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The Salzburg Tales
A group of visitors to the Salzburg Festival, brought together by chance, decides to mark time by telling tales. Their fantasies, legends, tragedies, jokes and parodies come together as The Salzburg Tales.
Dazzling in their richness and vitality, the tales are grounded in Christina Stead's belief that 'the story is magical . what is best about the short story [is] it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one'. Originally published eighty years ago, these are thoroughly modern stories that invite comparison with Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
The Salzburg Tales are published here with a new introduction by Margaret Harris, Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita at the University of Sydney, and literary executor for Christina Stead.
Dazzling in their richness and vitality, the tales are grounded in Christina Stead's belief that 'the story is magical . what is best about the short story [is] it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one'. Originally published eighty years ago, these are thoroughly modern stories that invite comparison with Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
The Salzburg Tales are published here with a new introduction by Margaret Harris, Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita at the University of Sydney, and literary executor for Christina Stead.
398 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1934
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About the author
Christina Stead
39 books127 followersChristina Stead (1902–1983) was an Australian writer regarded as one of the twentieth century’s master novelists. Stead spent most of her writing life in Europe and the United States, and her varied residences acted as the settings for a number of her novels. She is best known for The Man Who Loved Children (1940), which was praised by author Jonathan Franzen as a “crazy, gorgeous family novel” and “one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.” Stead died in her native Australia in 1983.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 2, 2015
"When I say that Miss Christina Stead’s Salzburg Tales are far better than the Decameron, I intend nothing but disrespect to Boccaccio, the prince of bores…. Miss Stead impales literary butterflies on the needles of malicious paragraphs, weaves medieval legends that sound as if you had looked in upon them years ago through the dim pages of the Gesta Romana, relates funny stories about goldfish that predict the fluctuations of the stock market, and tricks venerable jokes out until they become tiny, twinkling masterpieces of gargoyle humor."
- Clifton Fadiman - from http://neglectedbooks.com/?page_id=58
Now, I would not go that far - not least because I love the Decameron - but also because the quality of the tales varied considerably, as did the enjoyment I got out of them.
Nevertheless, here we have another counter to the argument that "women don't produce these sort of books". Forty years before the PostModern types would do similar re-workings of such texts, Christina was doin it and doin it and doin it well.
Someone else also said:
No work of Christina Stead’s has divided commentary more than The Salzburg
Tales. Contemporary reviews were overwhelmingly positive, with the Times Literary
Supplement saluting it as evidence of a “story-teller of profuse imagination [. . .] [and] unusual interest” (Geering 45) and the New Yorker claiming that the stories were “far better than the Decameron” (Rowley 156). Later critics, however, have been less certain of its merit and of the place it holds in her unfolding oeuvre.
Although R. G. Geering maintained that Stead “never surpassed the sheer brilliance of this early volume” (45), Diana Brydon has adjudged its tales “accomplished but conventional,” arguing that stylistically they “represent[ed] a dead end” and demanded the suppression of her disturbing, hallmark attribute: “the original critical intelligence that springs from her own experience as a woman” (47)
- Clifton Fadiman - from http://neglectedbooks.com/?page_id=58
Now, I would not go that far - not least because I love the Decameron - but also because the quality of the tales varied considerably, as did the enjoyment I got out of them.
Nevertheless, here we have another counter to the argument that "women don't produce these sort of books". Forty years before the PostModern types would do similar re-workings of such texts, Christina was doin it and doin it and doin it well.
Someone else also said:
No work of Christina Stead’s has divided commentary more than The Salzburg
Tales. Contemporary reviews were overwhelmingly positive, with the Times Literary
Supplement saluting it as evidence of a “story-teller of profuse imagination [. . .] [and] unusual interest” (Geering 45) and the New Yorker claiming that the stories were “far better than the Decameron” (Rowley 156). Later critics, however, have been less certain of its merit and of the place it holds in her unfolding oeuvre.
Although R. G. Geering maintained that Stead “never surpassed the sheer brilliance of this early volume” (45), Diana Brydon has adjudged its tales “accomplished but conventional,” arguing that stylistically they “represent[ed] a dead end” and demanded the suppression of her disturbing, hallmark attribute: “the original critical intelligence that springs from her own experience as a woman” (47)
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September 16, 2016No rating (didn't finish)
It's worth reading some of this if only to learn how powerful an author's character description can be - superb!
