With these audacious and murderous witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupation of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts. Like all of Donald's work, the sixty stories collected in this volume are triumphs of language and perception, at once unsettling and irresistible.
A student at the University of Pennsylvania bore Donald Barthelme. Two years later, in 1933, the family moved to Texas, where father of Barthelme served as a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme later majored in journalism.
In 1951, this still student composed his first articles for the Houston Post. The Army drafted Barthelme, who arrived in Korea on 27 July 1953, the very day, when parties signed the ceasefire, ending the war. He served briefly as the editor of a newspaper of Army before returning to the United States and his job at the Houston Post. Once back, he continued his studies of philosophy at the University of Houston. He continued to take classes until 1957 but never received a degree. He spent much of his free time in “black” jazz clubs of Houston and listened to musical innovators, such as Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelly; this experience influenced him later.
Barthelme, a rebellious son, struggled in his relationship with his demanding father. In later years, they tremendously argued about the kinds of literature that interested Barthelme. His avant-garde father in art and aesthetics in many ways approved not the postmodern and deconstruction schools. The Dead Father and The King , the novels, delineate attitude of Barthelme toward his father as King Arthur and Lancelot, the characters, picture him. From the Roman Catholicism of his especially devout mother, Barthelme independently moved away, but this separation as the distance with his father troubled Barthelme. He ably agreed to strictures of his seemingly much closer mother.
Barthelme went to teach for brief periods at Boston University and at University at Buffalo, and he at the college of the City of New York served as distinguished visiting professor from 1974-1975. He married four times. Helen Barthelme, his second wife, later entitled a biography Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound, published in 2001. With Birgit Barthelme, his third wife and a Dane, he fathered Anne Barthelme, his first child, a daughter. He married Marion Barthelme near the end and fathered Kate Barthelme, his second daughter. Marion and Donald wed until his death from throat cancer. People respect fiction of Frederick Barthelme and Steven Barthelme, brothers of Donald Barthelme and also teachers at The University of Southern Mississippi.
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:
REPORT Antiwar: The narrator is sent by an antiwar group from New York to Cleveland to persuade hundreds of engineers “not to do what they are going to do.” This 1968 Barthelme flash fiction was written at the peak of the U.S. war in Vietnam. A fiercely anti-U.S., anti-Vietnam War story, but not once is Vietnam mentioned. Similar to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (Donald Barthelme much admired Beckett), time-bound specific symbols and specific references are absent.
Cartoon Atmosphere: The Cleveland meeting of engineers takes place at a motel, very appropriate since the whole phenomenon of motels, those small, cheap, tacky roadside hotels with a swimming pool out back, were also at their peak in the late 1960s. Hundreds of engineers attend the meeting and as soon as our narrator walks in, he beholds chaos: not only are the engineers making calculations and taking measurements, they are drinking beer, throwing bread and hurling glasses into the fireplace. On top of this, he also sees most of those hundreds of engineers have their arms, legs or other body parts in plaster casts due to various kinds of multiple fractures. This bit of absurdity is truly cartoonish, and to top it off, the narrator tells us the engineers are friendly.
Friendly, Friendly: Of course those beer drinking, bread throwing engineers are friendly - friendly on the surface, that is, since their jolly laughter and all those jovial smiles are effective ways to maintain a lighthearted, uncritical attitude toward the destructive, tragic power and death-dealing consequences of their calculations and measurements.
Love and Information: Yes, yes, yes . . . the narrator tells us directly how the engineers are also full of love and information. As, for instance, when the chief engineer, standing among beer bottles and microphone cable, invites him to eat some of their chicken dinner and asks what they, the engineers, can do for him, their “distinguished guest.” A true stroke of irony bordering on sarcasm: to call such an outsider “distinguished guest,” an outsider who could quite possibly pose a threat to their developing and utilizing invented technologies to win the war.
The Irony Thickens; The Sarcasm Thickens: When the narrator states his line is software and how he wants to know what they are doing, the chief engineer begins his reply: “Ask us anything about our thing, which seems to be working. We will open our hearts and heads to you, Software Man, because we want to be understood and loved by the great lay public, and have our marvels appreciated by that public, for which we daily unsung produce tons of new marvels each more life-enhancing than the last.” Although the engineers are creating military weapons and chemicals to be used in war, the chief engineer refers to their creations as “life-enhancing.” Yet again another Donald Barthelme tale where language is distorted and twisted by the power people in order to maintain and expand their power.
A Sucker is Born Every Day: The Software Man states his concerns; the head engineer bombards him with a thick fog of words, including making a personal accusation of Software Man’s hatred and jealousy (ah, when it doubt, attack the person not the argument!). The fog of words is so thick he gets Software Man to leave with a smile on his face. Back among his antiwar group, the narrator stresses the friendliness of the engineers and how everything is all right, how “We have a moral sense." and “We are not going to do it.”
Oh, my - not only swallowing the head engineer’s lies but taking on the identity of the entire room of friendly, beer drinking warmongers. Talk about gullible!
