
- provide a comprehensive list of online literary resources for each of the nations represented.
This bookblog, A Common Reader, tends to specialise in European literature in translation, but even I had never read anything before from the lesser known countries like Slovenia, Serbia and Albania. And the effect of reading these 35 or so stories was to make me want more from quite a number of these previously unknown authors. The quality of the writing is high throughout the book and the range of topics is vast. There are very few stories in the book which don’t surprise in one way or another. Continue reading Review: Best European Fiction 2010 – Editor, Aleksandar Hemon
Share on Facebook
Share on Facebook
 I am impressed with the new Shirley Jackson collection which has been published by Penguin Modern Classics, especially the book of short stories, The Lottery, but also the novels, We Have Always Lived in The Castle and The Haunting of Hill House.
American writer Shirley Jackson wrote in the middle of the last century and was noted for unsettling story lines, and writers such as Donna Tart and Stephen King are reported to have been influenced by her. King’s book, Salem’s Lot, even opens with a quotation from Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
Jackson is not necessarily a “literary” writer as such, but like Stephen King, is an extremely good story teller whose writings always captured the imagination. Perhaps her best known story is The Lottery, in which the population of a small town are gathered in the main square on a summer’s day in June to witness the drawing of a lottery which will select one of their number for a very special purpose. It is the sheer banality of the scene which strikes the reader. People greeting each other as they gather together, children playing, men speaking of “planting, tractors and taxes”. This is small town America at its most homely. Continue reading Review: The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson
Share on Facebook
Share on Facebook
 I came to read Gregor Von Rezzori through reading an article, Chronicle of Loss, by John de Falbe in Slightly Foxed magazine no. 15. As a book reviewer, it is easy to concentrate on new books to the exclusion of many excellent novels which are fast-fading from public gaze. Who for example reads Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene or Daphne du Maurier these days? Slightly Foxed magazine publishes articles about writers from the last 100 years or so and reminds its readers of so many 20th century gems that the subscription seems well worth-while.
Gregor von Rezzori is a deeply reflective writer. He writes what might be called memoir-based fiction, but he is not just interested in his stories, but wants to bring out the meaning behind them. His mind is hugely inventive and the reader gets the impression of someone who can see all points of view and incorporate them into his stories. He seldom allows his characters to get away with expressing their prejudices and long-held opinions but always sets them in juxtaposition with someone holding an opposing view, or else shows the absurbity of their statements by setting them in a context of personal decline and ultimate failure.
A true European, Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy, Ukraine) towards the end of the Austro Hungarian Empire. His home town was absorbed into the Romanian Kingdom and after World War 1, Rezzori studied in Vienna and other European cities, settling eventually in Bucharest until 1938 when as a German speaking Romanian he was compelled to move to Berlin. After the war he earned his living as an author, a screen-play writer and an actor moving around Italy, France and the USA, eventually settling in Tuscany. Continue reading Review: Memoirs of an Anti-Semite – Gregor von Rezzori
Share on Facebook
Share on Facebook
 According to the Toby Press website, Hartmut Lange was born in Berlin in 1937 and is well-known in Germany as a contemporary novelist and playwright. He has been awarded numerous literary prizes.
Missing Persons contains three longish short stories, all in one way or another covering the theme of disconnection: a sense that all is not quite right, with unresolved questions left hanging in the air.
In The Poster, we meet Henninger, a German bank director, who has travelled to Vienna for business purposes. He sees a list of missing persons on a pillar and takes a pen and scrawls his own name on it, seemingly to proclaim to the world that he is not as he appears to be. The time comes for him to return to his office in Berlin, but while waiting for his flight at the airport, “it occurs to him that it might be possible for him to exchange his ticket to Berlin for a flight to Venice”. And so his adventures begin.
As with all acts of spontaneous rebellion, Henninger worries about the effects of his absence back home. He tries to send a telegram to his office, but realises the impossibility of making an adequate explanation for his whim and tears up the telegram form.
Continue reading Review: Missing Persons – Hartmut Lange
Share on Facebook
Share on Facebook
 I was pleased when I read David Means’ Assorted Fire Events to discover a set of short stories which are just that – stories. Many contemporary short-story writers like to write stories which are more “episodes” rather than finished works in themselves . With no scene-setting or character development, they drop you into the middle of some traumatic or enigmatic event, leaving the reader to wonder, “what was all that about”.
But David Means writes beginnings, middles and ends. These are almost mini-novellas, complete in themselves, and to this reviewer at least, seem to be in the great tradition of American short-story writers whose notable members include F Scott Fitzgerald and Eudora Welty. This on the other hand may be its (ever so slight) weakness. I have a suspicion after having read the book, that I’d have felt happier if it had been written about 15 to 20 years ago: there is a slight absence of modernity about it, and some of the themes are more Revolutionary Road than American Beauty.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of Richard Ford (in his book The Sportswriter) and his other books about the suburban male. In the story “What They Did”, a young American couple buy a new house on a sparse and bleak new estate, where the builders have concreted over a stream in the back garden and turfed over it. The young wife is pregnant with her first child, and when the pathetic cost-cutting which went into the work fails as it must, tragedy happens. David Means perfectly captures the spirit of the last twenty years, in which houses were thrown up by speculative builders whose concept of “quality” was based more on satisfying the share holders than providing products worth buying.