I cannot fault the writing. It's just very long, and I couldn’t get involved enough with any of the wonderful characters or the stories they had to tell. I gather this is written in the style of The Canterbury Tales, another work which has never captured my imagination, although I am generally fond of short stories.
Because I read only the first part of this, I can’t rate it in good conscience, but I would like to share a sample of her extraordinary 5star style.
Nobody can touch Christina Stead for character description, and I hope to give you an idea. The book begins by introducing us to a wide range of “personages” who are arriving to attend a production of “Jedermann” (Everyman) held in the Cathedral Place of Salzburg.
As each person arrives, Stead introduces them with a title and a page or two detailing their clothing, personality and manner. One was the VIENNESE CONDUCTOR. (They are all presented to us with capital letters.)
“The Viennese Conductor was like a tasselled reed, with shoulder and hands spreading outwards, delicate hips and a soft, long, feline stride: he sometimes took shorter steps and sometimes longer as if to show that in him the passion of rhythm was constant but tidal. He looked this way and that as he bowed obsequiously over his companion’s conversation, smiling to himself on the side, as if he had a tiding of joy in his sleeve, and gathering in the ladies’ glances; it might have been harvest-time and he a reaping-hook.”
He continues making his theatrical way through the gathering crowd, “and then he walked on indifferently, dropping all this behind him, like a dolphin in the waves, going on from easy conquest to easy conquest, speaking of violins and sunshine, . . .”
Then there is the Scottish DOCTRESS who “liked to be with men, she smoked cigarettes and drank milk. . . gave lectures in schools to embarrassed adolescents and taught nose-blowing to kindergartners. . . she liked pretty little girls but detested little boys with their ink, their coils of string, their stamps and smells.”
As I said, nobody could fault her writing. Written in 1936, republished again between then and now, and once again recently. Thanks to NetGalley and Melbourne University Press for allowing me to review an advance copy. I’m only sorry I didn't do it justice.
It's worth reading some of this if only to learn how powerful an author's character description can be - superb!
I cannot fault the writing. It's just very long, and I couldn’t get involved enough with any of the wonderful characters or the stories they had to tell. I gather this is written in the style of The Canterbury Tales, another work which has never captured my imagination, although I am generally fond of short stories.
Because I read only the first part of this, I can’t rate it in good conscience, but I would like to share a sample of her extraordinary 5star style.
Nobody can touch Christina Stead for character description, and I hope to give you an idea. The book begins by introducing us to a wide range of “personages” who are arriving to attend a production of “Jedermann” (Everyman) held in the Cathedral Place of Salzburg.
As each person arrives, Stead introduces them with a title and a page or two detailing their clothing, personality and manner. One was the VIENNESE CONDUCTOR. (They are all presented to us with capital letters.)
“The Viennese Conductor was like a tasselled reed, with shoulder and hands spreading outwards, delicate hips and a soft, long, feline stride: he sometimes took shorter steps and sometimes longer as if to show that in him the passion of rhythm was constant but tidal. He looked this way and that as he bowed obsequiously over his companion’s conversation, smiling to himself on the side, as if he had a tiding of joy in his sleeve, and gathering in the ladies’ glances; it might have been harvest-time and he a reaping-hook.”
He continues making his theatrical way through the gathering crowd, “and then he walked on indifferently, dropping all this behind him, like a dolphin in the waves, going on from easy conquest to easy conquest, speaking of violins and sunshine, . . .”
Then there is the Scottish DOCTRESS who “liked to be with men, she smoked cigarettes and drank milk. . . gave lectures in schools to embarrassed adolescents and taught nose-blowing to kindergartners. . . she liked pretty little girls but detested little boys with their ink, their coils of string, their stamps and smells.”
As I said, nobody could fault her writing. Written in 1936, republished again between then and now, and once again recently. Thanks to NetGalley and Melbourne University Press for allowing me to review an advance copy. I’m only sorry I didn't do it justice.
May 22, 2020
And why shouldn't we fill in our leisure hours this way, listening to tales! What a company we are! We come from every corner of the earth; we have seen the world; we know Life. Let us amuse each other."
This, I can confidently say, is one of the strangest books I have ever read.
