V. S. PritchettRecensioni

41 stories from Sor Walter Scott to John Updike

Reynolds Stone was born in 1909 and died in 1979. Perhaps best known for his wood engravings, he was also a painter, designer (with public commissions for stamps and bank notes), and letterer in stone (Sir Winston Churchill's memorial in Westminster Abbey). Pritchett and Stone were close personal friends.

Critique of 46 fiction writers including Americans Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Henry James,
Nathanial West, and S. J. Perelman.½

Currently reading, will update with individual story reviews as I complete them. I was going to do this in the private notes field, but I didn't realize it was character limited until I hit a wall, lol.


THE TWO DROVERS (Sir Walter Scott)
3 stars - I did end up liking it somewhat, but it was very hard to get into at the start.

THE BIRTHMARK (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
2 stars - Look, I get what he's doing in this story and the Message Behind It, but I just couldn't find either character likable, though I did feel very sorry for Georgiana. Also I just kind of don't like Hawthorne that much so maybe I'm biased.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (Edgar Allan Poe)
5 stars - Love Poe, love this story. Definitely did not pick up the implications about the Usher family when I last read this probably more than a decade ago so that was certainly a shocker.

Too old sexist-wise & print size,

I DIDN'T LIKE THE EARLY STORIES BUT ENJOYED THEM AS I WENT ALONG,

These stories were fairly bland and mediocre. I don't understand why the literary critics on the cover and back seemed to goad this forward with so much respect and admiration. There was not much to interest me in these stories and none of them really stood out. They weren't bad, per se, but they definitely were not worth mentioning.

1 star.

An obsessive compulsive genius was our poor Balzac. Pritchett is a fine biographer of this tremendously energised chronicler of French society in the years following Napoleon's defeat. Well researched, plenty of illustrations and blessed with V.S. Pritchett's effortless prose.

A nice surprise of a writer on my peripheral radar with attitude and a cold eye.

A well imagined novel set in Brazil, where a son goes on a quest to discover a father who disappeared seventeen years previously. The three members of the expedition are so well drawn in their rivalry, and in their relation to Lucy, a young woman who is significant to all three.
The forest, rivers and natural obstacles are expertly given life in this book; praiseworthy in Pritchett, who imagined his setting before he visited it later in life.
The narrative is gripping and the action reliably done.

I have already read seven of these short stories - all of them are fantastic and represent many of the authors at the height of their storytelling power...[in progress]

Memorable memories. A man for seasons that we can only listen in on from afar. Excellent.

Years ago I read Pritchett's Collected Stories, which I loved although I don't usually "get" short stories. I hadn't realized he had written a novel, so when I saw this available for cheap on Kindle, I grabbed it. As a bonus, its plot revolves around Amazonian exploration, which I like reading about. Harry Johnson is the son of a missionary who disappeared into the jungle 17 years previously. He has had some previous experience of the Amazon when he and a friend set off upriver to join an older man on a planned exploration. While seeking an answer to what happened to his father was not the stated purpose of the exploration, that is what the expedition turns into.

Until I read my next book (see my review for [The Lost City of Z]), I thought Pritchett's descriptions of the hardships suffered by the explorers--the heat, the insects, the disease, the deprivations, the hostile Indians, etc.--were magnificent, and so very graphic. And they are good--in a "You are there!" kind of way. However, I found some of the plotting didn't make sense, particularly Harry's fear that he may have gotten his girlfriend back in England pregnant (she is the stepdaughter of the expedition leader), and his preoccupation with her failure to write him.

I'm not sure whether this book is in any way based on Percy Fawcett, the explorer who is featured in [The Lost City of Z], but after Fawcett's disappearance, Fawcett's surviving son (his older son disappeared with his father) launched an expedition to find him, and since this book was written in the 1930's I'm sure the Fawcett story at least influenced Pritchett.

However, if you only choose to read one book of Amazonian exploration, it shouldn't be this one--pick up [The Lost City of Z] instead½

Super account of childhood in early 20th century. The descriptions of people and places, especially London, are excellent and not to be skipped through.

Pritchett's impressionistic rambles through London offer the reader a snapshot of a city on the cusp of becoming the place we know today. In his early-60s milieu, the Docklands were still working docks not high-priced condos, Teddy Boys were about to be MODernized, and some of the rubble of the Second World War still stood, slowly being replaced by featureless International Modern concrete blocks. Some of his observations still hold true, just as VSP found echoing vestiges of Dickensian (and older) London in the city of 1962. Some are hopelessly outmoded, ways of life and places gone forever.

The writing was poetic and rather beautiful but also odd and strangely rambling, often with no clear connections between thoughts. Three stars for the writing, five for the excellent and haunting photographs by Evelyn Hofer, rendered in high-contrast quality in the 2002 Godine reprint. Worthwhile for the London enthusiast, photography fancier, cultural historian, or nostalgia buff.

Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in 1900 and died in 1997. That period covers two world wars, landing on the moon, the birth control pill--in other words, a remarkable condensation of technological achievement encompassing the fledgling days of the industrial revolution, space and cyberspace. This autobiography focuses on his extraordinary childhood. Eventually he would become a highly respected English writer with “Sir” before his name but he didn’t shun his humble beginnings. In fact, he used them as fodder for his writing.

His father, Walter, was a strutting popinjay of a Yorkshireman who indulged his taste for fine clothes to the point of dandyism, pursuing his dreams relentlessly no matter how many times they flopped, and demanding to be above criticism by his family no matter how many times he let them down. The cab of the title had to be called to the door umpteen times to move this unfortunate (and ever growing) family because of his unpaid bills and mismanaged finances. But “father never gives up” so this little tyrant clung to both his dreams and his iron control over his family. His foray into Christian Science was very interesting, if faintly chilling.

V.S.'s mother, Beatrice, was a Cockney born and bred, full of imagination, humour, laughter, music and fun, yet given to tremendous anxiety and moments of despair. How could she not, tethered to Walter and ground down by him and their circumstances. She would be reduced to helpless laughter by the word “bloomers” but the planes attacking London had her spinning in mindless terror, clutching her children to her. She would tear down curtains and sew slapdash pants for her sons. She never could cook but she gamely tried. Yet her focus was on Walter, so that V.S. could never entirely count on her support for himself. He loved her but he could call her “shifty”.

Reading of his childhood, youth and adolescence was like finding a lost novel by Dickens. Despite trips up to Yorkshire at various times, the real heart of the story was in London with its curry coloured fogs, horses and cars comingling in the streets to provide noise and danger, schoolyards full of fighting, brawling boys and shrieking, slapping girls. His stint in the Bermondsey leather trade was remarkable with its insight into the factory trade but even more interesting for the characters who worked there.

At times it felt as though the story wasn’t being told by a writer who was polishing his verbs and setting his adjectives a’twinkle but by a man exhilarated himself by the memories rushing out of him, eager to get them out swiftly because there was another wave of them waiting to dash on to memory’s beach, his pen barely able to keep up.

A lovely little book in a gem of a publication by Slightly Foxed (I do love built-in ribbon bookmarks). Recommended.

Victor Sawdon Pritchett never wrote a boring sentence. And it didn't hurt to have one of the more interesting English novelists to write about. When the best write of the best we can call ourselves, if nothing else, lucky.

A wonderful single volume Modern Library edition of Pritchett's two volumes of memiors, Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil. Cab at the Door covers Pritchett's life from before birth to age 18. It is by turns: engaging, enlightening and laugh out loud funny. A good picture of post Victorian/Edwardian England. Pritchett's easy, self-depricating style keeps this poverty coming of age story from becoming another Mein Kampf (my struggle).

Midnight Oil is even better and was rightly called "A little Rolls Royce of a book." by Wilfred Sheed when it came out in 1972. The best and probably most realistic portrait of Paris in the 20's I've read. Very readable and important to anyone that wants to understand how a writer came to be. The pages fly by. I highly reccomend this Modern Library edition.

One of my favorite short story writers: The Skeleton, The Blind...

I haven't read the whole thing -- it's massive -- but every essay I have read is exceptional. A model critic who has that talent for getting to the raw essence of anything he reads.

Gorge yourself on these superb short stories from the master of the form in English, bar none. There is not a wasted word but be warned: These are so good that it will drive you to seek out Pritchett's literary biographies, criticism, essays, travel pieces and two volumes of autobiography.

A collection of some forty short stories written in English, covering the period from the early 19th century to the present and drawing especially upon writers from Great Britain Ireland, and the United States.

Sir Victor Pritchett disproved almost every cliché of literary life. After making a striking debut as a journalist and fiction writer during the 1920s, he not only failed to burn out in a fashionably bohemian style but got a second wind that carried him clear through the 1990s. In an age of specialization, he left his mark on a half-dozen genres--the novel, short fiction, memoir, casual essay, travel writing, and criticism. Throughout a career of such jaw- dropping duration, he resisted literary fads like the plagues that they are. Finally, he had that rarest of authorial virtues--common sense--which enlivens almost every word of The Pritchett Century. No doubt Pritchett fans will argue over what their hero did best. But his short stories, which leaven a near-Chekhovian delicacy with the driest of wit, equal anything written in our age. And his criticism is as entertaining as it is accurate, particularly when he wrote about books he loved. (Here's Pritchett on Huckleberry Finn, for example, mixing his panegyric with a soupçon of poison: "Huck is a only a crude boy, but luckily he was drawn by a man whose own mind was arrested, with disastrous results in his other books, at the schoolboy stage; here it is perfect.") In any case, The Pritchett Century contains ample helpings of every genre, which adds up to an highly distinguished anthology.

This collection of Pritchett's prose includes autobiographical extracts, travel writing, and criticism of both classic and contemporary writers, from Kipling and Eliot, to Bellow and Rushdie. The volume also contains extracts from his novels, and the best of his short stories.