Continue reading Review: Assorted Fire Events – David Means
Share on Facebook
Share on Facebook
 When I bought this book, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories, I didn’t know that the title story has now been turned into a film starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. I wondered why Penguin had just published it, and one thing for sure, if it had been a film tie-in book with photographs of the leads on the cover, I wouldn’t have bought it (I avoid tie-ins because I like to create my own mind-pictures of the characters rather than having them drawn for me before I’ve even started to read the book – think Far From the Madding Crown and Alan Bates and Julie Christie!).
I’d never read Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories before and this seemed as good an introduction as any. I was not disappointed: the stories are witty and complex with a huge amount of atmosphere from early 20th century America.
The title story, Benjamin Button, is an imaginative fable, in which the “baby” is born a full grown man and during the course of the next 70 years grows younger and younger until he ends his life as a baby. I am not quite sure what the purpose of the story is other than as a curiosity, but it is well done and Scott Fitzgerald dreams up some amusing scenarios. Button’s father goes to see the new child in the maternity hospital and sees,
. . . an old man apparently about 70 years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-coloured beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window.
Mr Button Senior buys his new son a rattle and insists that he plays with it, whereupon,
. . . the old man took it with a weary expression and could be heard jingling it obediently at intervals throughout the day.
Lead soldiers, toy trains and soft toys failed to arouse Benjamin’s interest, although he seemed to have a predilection for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and also for his father’s dark Havana cigars.
Continue reading Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – F Scott Fitzgerald
Share on Facebook
Share on Facebook
 I read quite a lot of short stories and find they tend to come in two categories. Some are like short novellas, complete stories with a beginning, middle and ending, and well-developed characters. The classical short-story tends to be like this whether written by Chekov, de Maupassant, Tolstoy or countless others. Other writers seems to write enigmatic fragments or word-pictures, which sometimes seem more like a cryptic puzzle than a story, as though the author wants to tease the readers and provoke them to fill in the gaps for themselves.
Having recently written a bit of a eulogy about Gerard Woodward and his Jones family trilogy, I came to his new book of short stories, Caravan Thieves, with keen anticipation, and found the book firmly in the second of my categories above, the fragmented episode, the snap-shot of a life and sometimes the puzzle too.
I read the first story, the eponymous Caravan Thieves with interest – a caravaning couple, Phil and Joyce wake in their caravan one morning to find their caravan has been teleported (airlifted?) into the middle of a field of yellow rape. There are no tracks to the van through the field and their bewilderment is complete. They set off to walk through the field and the Phil’s thoughts turn to raping his wife (funnily enough, neither of the two can remember the name of the bright yellow plant).
Continue reading Review: Caravan Thieves – Gerard Woodward
Share on Facebook
Share on Facebook
 It was interesting to read in Human Smoke, the subject of my earlier review, references to Stefan Zweig, and his opposition to the Nazi regime. Zweig became convinced that Nazi domination of Europe was inevitable and would lead to the extinguishing of all he held dear, leading to his death by suicide, together with his wife, in 1942.
Zweig was a fine writer in the classical condition. His masterpiece, Beware of Pity, describes how an almost Dostoevskian failure to act decisively can create massive psychological conflicts which ultimately lead to disaster. His collections of short stories show a talent for the genre equalling Chekov and de Maupassant. One can only regret the lack of further writings from his later years due to his premature end.
This collection of four stories, reflects the imminent tragedy of Zweig’s life, for they all end in a suicide, causing the reader to wonder how far Zweig had conditioned himself to the thought of death by his own hand in the years leading up to his own demise. In reading this I was reminded of W G Sebald’s book The Emigrants, in which all four of his characters also take their own lives.
The stories are rich with understanding of people under pressure. Zweig was a master of describing the agonies of people beset by a burning conscience, the pain of a thwarted desire to return to loved ones, the agony of unrequited love. His characters are people who feel things more deeply than most, who are unable to shrug off emotional pressure or to find escape in diversionary activities. They live on the existential edge of their mental suffering and find no balm in the consolation of friendship or the beauties of nature. The stories serve as a reminder that tragedy can strike anyone, however settled, particularly those who step outside their day to day lives, whether voluntarily, in seeking a better life for themselves, or involuntarily through the effects of war or social disruption.
Continue reading Review: Amok and Other Stories – Stefan Zweig
Share on Facebook
Share on Facebook
|
Subscribe in Google Reader:  This work is copyright and may not be republished without permission. I am generous with my re-use permissions but please email meFIRST.
I am happy to recommend:
 
|
Recent Comments