THE INDIAN UPRISING One of the most popular Donald Barthelme’s stories. Here are a number of themes I see contained in its mere seven pages:
America, land of genocide Why are Indians attacking an American city in the 20th century? Why are the narrator’s people defending the city? Is this a mental defending of past history, a defending or justifying the genocide of the Native Americans in previous centuries? Back in high school history class during the late 1960s, the time this story was written, there wasn’t too much said about the brutal treatment of Native Americans and the destruction of their populations and cultures. Ironically, my high school mascot was and still is “The Indians.”
America the superficial “There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire.” Nice contrast, Donald: the Indians and their primitive crafts (earthworks) on one side and the barbed wire (sparkling wire) on the other. Donald Barthelme doesn’t miss an opportunity to make his story’s details, telling details – case in point, barbed wire played a pivotal role in transforming the open land west of the Mississippi River into domesticated ranchland. Meanwhile, the narrator, let’s call him Bob, asks his girlfriend Silvia if this is a good life. She tell him “No.” Are the apples, books and long-playing records laid out on a table (perhaps symbols of American, the land of plenty), Bob’s idea of a good life, even if his city is under attack? If so, Bob’s idea of the good life sounds rather superficial.
America the hyper-violent Bob and others torture a Comanche but Bob doesn’t give this cruel act any more emotional weight than if he and a couple men were cleaning up a grimy picnic table. I don’t know about you, but such insensitivity and sadism sends shivers up my spine. In the late 1960s, the time when this story was first published, photographs of Americans torturing Vietnamese first began appearing fairly regularly in magazines and newspapers. Additionally, I recall how during the late 1960s , Saturday morning cartoons switched from funny to hyper-violent, which caused outrage among some to ask: “Are we becoming a country of extreme violence and nothing but extreme violence?”
America, land of postmodern leveling Bob asks Silvia if she is familiar with the classical composer Gabriel Fauré. This question quickly shifts to Bob’s reflections on the details of a smut scene and then to the tables he made for four different women. This mental jumping from the beautiful to the repugnant, from people to objects, treating everything, irrespective of content, with the same emotional neutrality sounds like a grotesque form of postmodern leveling. Personally, this is one big reason I have always refused to watch commercial television: the non-stop switching from one image to the next, from tragedy on the nightly news to selling candy bars to the latest insurance deal I find unsettling in the extreme.
America, land of the racist Bob tells us: “Red men in waves like people, scattering in a square startled by something tragic or a sudden, loud noise accumulated against the barricade we had made of window dummies, silk, thoughtfully planned job descriptions (including scales for the orderly progress of other colors), wine in demijohns, and robes.” Red men in waves like people? They are people! Stupid to the core, Bob blithely dehumanizes others by his racism and barely realizes he is doing so. Donald Barthelme wrote this with a light touch, but I couldn’t imagine an author damning his own society and culture with more vitriol and scorn. John Gardner wrote how Barthelme lacked a moral sense. What the hell were you thinking, John?!
America, the land of hard drugs To combat the uprising, Bob notes: “We sent more heroin into the ghetto.” And the emphasis is on “more” since it is well documented how the U.S. government permitted and even encouraged the influx of hard drugs into poor black neighborhoods. Ironically, the outrage over the widespread use of hard drugs began once drug usage and addiction entered the fabric of middle class suburbia. I don’t think I’m alone in detecting a direct link between the use of drugs -- hard drugs, prescription drugs, recreational drugs - and the emotional numbness people have to the ocean of detritus overwhelming their lives.
America, the land of booze and passion Bob actively participates in more extreme torture. Doesn’t bother Bob in the least. Bob simply gets more and more drunk and falls more and more in love. Even when he hears children have been killed in masses, Bob barely reacts. Have some more booze, Bob, as that will solve all your problems. All this Bob stuff occurring in a world where, “The officer commanding the garbage dump reported by radio that the garbage had begun to move.” Also, “Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.” Have another drink, Bob, and convince yourself you are falling more and more in love.
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 sunset or as gloomy as pouring rain. With strong influences of Samuel Beckett (of whom Barthelme was quick to admit in interviews, saying ‘I'm enormously impressed by Beckett. I'm just overwhelmed by Beckett, as Beckett was, I speculate, by Joyce.’ in an interview with Jerome Klinkowitz), Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Pynchon and Franz Kafka, Barthelme creates powerful scenes of absurdist black-comedy that both challenge the intellect and tug the heartstrings as his characters play out their sad fates upon the page.
Each story is a breath of fresh air, even from one another. The styles, themes and lexicon of each story vary, often dramatically, illustrating Barthelme’s wide linguistic and narrative aptitudes. It would be hard for a reader to not find at least a few stories that seem geared to them, making this collection rather accessible to a large audience. While I greatly enjoyed most of these stories, finding a few filler tales along the way, I feel that some of the ones I disliked aren’t necessarily ‘bad’, but just not for me, whereas another reader might particularly enjoy the ones I did not. Much of the enjoyment comes from being able to deduce what Barthelme is trying to get across; these stories read like an elaborate joke and sometimes a reader won’t ‘get it’ on the first attempt (there were a few that I finished, thought ‘what the hell?’ and had to carefully go back through). Some of the language and stylistic choices are bewildering, but often they were just the sort of unique postmodernist obfuscation or structure that I really love.
