FORTY STORIES by Donald Barthelme
I first heard of Donald Barthelme only recently, and I can’t now remember what the context was; whatever it was, I was sufficiently intrigued that I tracked down the library’s copy of Forty Stories and read a few, as a sample. I was impressed enough to read the rest.
Barthelme’s short stories are really short; there are a handful in this collection that approach the dozen-page mark, but most are in the 4-6 page range. And they’re all over the map in terms of subject matter and style: some are fairly “realistic” snapshots of moments in someone’s life, and some are like the most ludicrous dream you ever had, and some are weirder than that.
They were, on the whole, amazing. I love experimental writing (and film), but it can get old if done poorly, or too self-consciously, or for too long. There was only one of the stories in this collection that was unreadable: “Great Days,” which was 11 pages of non sequiters. Another came close: “The Sentence,” which was one long run-on, that didn’t even have a period at the end, but the content triumphed over the somewhat annoying device.
Most of them, though, left me slack-jawed in amazement that he’d not only gotten away with the absurd but done it well. The story about the wounded torero, with the ringing bull at the end? It gets weirder with every word. The story about Bluebeard’s seventh wife? It ends with a room full of zebra carcasses. In another story, he has Goethe say things like: “Actors are the Scotch weevils in the salt pork of honest effort.” What the hell does that even mean? He has Paul Klee as an engineer-private who loses a plane somewhere in Germany during WWI. He has St. Anthony living in the suburbs, before he’s run out of town. He has a group of friends planning a party for one of their number, at which they hang him for “going too far.”
They aren’t all so absurd, but even those which seem to describe ordinary life are generally a least a little off-kilter. I can only think of two that were basically straightforward, and they happened to be the two depressing ones.
This is definitely a book worth owning; it’s the kind of book one can pull off the shelf, read a few stories, and put back, having injected a dose of the surreal into one’s day.
June 5th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
[…] “Did they just do that? Yes, they did, and it was awesome” moments (like I did reading Barthelme’s short fiction). Moore and Gibbons are both aware of the possibilities and limitations of the medium, and do […]