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A review by raulbime
Summer Lightning and Other Stories by Olive Senior
5.0
The protagonists in this collection of ten stories are forlorn, mostly children, who live in rural Jamaica. They’re observant of the world around them, highly acute to the conditions that make themselves and those around them as they are, and make efforts to grasp at and understand that which would be simply termed as their lives.
It’s strange that I can now be able to tell while reading a work of fiction that its author also writes poetry. The way the narrative’s form, even at the sentence level, lends itself to the needs of the story, and makes whatever use it has to while at times disregarding typical form, as well as that way of, seemingly, rounding the story as it ends, might have something to do with this, but I wasn’t surprised to learn later that Olive Senior does write poetry as well.
This is a brilliant collection. I’ve been awed at the skill used to carry the stories off, but even more by the care and sensitivity the writer gives the experiences of the characters that people this story. Writing about poverty can bend towards the voyeuristic. Which isn’t to mean that poverty shouldn’t be written about, or that the suffering of the impoverished shouldn’t be recorded and highlighted. But storytelling, especially in places termed as “developing” or “third world”, can turn the conditions of poverty and deprivation into a kind of spectacle-something to marvel at, arouse disgust or pity, which if anything creates even more distance between the reader and the subjects of the story. Normally in these cases the writers aren’t even from the impoverished communities they depict, and even when they are of origin of the “third world” countries, they’re typically from a class that’s insulated from these depictions, and the intended audience for the stories is, also, not the subjects of the stories themselves; often is intended for those in “developed” or “first world” countries. But reading through this story it’s apparent the amount of genuine love the writer has for the world she artfully depicts and it shows in the level of complexity she’s given to the characters and the relations they have with each other and the world around them.
Star ratings are difficult for me, I’m not going to pretend that there’s a sure formula that I always abide by, and short story collections are even more difficult to rate. For one it’s unrealistic to expect that all short stories will be excellent or on the same level, but seven out of ten of these stories were excellent and given all that I’ve explained so far, this book shouldn’t be getting anything less than five stars from me.
It’s strange that I can now be able to tell while reading a work of fiction that its author also writes poetry. The way the narrative’s form, even at the sentence level, lends itself to the needs of the story, and makes whatever use it has to while at times disregarding typical form, as well as that way of, seemingly, rounding the story as it ends, might have something to do with this, but I wasn’t surprised to learn later that Olive Senior does write poetry as well.
This is a brilliant collection. I’ve been awed at the skill used to carry the stories off, but even more by the care and sensitivity the writer gives the experiences of the characters that people this story. Writing about poverty can bend towards the voyeuristic. Which isn’t to mean that poverty shouldn’t be written about, or that the suffering of the impoverished shouldn’t be recorded and highlighted. But storytelling, especially in places termed as “developing” or “third world”, can turn the conditions of poverty and deprivation into a kind of spectacle-something to marvel at, arouse disgust or pity, which if anything creates even more distance between the reader and the subjects of the story. Normally in these cases the writers aren’t even from the impoverished communities they depict, and even when they are of origin of the “third world” countries, they’re typically from a class that’s insulated from these depictions, and the intended audience for the stories is, also, not the subjects of the stories themselves; often is intended for those in “developed” or “first world” countries. But reading through this story it’s apparent the amount of genuine love the writer has for the world she artfully depicts and it shows in the level of complexity she’s given to the characters and the relations they have with each other and the world around them.
Star ratings are difficult for me, I’m not going to pretend that there’s a sure formula that I always abide by, and short story collections are even more difficult to rate. For one it’s unrealistic to expect that all short stories will be excellent or on the same level, but seven out of ten of these stories were excellent and given all that I’ve explained so far, this book shouldn’t be getting anything less than five stars from me.