The stories are often strange, surrealistic, and absurd, yet done with just the right amount of flair and subtlety. Barthelme’s surrealist narratives seem to be a precursor to more modern types of bizarre fiction, however, Barthelme is never ‘weird for the sake of weirdness’ and the absurdist qualities of Barthelme feel more dreamlike, where each aberration of normalcy seems to fit right it and it isn’t until the dreamer awakes that they notice anything was amiss. Everything is grounded in the theme and overall message of the story, and you will find King Kong as a history professor socializing at a party, an adult stuck in middle school to do a clerical error, a reptilian lesbian confronting the infidelities of her human lover, a city wide balloon and an extraterrestrial president with possible mind-control all read with surprising normalcy.
The comparisons to other great authors, especially the postmodernists like Pynchon, is difficult to avoid in a collection with such a wide range of styles as this one. There are straightforward, 3rd person tales, claustrophobic first person rants, 3rd person rants (occasionally in one, long multi-paged sentence) stories done entirely through dialogue which calls to mind William Gaddis, and a few stories that are more an exploration of an idea, such as the essay-like qualities of On Angels that recalls Borges. I’ve wondered how much of Barthelme that David Foster Wallace read, as the story Robert Kennedy, Saved From Drowning read as if it was an early version of DFW’s own Lyndon. Barthelme’s Mr. Sandman, in which a man writes a letter to his girlfriend’s therapist in a highly self-conscious manner arguing that it is her faults and flaws that he is in love with and of which he does not want tampered with (it is a rather touching story), is another story where DFW was immediately brought to mind. For anyone with a burning love for Wallace as I have, this collection has many examples that will satisfy that particular thirst. There are a surprisingly large amount of touching stories, and an equal amount of comically cynical stories of adultery, failures and frustration with the social structure. It is his cynical side that really gets me, such as the story mocking the Phantom of the Opera, having him an old, pathetic man who’s theatrics of appearing and disappearing in an flash annoy his only friend, his constant longings for lost love reduced to mere whines, and the wonderful concluding sentence of ‘until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense’. Compare that to the way he is able to move from an intellectual inquiry of signs and symbols in The Balloon to an extremely moving and romantic final paragraph. Simply put, this guy works pure magic.
For anyone who loves the postmodernists and would like to be moved or posed with an intellectual puzzle in small, bite-sized doses, then this collection is just begging to be added to your bookshelf. The philosophic, emotional and societal investigations are sharp and witty, the humor dark, and the settings surreal. This collection will reinstate your beliefs in the powers of language and literature and you will be pleasantly surprised with what he can do in a short amount of space. 4.5/5 (rounded up)
If you would like to wet your whistle with Barthelme’s wit, here are a few stories to try: The School (often considered one of his best) Game (for LOST fans, try not to think of the Hatch) The Balloon
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. Anyway, I liked Turner's point, and I really like what Barthelme is doing to my brain this week. I wouldn't say he's altering it so much as bringing forth latent tendencies...sort of like applying cognitive makeup to enhance what's already there. And truly, is there a better, more consummate ending to a short story than this: "Then we shook hands, Mrs. Davis and I, and she set out Ralphward, and I, Maudeward, the glow of hope not yet extinguished, the fear of pall not yet triumphant, standby generators ensuring the flow of grace to all of God's creatures at the end of the mechanical age." ?
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!
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 this book will show you some fantastic possibilities.
By the way: collected works volumes are heartless, but they are economical. You may as well have it all in one place. Take your fucking vitamins.
оскільки ця книга має ВИКЛЮЧНО змістовні, помірковані та глибоко насичені смислами оповідання, я розробив власну шкалу оцінки. вона виглядає так:
болд - повнотіле оповідання італік - підступне оповідання без змін - плюгаве оповідання страйк - шаланда шлакоблоків андерлайн - гармидер
і зараз ми з вами, любі друзі, оцінимо кожне з шістидесяти. кожне. з шістидесяти. з 60. колись в лампочках було стільки ватт, кожна ваттинка й кожен ваттичок просиналися від першого ж клацання вимикачем, вишиковувались в шеренгу колом, хапали одне одного за свої дрібненькі ваттячі рученята і голосно волаючи загорялись, але зараз це лише кількість оповідань бартелмі. їх:
ш і с т ь д е с я т к і в.
і не смійте відвертатися, бо я вас по айпішнику вичіслю. кожного. а ще у нас будуть цитати. я казав? я кажу. у нас будуть цитати. але не всюди. тільки тоді, коли мені цього захочеться. цитати будуть без контексту, бо якщо трошки подумати порозмишлять поміркувати, то контекст у кожного свій. навіть зараз мій контекст — це мій контекст, а ваш контекст — ваш.