I have long had a fascination-cum-adoration for Christina Stead, one of the most difficult writers to emerge from our Great Southern Continent, but even compared to her often violently idiosyncratic novels, The Salzburg Tales is a beguiling, deeply individual work. Over the course of 7 days, a bunch of socially disparate visitors to the annual Salzburg Festival (still occurring as of 2020, almost nine decades after the novel's publication) tell tales with each other, in a plot device that is consciously Boccaccio with a touch of Chaucer, and what tales they are.
Stead's stories have a much deeper fairytale element than Boccaccio's, seem to draw less on existing folk myth and more on a repository of subconscious Freudian ideas, buried tropes, and a limitless imagination. There is really no explaining the contents of this book as the stories often have no great power outside of the author's endlessly versatile prose. The marionettist who abandons his family for the glitzy life of an urbane sculptor, the dead wife whose golden statue takes her place in the mind of her late husband and his adulterous brother... the stories could easily fill the annals of O. Henry or John Cheever or, indeed, the works of R.L. Stine!
Here, however, Stead transforms these unsettling tales into something mystical yet earthy, intangible yet heartpoundingly visceral, abstract but sentimental. Her turns of phrase, unsurprisingly for those who have read her novels such as The Man Who Loved Children or Letty Fox: Her Luck are cuttingly precise, startlingly poetic. The absolute best, for my money, are those told in the first person. It saddens me that Stead didn't become a playwright; even reading some of the first-person stories out loud at home (hey, we commit weird acts during pandemic lockdown), I found myself close to tears with the poignancy and dare I say magical-realism of the experience.
Perhaps best read as a nightly story before bed, rather than rushed through for the sake of completion. These are delicacies to be savoured, jewels to be plucked from a box for quiet contemplation. Stead remains criminally underrated, but she is also an author one must approach on her terms - rather like a caged leopard. Look the wrong way, allow her to take control, and you may as well surrender your life. She writes on her terms; approach with caution.
This, I can confidently say, is one of the strangest books I have ever read.
I have long had a fascination-cum-adoration for Christina Stead, one of the most difficult writers to emerge from our Great Southern Continent, but even compared to her often violently idiosyncratic novels, The Salzburg Tales is a beguiling, deeply individual work. Over the course of 7 days, a bunch of socially disparate visitors to the annual Salzburg Festival (still occurring as of 2020, almost nine decades after the novel's publication) tell tales with each other, in a plot device that is consciously Boccaccio with a touch of Chaucer, and what tales they are.
Stead's stories have a much deeper fairytale element than Boccaccio's, seem to draw less on existing folk myth and more on a repository of subconscious Freudian ideas, buried tropes, and a limitless imagination. There is really no explaining the contents of this book as the stories often have no great power outside of the author's endlessly versatile prose. The marionettist who abandons his family for the glitzy life of an urbane sculptor, the dead wife whose golden statue takes her place in the mind of her late husband and his adulterous brother... the stories could easily fill the annals of O. Henry or John Cheever or, indeed, the works of R.L. Stine!
Here, however, Stead transforms these unsettling tales into something mystical yet earthy, intangible yet heartpoundingly visceral, abstract but sentimental. Her turns of phrase, unsurprisingly for those who have read her novels such as The Man Who Loved Children or Letty Fox: Her Luck are cuttingly precise, startlingly poetic. The absolute best, for my money, are those told in the first person. It saddens me that Stead didn't become a playwright; even reading some of the first-person stories out loud at home (hey, we commit weird acts during pandemic lockdown), I found myself close to tears with the poignancy and dare I say magical-realism of the experience.
Perhaps best read as a nightly story before bed, rather than rushed through for the sake of completion. These are delicacies to be savoured, jewels to be plucked from a box for quiet contemplation. Stead remains criminally underrated, but she is also an author one must approach on her terms - rather like a caged leopard. Look the wrong way, allow her to take control, and you may as well surrender your life. She writes on her terms; approach with caution.
January 26, 2016
‘Salzburg, old princely and archiepiscopal city, and its fortress Hohen-Salzburg, lie among the mountains of the Tyrol, in Salzburg Province, in Austria.’
A chance meeting at the Salzburg Festival, brings together a group of strangers. They have some time on their hands, and decide to tell each other stories. So, over seven days, the members of this group take turns in sharing tales of fantasy and legend, tragedies, parodies and jokes. A more modern rendition of Bocaccio’s ‘Decameron’ or Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’? Perhaps, although I’ve never read both in full and so cannot make accurate comparisons.
