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Dazzling collection of postmodern blisters and blasters, usually as short as three, four or five pages but some as long as twelve pages, stories written in dialogue or lists or letters or narrative, covering topics from highbrow culture to the lowbrow scuzzy, from the everyday to the sensational and historic, an innovative collection from one of the most perceptive wordsmiths ever to put pen to paper or fingers to typewriter. Many are the stories I found wickedly astute, including these two:REPO...
This is the only book I've yet read by this author, a few years ago, but I remember thinking that it was overall an enjoyable collection of stories. There is another collection by him called Forty Stories which I may get one day, and he did a few novels I think, but I haven't a clue what they are like. I think I saw this book on amazon and was drawn to it by the psychedelic front cover, and then when I read the blurb about it, I thought I'd give it a go, reckoning a book with sixty stories in it...
Donald Barthelme, Sixty StoriesPenguin, 1982introduction by David Gates (2003)When I was 20 I tried to read Nabokov, and couldn’t, and knew it was my problem, not his. When I was 25 I could read Nabokov. I couldn’t read Barthelme until I was 40. (There are real benefits, it turns out, to not dying young.) Maybe it helped that I had read Beckett, Lispector, Lydia Davis in the meantime. Probably it helped even more that I had suffered serious disappointments and intermittently drank too much. I ha...
well, i didn't finish sixty stories, but i did get about 3/4 of the way through it and it took me a while, so i feel duty-bound to document it. one of the traits i admire most in writers is the ability to extend themselves out of veiled autobiography and write in and through the eyes of someone else. one of the traits i most disdain in writers is a tendency towards the esoteric, ignoring the critical elements of a good story. Barthelme is both of these writers. the stories with real characters a...
The first thing I ever read from the field of cognitive linguistics, which has stayed with me till the present moment, was Mark Turner's notion that "one reads Shakespeare in order to have a brain that has read Shakespeare." The original context was something about Hirsch's crap about cultural literacy and a rebuttal of the notion that we read Shakespeare simply to attain a few cultural benchmarks (blech), as if cocktail party conversation were the final arbiter of literary merit and purpose. An...
They sit down together. The pork with red cabbage steams before them. They speak quietly about the McKinley Administration, which is being revised by revisionist historians. The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page (so ends the story Rebecca, page 279).The above passage is the rarest of examples of...
This guy is a genius and it is a tragedy that he is not better known or more commonly read. He is a great original and one of the best examplars of the good qualities of postmodernism. His writing is so fresh, so full of brio, wit and zip. His prose is so carefull considered at a sentence by sentence level that I can only compare him to Samuel Beckett in this respect. The stories are so unpredictable and wayward that he recalls Kafka. The intricacy, intelligence and originality recalls Borges. T...
I spent this past summer with Barthelme’s Sixty Stories never far from my side as my most recent ‘dashboard book’. The stories contained in this hilarious and bizarre collection are rarely more than 5-10pgs in length, making them a perfect companion to turn to whenever you find a few spare moments where you want to simple get-in-and-get-out while still walking away with a headful of ideas to chew on. The stories are as varied as the horizon viewed through a travelling car, often as pretty as the...
Espectacular antología de Donald Barthelme. Historias muy experimentales, fragmentadas, simbólicas, reales, que resaltan las verdaderas relaciones humanas. Después de leer Sixty Stories ya no me quedan dudas de que Barthelme es uno de mis cuentistas favoritos.Relatos inolvidables: "A Shower of Gold", "Me and Miss Mandible", "Game", "The Balloon", "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning", "Report", "Views of My Father Weeping", "On Angels", "The Sandman", "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel", "Daumier",
Postmodern humor of a sort that might remind readers of the work of writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon or Robert Coover. Barthelme's fictions are formally experimental, employing unconventional methods of storytelling and frequently depicting unreal situations. Narrators in a few of them are unreliable; in others, narration is completely absent, the "stories" consisting entirely of unattributed dialogue.Along with stories selected from earlier Barthelme collections such as Unspeakable Pr...
Sometimes I feel like a huge misfit writing fiction. I have some language-level obsession that doesn't always translate very well into "shit happening," which, let's face it, is crucial to a story. I think I always put more elbow grease into sentences and images, and particular cadences that please me. All of which is my roundabout way of praising Don Barthelme for writing stories that hit the aforementioned balls out of the park. Take heart, poets attempting to write fiction. The stories in thi...
I refuse to review this until you read it or I re-read it. Suffice to say, for now, that this guy knows what's the story. There are, surprise, 60 stories here. And I thought 3 maybe 4 were misses or fouls. That leaves 56 maybe 57 homers. Some of them barely left the yard but many of them were way, way gone. Why am I continuing with this trite analogy? Perhaps it's because I can't play with the jacks. I am not well.At the sentence level, Barthelme's ear is phenomenal. At the idea level, he's both...
Barthelme is the short story writer for me. I loved these mad, witty, clever but not clever-clever, surreal and speculative stories. Barthelme has a style and range utterly unique to him and uses a fragmented, avant-garde approach to tell his cryptic and weirdly moving stories.I can't pick a favourite from these. They were dazzling, one and all. Hooray for discovering new writers!
Here's an odd coincidence: Carl, that's me, finishes reading The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes and then immediately picks up Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme. The first story contains a character named Carl who talks about being a fan of The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes.
Borges for depressed people.
Sipped and savored this one for as long as I could. It's surprising that I can still be so awed by a book at my age, but Sixty Stories was a mindblower. I can only imagine that my life would have taken a different path had I discovered this earlier. For some reason, I came in thinking it was going to be like the barren, austere surrealism of Beckett and Pinter, and was surprised to find these stories are often very funny and situated in a recognizable world. Still concerned with the absurdity of...
The Indeterminacy of the Quotidian"Whereof one cannot speak with clarity, Thereof might one speak with obliquity."D. J. WittgensteinAll is Not Right in BarthelmelandBy the time I'd read the first couple of these 60 stories, I had started to wonder whether something in Barthelmeland was askew, whether something was not quite "right". So the purpose of much of my subsequent reading was to work out the cause. Here is the hypothesis that emerged:Human beings communicate primarily by language. Langua...
I was half way through the book when I realized that these stories serve as a kind of Rorschach Test, always in movement, always mind-boggling, and forever inspiring. Some of the "dialogues" can seem overly long and pedantic, but when it comes to Barthelme, can there be such terms? They seem to be much of the point. As an earlier review mentioned, these short pieces have the tendency to rip your mind to shreds, without any hope for recovery throughout. Many stories in this collection bear the ma...
How can I justify my indifference to Donald Barthelme? I’m not sure I can. No doubt these stories are/were innovative, unique, at times wildly inventive. They’re also, for the most part, easy to read, not daunting, but on the other hand not inviting―not to me anyway. For a few weeks I dipped into 60 Stories with moderate enjoyment, but soon noticed it was my “go to” books in times of distraction, when something more demanding would have tested my fractured concentration. Don’t get me wrong, he’s...
For the past couple of years, I have kept word documents that keep track of the individual short stories or long essays I read. I say to myself I do this so I can keep track of what I read and recognize writers who've I encountered before. While this is true, the main reason I keep these lists is because I am a bit compulsive when it comes to keeping track of unnecessary things. Seriously, I have never been able to get myself to keep up with my check balance book but my music on my external hard...