о т ж е т ж е
1. береги. ЦИТАТА | Я розмовляю з тобою, — сказав Едвард, — через широку прірву невігластва і темряви. <…> Чи не міг би ти потримати хвилиночку мої картонки? 2. золотий дощ. ЦИТАТА | Можливо, вас і не цікавить абсурд, — сказала вона впевнено, — але абсурд точно цікавиться вами. 3. я і міс мендибл. 4. бо я саме той. 5. розкажете мені. 6. повітряна куля. 7. президент. 8. гра. ЦИТАТА | Шотвелл тримає камінчики та гумовий мʼячик у своєму кейсі й не дозволяє мені ними гратися. 9. аліса. 10. роберт кеннеді, врятований від потопання. 11. звіт. ЦИТАТА | Ми маємо зграї риб, що нападатимуть на їхніх риб. 12. телепень. 13. бачиш місяць? 14. повстаня індіанців. 15. картини ридання мого батька. ЦИТАТА | Один шляхтич їхав вулицею у своєму екіпажі. Він переїхав мого батька. 16. параґвай. ЦИТАТА | Поверхні в Параґваї такі гладенькі, що все не таке гладеньке цінується надзвичайно дорого. 17. про ангелів. 18. приятель привида опери. 19. життя в місті. ЦИТАТА | В електричній компанії запанувала нервозність, коли думка Рамони запустилась у парапсихологічний простір. 20. кʼєркеґор несправедливий до шлеґеля. 21. собака-випадака. 22. поліцейський бал. 23. скляна гора. ЦИТАТА | Останнім часом надмірно послабшав пристрасний інтерес до реальності. 24. critique de la vie quotidienne. 25. пісочний чоловік. 26. träumerei. 27. підйом капіталізму. ЦИТАТА | Заперечення заперечення засновано на правильному прочитанні неправильних книжок. 28. місто церков. 29. домʼє. 30. вечірка. ЦИТАТА | Людина сприймає світ дещо інакше порівняно з мавпою, але це не означає, що мені не подобаються парфумовані ночі.
антракт на неймдропинг: штиблети боягуза, людвіг вітгенштайн, матриця, еммануїл сведенборг, коханка вітгенштайна, афанасій афонський, артур веллслі веллінгтон, пан монблан, елла фіцджералд. одне-два імені в тексті не згадувалось. ще одне я вигадав. але не тут, раніше, ще в дитинстві вигадав. я вам якось потім розповім.
31. ежені ґранде. 32. ніщо: попереднє враження. 33. посібник для синів. ЦИТАТА | Ніякої потреби вбивати батька — його вбʼє час. 34. наприкінці механічного віку. 35. ребекка. 36. захоплена жінка. 37. я придбав невеличке місто. 38. сержант. 39. школа. 40. великі обійми. 41. наша робота та чому ми її робимо. 42. криза. ЦИТАТА | Повстанці ввійшли до кліток з прирученими тваринами й ніжно з ними граються. 43. кортес і монтесума. 44. нова музика. 45. зомбі. 46. король джазу. 47. ранок. 48. смерть едварда ліра. ЦИТАТА | Смерть Едварда Ліра сталася недільним ранком у травні 1888 року. Запрошення розіслали задовго до події. 49. викрадення із сералю. ЦИТАТА | Єдине, що перевершує красу жінки, — це двотаврова балка, пофарбована в яскраво-жовтий колір. 50. на сходах консерваторії. 51. стрибок. ЦИТАТА | Мене надихає вино можливостей і зростання популярності світла. 52. арія. 53. смарагд. ________ ________ ЦИТАТА | Це, можливо, через сепсис вашої професії? — висловив припущення смарагд. 54. як я пишу пісні. 55. прощання. 56. імператор. 57. таїланд. ЦИТАТА | Не можу повірити, що сиджу і слухаю розповідь цього маразматика про карі з вугра. 58. герої. 59. бішоп. 60. бабусин дім.
як бачите, серед оповідань були повнотілі й підступні, плюгаві й піджарі (таких не було), шаланда шлакоблоків і повний гармидер. який висновок ми з цього робимо? пішов ти в сраку, семюел беккетт дональд бартелмі. ось який.
"Whereof one cannot speak with clarity, Thereof might one speak with obliquity."
D. J. Wittgenstein
All is Not Right in Barthelmeland
By 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. Language is designed to illuminate the world, so that we can see it, understand it, interact with it, and discuss it with others.
Language consists of words, signs and symbols (including metaphors).
In a semiotic sense, words derive meaning from a social compact about what each word means or signifies: “We read signs as promises,” Barthelme writes.