‘When they reached the outlook over the city and sat down, he began, by accident to relate the history of a humble man who had lived in Salzburg and been a friend of his, and that was the first story told.’
While I found most of the stories interesting, and some utterly absorbing, few of the characters telling the story made much impact on me. They existed, I felt, as vehicles for conveying the story to the reader without themselves being of significance. Or, perhaps, I was so focussed on the stories being told I didn’t pay enough attention to the story teller. One day I’ll reread ‘The Salzburg Tales’, and I’ll pay more attention to the storytellers. I enjoyed Ms Stead’s descriptions of each storyteller (‘The Personages’) but there were so many of them that by the time I’d got to their particular story, I needed to go back. Some of the descriptions I enjoyed included: ‘After them came the ITALIAN SINGER, a gentleman of fifty years or more, with a ravaged wrinkled face, like a mask of tragedy carved in wood; …’ , ‘There came in next the POET. He was tall, spare and ill, with hollow cheeks and eyes.’, and the SOLICITOR ‘He loved a little chat, with a legal joke and a neat personality, and a little cup of tea.’
As I finished reading it, I wondered whether I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d felt that ‘The Personages’ were somehow more connected to the stories they told? I’ve read a couple of Ms Stead’s novels, and enjoyed them, and am slowly reading my way through her published work.
Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Melbourne University Publishing for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book, which was first published in 1934, for review purposes.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
A chance meeting at the Salzburg Festival, brings together a group of strangers. They have some time on their hands, and decide to tell each other stories. So, over seven days, the members of this group take turns in sharing tales of fantasy and legend, tragedies, parodies and jokes. A more modern rendition of Bocaccio’s ‘Decameron’ or Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’? Perhaps, although I’ve never read both in full and so cannot make accurate comparisons.
‘When they reached the outlook over the city and sat down, he began, by accident to relate the history of a humble man who had lived in Salzburg and been a friend of his, and that was the first story told.’
While I found most of the stories interesting, and some utterly absorbing, few of the characters telling the story made much impact on me. They existed, I felt, as vehicles for conveying the story to the reader without themselves being of significance. Or, perhaps, I was so focussed on the stories being told I didn’t pay enough attention to the story teller. One day I’ll reread ‘The Salzburg Tales’, and I’ll pay more attention to the storytellers. I enjoyed Ms Stead’s descriptions of each storyteller (‘The Personages’) but there were so many of them that by the time I’d got to their particular story, I needed to go back. Some of the descriptions I enjoyed included: ‘After them came the ITALIAN SINGER, a gentleman of fifty years or more, with a ravaged wrinkled face, like a mask of tragedy carved in wood; …’ , ‘There came in next the POET. He was tall, spare and ill, with hollow cheeks and eyes.’, and the SOLICITOR ‘He loved a little chat, with a legal joke and a neat personality, and a little cup of tea.’
As I finished reading it, I wondered whether I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d felt that ‘The Personages’ were somehow more connected to the stories they told? I’ve read a couple of Ms Stead’s novels, and enjoyed them, and am slowly reading my way through her published work.
Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Melbourne University Publishing for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book, which was first published in 1934, for review purposes.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
February 21, 2016
Christina Stead is finally and thankfully going through a revival as new readers are introduced to her works. Australia seems to have a habit of not celebrating its female authors and it is wonderful to see this renewed focus.
Stead in my humble opinion is one of Australia’s greatest authors and having read this novel just seals the deal for me.
A group of strangers have a chance meeting at the Salzburg Festival and over seven days they tell stories. The tales involve tragedy, humour, fantasy and myth. The characters are beautifully realised It is an extraordinary collection of stories and I was moved, engaged and transported into these diverse lives.
The way that Stead captures the elements of a character in her personages’ introduction is just divine ‘her arms were thin, muscular and rough skinned as a shark’s fin with too much exercise.’ There are so many gems like this as they make reading such a joy.
I know I am going on with the platitudes but seriously when you place this book in context, the time it was written (1934) by an Australian female author who was even denied a literary prize based on the grounds that she had been so long overseas that she had ceased to be an Australian. You begin to realise just how much that is a novel of great ambition and I am not sure that any other writer that Stead could have pulled it off. It is an extraordinary piece of work.
Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to review.
Stead in my humble opinion is one of Australia’s greatest authors and having read this novel just seals the deal for me.
A group of strangers have a chance meeting at the Salzburg Festival and over seven days they tell stories. The tales involve tragedy, humour, fantasy and myth. The characters are beautifully realised It is an extraordinary collection of stories and I was moved, engaged and transported into these diverse lives.
The way that Stead captures the elements of a character in her personages’ introduction is just divine ‘her arms were thin, muscular and rough skinned as a shark’s fin with too much exercise.’ There are so many gems like this as they make reading such a joy.
I know I am going on with the platitudes but seriously when you place this book in context, the time it was written (1934) by an Australian female author who was even denied a literary prize based on the grounds that she had been so long overseas that she had ceased to be an Australian. You begin to realise just how much that is a novel of great ambition and I am not sure that any other writer that Stead could have pulled it off. It is an extraordinary piece of work.
Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to review.
September 20, 2011
The Salzburg Tales is a 1930′s take on Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales, following the same pattern of a group of strangers meeting (in this case they are all attending the opera at the Salzburg Festival) and deciding to tell stories to pass the time. A 1930′s take on The Canterbury Tales? What’s not to love? Well, quite a bit if I’m honest.
For a start, Stead’s characters are nowhere near as diverse and interesting as Chaucer’s are, and I think that’s partly due to the set up of her frame narrative. Chaucer has his characters meet at a pub prior to going on pilgrimage. Boccaccio in his Decameron which follows the same format has his characters fleeing from the black death in Florence. Religion and death are both great levellers of men, but Austrian opera, strangely enough, is not. As a result, Stead’s characters are all the sort of middle class people who might attend an opera festival and so, although she has a keen eye for detail, there are none of the great individuals like the Miller or the Wife of Bath who stand out. Instead, they’re all much of a muchness. I enjoyed the character portraits when reading them, such as the Banker: 'He would risk half his fortune on a throw, turn head-over-heels in the air in an aeroplane, tell anyone in the world to go to Hell, laugh at princes and throw tax-collectors out the door, but he suffered excessively from toothache because he feared the dentist’s chair: and he was convinced that his luck depended on numbers, events, persons, odd things he encountered; his head accountant was forced to wear the same tie for six weeks because it preserved a liberal state of min in the Government in a difficult time: his chauffeur was obliged to carry the same umbrella, rain, hail or shine, because the umbrella depressed the market in a stock he had sold short.'
Or the Old Lady: 'She wore a long gold chain and a lorgnette and an expensive hat made of satin, feathers, straw and tulle, all mixed and mummified together: no one could imagine what antediluvian stock of unfashionable materials had been drawn upon to make her hat.'
They have enough interesting quirks to make them interesting without making them too contrived, and this was by far my favourite part of the book. However, the character types are all very similar and so even with these little details it becomes impossible to tell them apart, particularly when they do not behave in any manner distinct to their characters after this introduction.
Because the characters are all very similar, so are their stories. There was none of the variety of tone, dialect, register, interests and agenda which make The Canterbury Tales so great. In fact, I didn’t believe that any of these stories was being told by anyone other than Christina Stead herself. They aren’t the stories of the characters described at the beginning, but merely a short story collection stuffed into an unnecessary framework which adds nothing to the reading and understanding of them. This would have been less of a problem had I found the stories themselves enjoyable, but sadly they really weren’t my cup of tea. Very few of them were satisfying on a narrative level, often feeling either tedious and drawn out or as though a large chunk of the middle were missing in order to leap to a conclusion which didn’t make much sense.
I found this book a very frustrating read because I wanted it to be so good.
For a start, Stead’s characters are nowhere near as diverse and interesting as Chaucer’s are, and I think that’s partly due to the set up of her frame narrative. Chaucer has his characters meet at a pub prior to going on pilgrimage. Boccaccio in his Decameron which follows the same format has his characters fleeing from the black death in Florence. Religion and death are both great levellers of men, but Austrian opera, strangely enough, is not. As a result, Stead’s characters are all the sort of middle class people who might attend an opera festival and so, although she has a keen eye for detail, there are none of the great individuals like the Miller or the Wife of Bath who stand out. Instead, they’re all much of a muchness. I enjoyed the character portraits when reading them, such as the Banker: 'He would risk half his fortune on a throw, turn head-over-heels in the air in an aeroplane, tell anyone in the world to go to Hell, laugh at princes and throw tax-collectors out the door, but he suffered excessively from toothache because he feared the dentist’s chair: and he was convinced that his luck depended on numbers, events, persons, odd things he encountered; his head accountant was forced to wear the same tie for six weeks because it preserved a liberal state of min in the Government in a difficult time: his chauffeur was obliged to carry the same umbrella, rain, hail or shine, because the umbrella depressed the market in a stock he had sold short.'
