Great collection of short stories. Most of them are around 15 pages long, which sounds like a lame reason to like something but actually made them perfect for bedtime reading. They are economically told and Lasdun has a great skill for releasing unexpected information quietly. For the most part they are not heavy on plot points but through small happenings you see truth of character. His observations really chimed with me. Here's a line from the last story in the collection, 'Caterpillars', about Caitlin's relationship with the bullish Craig: 'But he had engulfed her somehow; taken up residence in her imagination like some large, dense, intractable problem that had been given her to solve.' I'll be buying something else by Lasdun soon. “But knowing that in twenty minutes you were going to legitimately succumb to anxiety was not very different from succumbing to it right now” (11).“Then it was the light itself one became aware of, rather than the things in it” (12).“She had changed out of the tissuey top into a sleeveless robe of flowing peach-colored linen, but Joseph had recognized her at once as the victor in the incident with the lobsters” (14).“The ideal state of affairs, things seemed to imply, was a continual orgy. If you weren’t desirable, then dye your hair, spend the day in a tanning salon, sign up at one of these gyms that flaunted their robotic, Lycra-clad members at passersby through vast street-level windows. Turn the inside of your head into your own private rock stadium…The steady convergence of mainstream commerce with what had once been marginal or underground was peculiarly dismaying. In the past, when you grew sick of one of these worlds, you could shift, mentally, into the other, but now they had consolidated, and there was nowhere to escape. The whole world, as he had read somewhere, was an underworld. If you described New York to even a liberal-minded person of fifty years ago, he would tell you the apocalypse must have come… “But in the thick of these thoughts a sudden bewilderment seized him. Where did they come from? What was the basis, within him, for this indignation? On what rock of conviction was it founded? If you didn’t believe in God or the soul or the hereafter, then what was a human being if not merely living meat? And if that was so, then surely it was natural to want to be healthy, nubile, muscular, lusty…Better that than tainted meat, as he had become!” (58-59).“Mrs. Knowles looked at him for a moment, saying nothing, but leaving him in no doubt that he had humiliated himself” (70).“Privately, I had observed the events in the countries beyond what had once been the Iron Curtain with mixed feelings; it had been strangely unsettling to find myself somehow vindicated in the caution, the capacity for endless equivocation, the final attachment to comfort and prosperity that had delivered me to where I was today. It had felt like getting away with a crime, on the grounds that the crime had suddenly been made legal. ‘It’s all right,’ history had seemed to whisper complicitly in my ear, ‘you have nothing to be ashamed of…’ The peculiar economy of my conscience had apparently come to depend on the supposition of a universe violently opposed to my own” (125-126).“ ‘As far as I can see, a nation is just an expression of the human inability to give a shit about the life or death of other humans beyond a fixed limit. Or put the other way round, it’s a way of organizing and instituting people’s apparently limitless desire to grind their heels in other people’s faces’” (127-128). “The woman’s round, haggard face seemed to dilate in the gray air as though swelling on her own obscurely affronted rectitude” (179).“Vindictiveness was rare in June’s experience, but she wasn’t after all, a complete stranger to it. She knew well the feeling of luxuriant, almost voluptuous destructiveness it released, over and above any justified punitive function it might serve” (179).“He spread the menu before him like a general’s map, plotting his debauch on our inexperienced palates” (201).“Since being with Craig, she had found that I was necessary to guard, rather carefully, what remained of her affection for her own species” (215).
What do You think about Comincia A Far Male (2011)?
Short stories that are short but very insightful.
—iyah0201