A Single Random Balloon
The arbitrarily chosen word "balloon" is supposed to signify a balloon, whatever the specific type or colour of balloon. When somebody uses the word, the listener or reader imagines a balloon (whether or not it is identical to the type or colour of balloon it signifies for the speaker or writer):
“As a single balloon must stand for a lifetime of thinking about balloons, so each citizen expressed, in the attitude he chose, a complex of attitudes.” (48)
“The balloon, for the twenty-two days of its existence, offered the possibility, in its randomness, of mislocation of the self, in contradistinction to the grid of precise, rectangular pathways under our feet.” (50)
The difference in signification reflects a degree of tolerance in what society will allow to facilitate clear communication:
“We have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena. It was agreed that since the meaning of balloon could never be known absolutely, extended discussion was pointless…” (47)
Mystery and Darkness
Even within this level of tolerance, there is still scope for lack of clarity, obliquity, misunderstanding, disagreement, mystery and darkness: “arrangements sometimes slip,...errors are made,...signs are misread...” There is therefore mystery and darkness in the space or gap or gulf between words, and also between people (cross-eyed, we talk at cross-purposes):
“I'm communicating with you across a vast gulf of ignorance and darkness.” (1)
“He had, in point of fact, created a gentle, genial misunderstanding.” (362)
Notwithstanding the gulf, people convince themselves that “[they] have confidence in their ability to take the right steps and to obtain correct answers.” (27)
A Wonderful Sea in Which We Can Swim, Leap or Stumble
Like language, Barthelme writes of behaviour:
“Behaviour in general is a wonderful sea, in which we can swim, or leap, or stumble.” (355)
Even though Barthelme writes with the precision of realism, he’s fascinated by this gulf, and what happens when people detect it. They don’t always take the right steps. Does it make people feel uneasy or uncomfortable? Is it the source of absurdity, of alienation, of dispute, of aggression, of mental illness?
Dread, Estrangement, Finitude
Barthelme describes the consequences for modern society:
“People today...are hidden away inside themselves, alienated, desperate, living in anguish, despair and bad faith...Man stands alone in a featureless, anonymous landscape, in fear and trembling and sickness unto death. God is dead. Nothingness everywhere. Dread. Estrangement. Finitude.” (8)
He attributes part of the problem to living and working under capitalism (and the social/cultural conditions it engenders):
“Authentic self-determination by individuals is thwarted. The false consciousness created and catered to by mass culture perpetuates ignorance and powerlessness...Bad faith.” (201)
“The thing is you got to go to school, son, and get socialised.” (249)
Authenticity and Irony, Estrangement and Poetry
This is Barthelme’s subject matter, but short fiction isn’t just his way of diagnosing the problem, it’s his way of treating it. He wants to find a way to achieve “authentic selfhood” and “authentic self-determination”.
Barthelme’s interest in authenticity leads him towards the use of irony (which is based on his reading of Kierkegaard):
“Irony deprives the object of its reality when the ironist says something about the object that is not what he means. The object is deprived of its reality by what I've said about it. Irony is thus destructive and what Kierkegaard worries about a lot is that irony has nothing to put in place of what it has destroyed...An irony directed against the whole of existence [rather than a given object] produces, according to Kierkegaard, estrangement and poetry....Irony becomes an infinite absolute negativity. Quote the whole of existence has become alien to the ironic subject unquote.” (158)
Broken Faith
Bad faith can equally be “broken faith”. Alienation splits people, and pits one part against another. We end up a vestige of what we once were, even if we weren’t wholly known or appreciated by another (or an other):
“I looked at her then to see if I could discover traces of what I had seen in the beginning. There were traces but only traces. Vestiges. Hints of a formerly intact mystery never to be returned to its original wholeness.” (184)
These Minimalist stories reflect the concerns of Post-Modernism, only they never fall victim to the superficial depth of Maximalism, where mere name-dropping of philosophers is supposed to be enough to impress the reader.
B-SIDES & RARITIES
Bad Zombie [In the Words of Donald Barthelme]
Oh what a pretty lady! I would be nice to her! Yes I would! I think so!
Mother/Love [In the Words of Donald Barthelme]
I went to my Mother and said, Mother, I want To be in love. And she replied? She said, me too.
What Did You Just Say?
I do hate fucking Lawyers, but, you know, Occasionally, I have to make a One-off exception.
I Can't Believe You Were There [Apologies to Robyn Hitchcock]
I'm friends with a bimbo, My arms are akimbo, My mind is in limbo.
But She's a Stranger [In the Words of Donald Barthelme]
Naked woman In the next room. On a couch. Reclining. Flowers in her hair. I've seen one. In a magazine.
That's Just The Way I Do It! [The Male Gaze]
If both my eyes were open, I'd perve at all your naughty bits. With only one eye closed, I'd focus on your perfect tits.
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 accessibly philosophical and very funny.
I could see someone claiming that some of his stuff is just gimmicky and I could see myself telling that someone to go away.
These (mostly) micro-fictions are quality of the first order. Read this thing. Change your life mayne.
داستانهاش بهشدت به سلیقه من نزدیکه. داستان هایی با اتفاقاتی عجیب و که خیلی طبیعی و معمولی بیان میشن، داستانهایی که توش هرچیزی رو ممکنه پیداکنی، داستانهایی با کلی ساختارشکنی و کارای جدید و جالب و خلاق، که نمیشه حتا به بعضیاش گفت داستان!
