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Donald Barthelme
Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
Title: Forty Stories (Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics)
Author: Donald Barthelme
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Pages: 256
Publisher: , 0
ISBN: 0141180943
Format: PDF / Kindle / ePub
Size: 7.5 MB
Download: allowed
Description
In 'Forty Stories', Donald Barthelme invented a random universe in which time, reality, meaning
and language are turned exuberantly upside-down. Tangling with the ludicrous and challenging
the familiar, these small masterpieces provide piercing and hilarious insights into human
idiosyncrasies.
Insightful reviews
Jennifer Gifford: Where do I start? The stories are one dimensional, with paper thin characters
composing uninteresting snippets of lives of the above mentioned characters. I couldn't even
finish the whole book because it was just aweful. No real sense of togetherness (which is
usually an underlying theme in a collection of work), no real direction, either. The stories are
trite, boring, and worse, poorly structured.
Adrian Stumpp: Barthelme is the quintessential super-pretentious post-modernist. These stories
are all less than four pages long and run the gambit from clever to amazing to barely readable
to barely written. Of the forty, quite a few are duds, but the gems make up for it. Barthelme
loves wordplay and idea play. A normal Barthelme "trick" is to take an idiomatic figure of
speech. I won't quote from the book specifically, but an example would be something like "I
wanted to tell Maggy I was having an affair but I couldn't stop beating around the bush." The
plot of this particular story would revolve around how Maggy responds to the narrator's habit of
beating around the bush whenever he had something important to say to her. She might ask
him "Why do you keep hitting that bush with a stick" or some such thing. Shenanigans would
ensue. Most of Barthelme's plots are absurdist and nothing of consequence usually happens.
Some of my favorites are "Chablis," "The New Owner," "Jaws," "and "Some of Us Had Been
Threatening Our Friend Colby." Definitely an acquired taste.
Jesse Cooley:
Donald Barthelme is the first and foremost of a slew of sixties and seventies authors to first
bend and shape fiction into what we know of as “metafiction”. Metafiction deals with writing
about writing, self-conscious writing, or writing that merely draws attention to the act of written
construction. Barthelme does this best (in my humble opinion) with Forty Stories, a lofty
collection of stories of various lengths and dimensions. Barthelme here pioneers the micro-story
(story which is vehemently short). One such famous piece is Barthelme's Sentence which is, of
course, but one sentence that is neither capitalized at the beginning or punctuated at the end. In
fact, the piece is contained within ellipses so as to suggest the cyclical/infinitesimal nature of the
subject matter that the single sentence deals with. Another exemplary story is Barthelme's
Some of us had been Threatening our Friend Colby, a kind of parable about ideological control
told through a small-scale, humdrum lens. The story is a kind of fabulation, a form of metafiction
centered in the retelling of folklore/mythopoeia. There is also The Baby. The Baby, I believe, is
one of the most important pieces of literature today. The occlusive viewpoint and maniacally
strange but keenly metaphorical subject matter of this story cause an inevitable double-take in a
casual reading.
For all his genius, it can be said of Barthelme that his work is obscene in its demands on
readers. Forty Stories is not an easy book to get through reading lightly. It requires a willingness
to delve, to research, and to try understanding the seemingly apocryphal. In this way, Barthelme
defeats himself in his noble attempt to deconstruct literature's infamous “fourth wall”: by forcing
readers into presupposed knowledge (aforementioned seeming apocrypha) Forty Stories
sidesteps the notion of a fourth wall, and therefore does not engage its deconstruction. This is in
part due to the very compact nature of the book, and Barthelme has demonstrated his ability to
engage the “fourth wall” narrative in other works (see The Dead Father, The King).
Reading Forty Stories all the way through is a woozy feeling, the mind afterward feels distorted,
the lens of brilliant literary insight playing haunting games with one's perception. With calculated
precision, Barthelme dishes out knowledge like a furious storm, Forty Stories the wake of this
tempest.
M: "The concept of the movie is that it now not be like different films" - The Film, forty stories.
the belief of a few of the tales during this assortment is they no longer be like different stories.
