A review by declaired
The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki
5.0
Recommended by Olivia! We were chatting about books and she mentioned one of Saki's short stories was one of those Vital Pieces of Literature in her life, and I'm a sucker for vitality. (That one being "Sredni Vashtar," a delight.)
Saki's stories are mostly political or social satire of a certain era of British mainland concerns; they are Quite Funny, both in snarky dialogue and in the punchlines of the story, usually, and a typical narrator is the rather self-involved but clever and amusing Clovis. Milne puts it as "the cruelty of youth," which works as well as anything- absurdities and faith rewarded and skewerings of language and blowhards.
Sometimes, though, there are sprinkled within the typical fare of satiric social puncturings, a few far more straightforward horror stories. I quite enjoyed those creepy diversions, such as "Hounds of Fate" and "The Peace of Mowsle Barton."
The language, I keep hammering on about, but "the talking-out of tarrington" has the most luscious description of a peach and a summer afternoon as to make a winter-stranded woman weep.
A note: stories being a product of a people and a time, this collection (the one I have published by Xist, with an intro by AA Milne, and is available on hoopla) drops the n-word casually once (in The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope), and is as snarky about women's suffrage as it is about anything else; caveat lector, but I enjoyed the vast majority of the stories quite a bit.
Saki's stories are mostly political or social satire of a certain era of British mainland concerns; they are Quite Funny, both in snarky dialogue and in the punchlines of the story, usually, and a typical narrator is the rather self-involved but clever and amusing Clovis. Milne puts it as "the cruelty of youth," which works as well as anything- absurdities and faith rewarded and skewerings of language and blowhards.
Sometimes, though, there are sprinkled within the typical fare of satiric social puncturings, a few far more straightforward horror stories. I quite enjoyed those creepy diversions, such as "Hounds of Fate" and "The Peace of Mowsle Barton."
The language, I keep hammering on about, but "the talking-out of tarrington" has the most luscious description of a peach and a summer afternoon as to make a winter-stranded woman weep.
A note: stories being a product of a people and a time, this collection (the one I have published by Xist, with an intro by AA Milne, and is available on hoopla) drops the n-word casually once (in The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope), and is as snarky about women's suffrage as it is about anything else; caveat lector, but I enjoyed the vast majority of the stories quite a bit.