بعضی از داستانهاش ممکنه زیاد دوستداشتنی نباشن و به این علت ۵ ستاره ندادم. ولی بعضی داستانهاش به شدت محشرن و هزارتا ستاره هم براشون کمه.
ممکنه با خوندنش آدم ایده بگیره برای نوشتن. خلاق نوشتن.
جالبیش اینه که داستانهایی که طنز قویای دارن، صرفن طنز نیستن و توش چیزهای مختلف رو نقد میکنه و نقدشم جوریه که خیلی راحت به چشم میاد و با خوندنش راحت میفهمی منظورش از این اتفاقات چیه و نظرشو درباره چی داره بیان میکنه.
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” book in times of distraction, when something more demanding would have tested my fractured concentration. Don’t get me wrong, he’s charming, clever; some of his ideas, and his ways of approaching them, are great, for what they are. But what are they? To my mind, magazine stories, little pop-art bursts of colour to spice up the lifestyle supplement, things you read over coffee with a shrug and a chuckle and put aside. Nothing wrong with that I suppose, and his influence is certainly widespread (in Australia in the 70s this style was “it” among “experimental” authors, which may account partly for my lack of enthusiasm), but I’d just as soon my heart get a workout as well as my mind. Same old criticism from me, I guess, so I’ll leave it at that. Absurdist cartoonist par excellence, just nothing to set me on fire.
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", "The Party", "A Manual for Sons", "I Bought a Little City", "Rebecca", "The School", "The Leap", "How I Write My Songs" y "Heroes".
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 mark of absolute classics, like "The Great Hug", "Me and Miss Mandible", "Views of My Father Weeping" and "Cortes and Montezuma", among a half dozen or so others. Eccentric, horrifying, funny, and highly intelligent, this collection illustrates what an organized madman with an overgrown inner child can achieve with a typewriter.
Ця збірка є безсумнівною класикою, але от наскільки читабельною зараз? Постмодернізм пройшов складний шлях експериментів, та здається, що деякі експерименти Бартелмі вже не найцікавіші, та не найсвіжіші. Особливо, коли зараз можна озирнутись на увесь пласт літератури. Є декілька прям геніальних оповідань, ще декілька оригінально вибудованих, плюс усе пронизано щирим інтелектуальним гумором, але більшість зі збірки - це просто розваги Бартелмі, для яких, на жаль, читач зайвий. Автору себе розважати цікавіше.
Книга як закам'янілий відбиток слідів полишених доволі давно. Де кожен слід - це оповідання. Ми просуваємось нога в ногу, повторюючи шлях, ступаючи з оповідання в оповідання, але довколишнє середовище вже надто змінилось.
Як зауважено в чудовій післямові - Бартелмі видає літературний джаз. З цим важко не погодитись. Але де той джаз зараз, як не на запиленій поличці з історії мистецтва...
практично ідеальна збірка вибраного, що унаочнює весь діапазон письменницької майстерності й той рівень інтелектуального гумору, який колись був в американській літературі. усі різновиди комічного й драматичного у 60 зразках допитливого і вишуканого розуму. "Золотий дощ", "Повстання індіанців", "Бачиш місяць?", "Роберт Кеннеді", "Я і міс Менідбл", "Повітряна куля", "Смарагд", "Школа" та інші - просто геніальні, а інші - не гірші. Сподіваюся, невдовзі вийде в "Темпорі" з моєю післямовою.
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.
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 must have at least a few decent ones...and it does, thankfully! I think Barthelme is quite well regarded in literary circles and you can see why, as he certainly had a lot of talent and he did have quite a unique style and approach to short story writing. He has a very eclectic mix of tales here and they do feel very fresh and different, almost like he was ahead of his time in some ways. You get an experimental one here and there, a quirky innocent one, a few that are pretty dark and sinister, a load of surreal ones and then some that are almost baffling...you never know what is going to hit you next, which keeps you on your toes! He is very hard to pin down in terms of what kind of writer he is, maybe like Brautigan, in that he has his own hard to describe literary voice, and that's always a good thing... I didn't like every single story, there were a couple I wasn't that bothered about, but out of sixty wildly differing tales, that means I liked pretty much the whole collection, and with such a rich and varied mix here, there probably is at least a few stories to please most people.
Скільки є відтінків снігу? Сорок, п’ятдесят, шістдесят? Залежить від джерела інформації. Скільки є назв снігу? Двісті? Триста? Чи п’ятсот, як у ескімосів, якщо вірити чуткам?
Скільки є відтінків тексту? Жанрів, напрямків, типів, підтипів etc? Хтозна. Скільки думок (експертних і не дуже), стільки і видів тесту, напевно. Можна, приміром, все життя читати одноманітного Ернеста Гемінґвея і бачити/вишуковувати у ньому різноманіття. А можна все життя читати різноманітного Дональда Бартелмі — і одразу бачити різноманіття. Чи не бачити. Чи не розуміти його. (Шкода.)