Barthelme's wild imagination, his flavor for the absurd, and his galgenhumor make the tales
fascinating and unique nonetheless. Barthelme is an experimentalist in form. in regards to the
Bodyguard, a narrative (almost) fullyyt instructed within the interrogative form, is a really
profitable scan the place the shape and the content material are congruent. this can be might be
the simplest tale during this collection. different formal video games should not approximately as
winning (e.g. Sentence, that's a narrative concerning the sentence instructed in exactly one
sentence). Narration is additionally a priority of Barthelme. within the Genius, he permits the
characters of the tale to break the narrator, a truly democratic move. the various tales may well
simply be learn as excellent social-political satires, e.g. The Baby, a few of Us have been
Threatening Our good friend Colby, Paul Klee, The Temptation of St. Anthony. this isn't to
assert that Barthelme is dry. lots of Barthelme's strains might have been a part of a Tom Waits
track (e.g. "Polish the doorknobs with Brasso and produce within the sea bass" in nice Days).
Dream scenes, humorous conversations, and issues that one imagines whereas experiencing
delirium or hallucination are regularly occurring in those stories: The Wound, at the Deck, The
Explanation, Bluebeard, etc. at the disguise of my version of the ebook (Futura publ.) it says
that merely Borges may well dare to tread into Barthelme's position within the paintings of brief
story. i do not agree really. aside from occasionally utilizing beautiful words, and infrequently
exhibiting off with their breadth of information, Borges and Barthelme have little in common.
tales with an aftertaste for me have been Terminus, and Visitors. Barthelme could have possibly
known as those tales "terminally romantic".
MJ Nicholls: i do not understand what happened. There I was, excited to cadge a library replica
of a Barthelme book, a rarity on those shores, having saved up 8 months of hot emotions for
Sixty Stories. yet no. all of it got here crashing down with this unbearable sequence of selfironising experiments, non sequiturs, highbrow masturbations and opaque parodies.What
happened? Well, it really is fullyyt attainable Sixty tales exhausted the services of Mr. B, so
commonly cherished one of the McSweeney's generation, serving up an inferior batch of
stories. not anything right here took off within the similar insanely original, witty and definitively
bizarre means because the earlier collection. There wasn't a narrative in the following i would
are looking to have repeated sex with for months on finish sooner than lovingly cutting the warts
off my cock.And that is a shame. that's grand outdated shame.
Oscar: Estos ’40 relatos’ (Forty Stories, 1987) de Donald Barthelme, enganchan desde los
angeles primera frase. (Por ejemplo, ‘Chablis’, el primer cuento: ”Mi mujer quiere un perro,
aunque ya tiene una niña. los angeles niña tiene casi dos años. Según ella, es los angeles niña
los angeles que quiere el perro”.) Y es que Barthelme sabe cómo llamar l. a. atención del
lector. Todos los cuentos son diferentes: algunos humorísticos, otros paródicos, otros absurdos
o excéntricos, pero bajo todos ellos subyace algo más profundo, un reflejo del sinsentido de l.
a. sociedad consumista occidental. l. a. narrativa de Barthelme es claramente experimental, en
clave posmoderna, lo que Pynchon bautizó como barthelmismo, y como tantos autores de esta
corriente, intenta dar sentido a cosas extrañas, cercanas, cotidianas, dotándolas de una
transparencia que no habíamos apreciado hasta ahora.Las principales armas de Barthelme son
l. a. sátira y el lenguaje, con una erudición evidente, y sus temas, los angeles familia, los
angeles religión, los angeles cultura popular, los angeles política. Entre los ’40 relatos’ se
encuentran algunos memorables: ‘El genio’, ‘Acerca del guardaespaldas’, ‘Tiburón’,
‘Conversaciones con Goethe’, ‘El nuevo propietario’, ‘El soldado Paul Klee’, ‘La experiencia
educativa’, ‘Barba Azul’, ‘Despedidas’, ‘Visitas’, ‘Algunos de nosotros veníamos
advirtiendo a nuestro amigo Colby’ (que empieza magistralmente: ”Algunos de nosotros
veníamos advirtiendo a nuestro amigo Colby desde hace bastante tiempo, por su manera de
comportarse, pero ya había llegado demasiado lejos, de modo que decidimos ahorcarlo”.), ‘El
rayo’, ‘Rocadur’, ‘La construcción’ y ‘La niña’.Unas veces absurdo, otras extravagante,
otras genial, sin duda Barthelme no deja indiferente.
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