Jean Stafford (1915–1979)

This book shouldn't have been the slog for me that it was. I love short stories generally and Jean Stafford has a very rich vocabulary and dense writing style that makes paying attention to what you are reading, a must.

I felt strongly that reading Jean Stafford was like reading a pre-cursor to more modern prose styles like Joyce Carol Oates, and indeed, Oates wrote a New York Times piece defending the works of Jean Stafford and pointing out how neglected her works are...https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/28/books/adventures-in-abandonment.html?pagewanted=all

All the same, this was a slog. While there were many stories that I enjoyed, there were also many that seemed to have similar character types from story to story and the old fashioned language of her stories was, at first, interesting because it was unusual to me, but later became a bit of a drag. It was a bit like picking up The Lord of the Rings again after not having read it for 20 years...once it had been new and even exciting to me at 10 years old, but now I feel like I am reading an archaic form of english.

So I am giving it 3 stars and an "I liked it" but it was not the best Pulitzer winner I have read so far and I doubt I will ever want to go back and read it again. I also doubt I will purposely pick up anything else by Jean Stafford any time soon.… (més)

Stafford arranged her Pulitzer-winning collected stories geographically. All of the stories appear to be set in places where Stafford lived or spent a considerable amount of time, and consequently all of the stories have a strong sense of place.

The stories in the first section, “Innocents Abroad,” are set in continental Europe, and mostly in Germany. The most memorable story for me in this section is “The Echo and the Nemesis,” about a friendship between to expat college students in Germany that turns into something worthy of The Twilight Zone.

Section two, “The Bostonians and Other Manifestations of the American Scene,” features stories set in New England. The story that stood out to me in this section is “A Country Love Story,” about the disintegration of a May-December marriage after the couple moves to the country for the husband’s health. Many aspects of this story reminded me of Middlemarch.

The third section, “Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains,” contains stories set in the Western U.S. In this section, “A Reading Problem” will resonate with avid readers. The story tells how a young girl finds a place where she can read alone to her heart’s content, and then loses it.

The stories in the concluding section, “Manhattan Island,” are set in New York. “Cops and Robbers” is perhaps the most heartbreaking story in the collection, as it depicts the disintegration of a marriage with a five-year-old child used as a proxy.

This is a collection to be savored rather than rushed through. Although it took me several weeks to read it, Stafford’s exquisite use of language and her attention to detail provided the motivation I needed to read the entire collection.… (més)