Чи можна вловити 60 відтінків Дональда Бартелмі у його 60 оповіданнях? Мабуть, так, хоча деякі оповідання написанні в однаковому (оповідання-діалоги, приміром) стилі. Але однаковий стиль — не однакова тематика. Мабуть, все залежить від сприйняття читача. Безліч відтінків Бартелмі. Автоматично — безліч відтінків тексту. Широка одноманітність Бартелмі.
Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories Penguin, 1982 introduction 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 had finally arrived on the wave-length.
New to Barthelme? Read this one first. I’ve heard a few people say that Forty Stories is easier. I don’t see the truth in that. Some stories will grab you instantly, others will seem incomprehensible or opaque. (My favorites; “Me and Miss Mandible”, “City Life”, “A Manual for Sons”, above all: “At the End of the Mechanical Age”.) If you get stuck, bounce around. Read the stories out of sequence. Open the book at random and read sentences like fortunes: “There are twenty-two kinds of fathers, of which only nineteen are important.”
Нікого не здивую, якщо скажу, що це дивовижно відшліфована збірка постмодерністських оповідань. Скажу неправду, коли вдам, що зрозуміла кожне, чи більшість. Проте стовідсотково не виділила б жодне, бо ж це одна із найкращих збірок. Ти ніби читаєш різних письменників, з абсолютно різними стилями, різноманітним калейдоскопом подій та тем. Це такий собі діафільм довжиною в тисячі кадрів. Клац, і нова сцена, клац, і ще одна, клац, плівка обірвалась, а тут взагалі хтось вирізав шматок. Іноді смішно, презирливо, саркастично, часом меланхолійно, чи з острахом. Там нас запрошує Бартелмі на прогулянку містом, а потім кидає у вир джазу. Чудова, чудова збірка «я голосую за піаніно»👌
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 Barthelme explicitly stating the theme of any of his stories. Typically, he builds his bewildering stories using an elliptical approach to his prose, often stripping it down to mere dialogue or a single character engaged in monologue. More often than not I found myself shaking my head at the end of the story because my grasp of the overall theme was shaky at best. As I continued to read these stories something interesting began to happen. I got stronger as a reader, and so did the stories. For instance, I found the story of a grown man stuck in the third grade due to a bureaucratic mistake in Me and Miss Mandible a little uncomfortable, but by the end of the book the story about human longing illustrated by a witch giving birth to a sentient seven thousand and thirty five carat emerald after being impregnated by the man in the moon didn’t faze me at all.
Barthelme is an unmistakable stylist. As such, most readers will react strongly one way or the other to the absurdist elements of Sixty Stories. Since most of these stories were short to the point of bordering on flash fiction, I thought I would occasionally pick the book up and read a story during my lunch breaks as time permitted. I found that this strategy did not work with my reading style, even though the length of the stories are perfect for getting in and out with no one getting hurt. Barthelme writes for the quick of mind, and I’m a plodder. The idea of a long hard slog through a big square thing isn’t particularly daunting, but I found that too often with sixty stories I would be left shaking my head at the end of lunch and not looking to get back into the book. I found a lot more enjoyment when I sat down with the book for long periods of time. By the time I worked through three or four stories in a row on a nightly basis my head was in the proper space for enjoying what Barthelme had to offer. My advice to readers would be to read at least three of the stories (perhaps at random) before deciding that Barthelme isn’t your thing.
Highlights for me: The Balloon, Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning, The Indian Uprising, The Policeman’s Ball, Daumier, Eugenie Grandet, Nothing: A Preliminary Account, A Manual for Sons, Cortes and Montezuma, The King of Jazz, On the Steps of the Conservatory (in conjunction with the companion piece The Farewell), The Leap, How I Write My Songs (Ride the Snake to the Lake).
60 Histórias, de Donald Barthelme. Tradução de Paulo Faria. Com quase 600 páginas de contos, não é de estranhar que Barthelme apresente nesta coletânea resultados muito díspares. Se alguns contos são fabulosos (Miss Mandíbula é, para mim, o melhor dos sessenta), e outros bons, há também deles apenas razoáveis de tão crípticos. Barthelme deturpa amiúde as expetativas de leitura criadas por toda uma tradição narrativa, e é aí que reside a essência da sua obra, pois não há como abordar estes contos «como quem lê um romance»; devem, ao invés, ser lidos como tentativas irónicas de desconstrução da narrativa ficcional linear e um ataque às normas políticas e sociais que nos subjugam. Barthelme é particularmente acutilante e sarcástico no que concerne a relações amorosas e familiares, e há em muitos dos seus contos laivos óbvios de um certo complexo de Édipo. Um livro interessante, que deve, contudo, ser lido aos poucos.
