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Reviews
Penguin Modern Stories 1 by David Plante, Jean Rhys, William Sansom, Judith Burnley, Bernard Malamud
tolstoj4ever's review
4.0
I cannot get over how much I love short stories. Some stories here I loved, they resonated with me so deeply, like Jean Rhys' 'I spy a stranger', all about feeling completely isolated and misunderstood among people. Though the actual feelings of the main character are hardly described, they radiate from the page and hit you like a wall.
I also really loved David Plante's fountain tree. It was quite awful, a very sad, hopeless tale, but the concept of it made me smile. The letter-structure, illustrating a crumbling marriage, felt so intimate, the reader is like an intruder, pitiful to see two people in love hate each other so. I particularly liked this passage: "Thinking of her, he found his pen, as if obsessed by a rarefied rhythm, evolving the possibility of her giving birth to a great wet mass of tangled flowers. One of her eyes was a moon, the other an orange."
I also really loved David Plante's fountain tree. It was quite awful, a very sad, hopeless tale, but the concept of it made me smile. The letter-structure, illustrating a crumbling marriage, felt so intimate, the reader is like an intruder, pitiful to see two people in love hate each other so. I particularly liked this passage: "Thinking of her, he found his pen, as if obsessed by a rarefied rhythm, evolving the possibility of her giving birth to a great wet mass of tangled flowers. One of her eyes was a moon, the other an orange."
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