![]() ![]() What is really amazing about these stories, however, is how this dialogue is so masterfully intercut with details. Salinger, as has been endlessly noted everywhere man can put pen to paper, has a great ear for dialogue my favourite touches were the frequent interruptions and the not uncommon intonations of syllables, like “won derful”. I have a title and you may just be impressed by titles. I don’t think I shall tell you my full name, for the moment. The girl walks over, and introduces herself as Soon, the girl, her little brother and their governess walk in. He goes down to the town, walks into the church, listens to the child choir sing, notices particularly one among them, and goes over to a tea shop. It centers around an American soldier posted for training near Devonshire, England. “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor” is by far my favourite of the nine. It is, along with “For Esmé”, the least random of the nine stories. This is the story of the relationship between Boo Boo Tannenbaum, née Glass, her son Lionel and Lionel’s Godot-ish father. “Down at the Dinghy” is the second appearance, in Salinger’s work, of a Glass family member, after Seymour in the first story. ![]() Instead of actually talking about “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, I’ll just direct any interested readers to two interesting write-ups on it, one by Kevin (from Canada) and one by Trevor Barrett, as they say anything and everything I could possibly say. Special mention for coming close to being good: “Just Before the War with the Eskimos”, about one girl talking to one man and then another, and “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period”, about a new art teacher who finds an extraordinary student. The stories are “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, “Down at the Dinghy”, “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor” (by far my favorite) and “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes”. It’s a very good experiment, and it doesn’t detract from the experience that Salinger is one of the best I’ve read among American anti-formal writers, but, with the exception of four stories, I’m just… best exemplified by a bored Bill Murray.Īs I said, I only liked four of the stories, so I’m only going to talk about them, as I believe I’ve explained myself adequately on the negative front. It’s method: take the three-act structure and leave out an act (or maybe just half of one, but I don’t really care for these formalisms anyway), so that the ending completely blindsides us, the difference from The Sixth Sense being that Salinger’s ‘twists’ can’t even be properly explained in retrospect. ![]() It’s basically trying – if the above-quoted epigraph and “Teddy” are enough to go by – to ,at least slightly ,disturb our view of reality. Right now, after having read this book twice, the first time as I would any other book and the second to confirm the new view I got of it in the last story “Teddy”, I’m not sure I care enough about the book to be writing this review. The Catcher in the Rye may be the Salinger book considered the classic, but most seasoned book lovers I know, both on World Literature Forum and the blogosphere (I know precious few in real life), prefer his Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey.
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