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 human condition in the abstract, but as not stark as those European forebears. There is a postmodern American freewheeling whimsy in these stories that makes them more digestible, at times bordering on the dignified silliness of Robert Benchley or S.J. Perelman. I'm also obsessed with the way Barthelme creates these perfect sentences, over and over and over again. Such an ear for the music of language, the way it is corralled for different purposes, the way it can be made funny and strange and absurd, forceful, bizarre, erotic. It's hard to believe all of this was written by one man. Each story is a universe in itself.
"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." -'Rebecca'
Шістдесят оповідань позаду. Одна п’ята зі мною. «Я в міс Мендибл» - з розряду «а що якщо» у тілі маленького хлопчика розум і бажання дорослого чоловіка «Куля» - велика рандомна куля над Нью Йорком «Картини ридання батька» - про те, як батька переїхав екіпаж, і чи вдалось знайти винуватців «Про ангелів» - що робити ангелам, коли вмирає Бог? «Скляна гора» - як і Куля, рандомна скляна гора посеред Нью Йорку, суцільні пронумеровані речення «Critique de la vie quotidianne» - про труднощі сімейного життя «Пісочний чоловік» - лист від коханого до психіатра «Підйом капіталізму» - капіталізм який просочується всюди «Місто церков» - як церкви заполонили всі будівлі, і як химерно бути поза контекстом «Ребекка іґуана» - про лесбійку, із зеленавим відтінком шкіри, яка хотіла змінити прізвище «Смерть Едварда Ліра» - абсурдистське про смерть як п��дію із запрошенням, про її трактування в очах інших «Як я пишу пісні» - маленька практична інструкція з іронічними прикладами
Всі інші надто складні для моєї простої д��шеньки. Додає до прочитання те, що більшість читала переховуючись від російських ракет, що підвищує абсурдність цього світу
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 drive is organized meticulously.
I relate this because, after finishing Sixty Stories I was arranging them in my short stories list, and realized that I recalled most of them a lot more fondly than I would have anticipated. Reading short stories isn't always my cup of tea. I often get frustrated because just when I get acclimated to the structure of the story, right when I really sink into the groove, the story ends. I'm more comfortable in a sprawling morass that I can really sink into. Also, I can't resist trying to constantly ask what the author is trying to convey. These two issues I have are both especially prominent in Donald Barthelme's stories, which often experiment with form and narrative, and never, with a few exceptions, exceed ten pages. So the process of reading Sixty Stories was often frustrating. Every now and then, maybe when my mood was just right, one of the stories would just really connect. However, more often it seemed that I enjoyed having read the stories much more than actually reading them. And then there were a handful of stories I flat out didn't like. This final category of stories fell into two camps: a) ones where I recognized what Barthelme was trying to do but felt that he didn't really connect; or b) stories that I felt like I needed to read a 20 page dissertation on to ultimately understand.
Despite these possible missteps, there is definitely more good than bad here. From a historical perspective, Barthelme has to be one of the more significant American writers of the post-war era. While nobody I've encountered writes exactly like him, his influence is easy to spot in the work of George Saunders, Robert Coover, and David Foster Wallace. Barthelme never really manages to be engaging. He struggles with creating authentically human characters and his prose is rarely appealing. However, his inventiveness and his willingness to take risks make up for many of these weaknesses. Like I said before, an absolute pleasure to have read, if not always to read.
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 Practices, Unnatural Acts and Sadness, this volume includes several stories uncollected anywhere else. Highlights include a story about a balloon settling down on New York City, another telling of an ascent up a glass mountain, a "Manual for Sons" describing different types of fathers, and a retelling of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet.
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. The evidence of a deep thinker at work beneath the playfulness and humour recalls Wallace Stevens. You can see the impact of his influence upon the writing of Dave Eggers, George Saunders and Nicholson Baker, but he deserves to be more celebrated. He is certainly the equal of Pynchon, Delillo, Auster or any of the other great American postmodern writers.
I actually prefered 40 stories to 60 stories but they both demand reading.
With the exception of a couple of stories, particularly "Game," I found this collection of stories to be affected, precious, and irritatingly obscure (like the New Yorker magazine in which they so often appeared). Perhaps he meant to write gibberish. If so, what a strange way to burn heartbeats before you die. If not, it's a discourtesy to the reader to hide behind such a strange veil. Maybe the way to approach his work is to think of it as a messy collection of experimental attempts. Just like evolutionary mutations, most of these attempts are abortive. But a few work, and are worth having. The ones that do find some absurd situation in our world, and heighten it a bit. But most don't. It's a shame he wasted most of his talent, which is undeniable, attempting to always do new things. Novelty is a shallow virtue at best.
This selection remains the essential one for the situational brilliance, streetwise high-mindedness, worldly moaning and groaning, revivified commonplaces, and startling perfection of phrase that -- taken all in all -- defined a late-20th-Century master. No one with an ear for the language will want to skip the discoveries Donald Barthelme made in American Eglish. No one seeking to get their minds around the ever-more-citified complications of our existence, and to find what may yet amount to the human sob and chortle in those complications, can afford to skip this compendium.