Or the Old Lady: 'She wore a long gold chain and a lorgnette and an expensive hat made of satin, feathers, straw and tulle, all mixed and mummified together: no one could imagine what antediluvian stock of unfashionable materials had been drawn upon to make her hat.'
They have enough interesting quirks to make them interesting without making them too contrived, and this was by far my favourite part of the book. However, the character types are all very similar and so even with these little details it becomes impossible to tell them apart, particularly when they do not behave in any manner distinct to their characters after this introduction.
Because the characters are all very similar, so are their stories. There was none of the variety of tone, dialect, register, interests and agenda which make The Canterbury Tales so great. In fact, I didn’t believe that any of these stories was being told by anyone other than Christina Stead herself. They aren’t the stories of the characters described at the beginning, but merely a short story collection stuffed into an unnecessary framework which adds nothing to the reading and understanding of them. This would have been less of a problem had I found the stories themselves enjoyable, but sadly they really weren’t my cup of tea. Very few of them were satisfying on a narrative level, often feeling either tedious and drawn out or as though a large chunk of the middle were missing in order to leap to a conclusion which didn’t make much sense.
I found this book a very frustrating read because I wanted it to be so good.
March 21, 2017
As a child, I loved solitude, and I loved reading, so it wasn't difficult for me to appreciate fiction. Although the quality of my high school English teachers varied significantly, I was fortunate to be placed under one of the modern masters of Philippine literature in my English subjects for college. He was a good teacher: he made fiction even more enjoyable, and as he was (and is) homosexual, he wasn't picky with his fiction so long as the fiction was good. He introduced William Faulkner and Angela Carter to my life. He also discussed quite a number of the great writers of the 20th century. Because he was a good teacher and a kind person, I tried my best to excel in his subject (especially because I also love literature).
I recall one of the few times he reproached my writing, however. It was one of the few times I got a score below B+ in a literature paper, because he told me I was verbally incontinent: I tried so hard to emulate Faulkner's writing style that instead of being concise and clear with my statements, I instead contracted Montezuma's revenge - on words.
That lesson stuck with me for more than ten years (I'm almost 30 now): although I still use esoteric words so long as they're mot juste, I try to keep my writing as close-knit and as concise as possible. Sir Remoto was indeed a great teacher.
It's too bad that Christina Stead didn't have a teacher like him.
The Salzburg Tales is one serpentine, logorrheic circumbendibus.
Doesn't that sound pretentious? I think it does. So if you expand those types of sentences and stretch them into five hundred pages of below-average stories, you'll get The Salzburg Tales. That's how poorly-written this book was.
This isn't the Decameron. I read that book when I was in the fourth grade, and I was a lot more entertained despite having much less patience. Although the stories there were uneven, I could appreciate the quality of certain stories like 'Federigo's Falcon' interspersed with the other tales. This book was just an interminable meandering. If I didn't have patience, I would have dropped this book when nothing happened even after the book's first fifty pages. I bought this book primarily because of its attractive cover, and because of the lofty comparisons to Decameron and The Canterbury Tales.
They should have compared this to perfectly-sculpted turd. It's an iridescent, ostentatiously-described, well-overwritten, piece of shit. And no, I'm not against female writers: I love Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles, and Flannery O'Connor. But all three didn't take more than fifty pages to make a point - and that's the three of them combined.
I recall one of the few times he reproached my writing, however. It was one of the few times I got a score below B+ in a literature paper, because he told me I was verbally incontinent: I tried so hard to emulate Faulkner's writing style that instead of being concise and clear with my statements, I instead contracted Montezuma's revenge - on words.
That lesson stuck with me for more than ten years (I'm almost 30 now): although I still use esoteric words so long as they're mot juste, I try to keep my writing as close-knit and as concise as possible. Sir Remoto was indeed a great teacher.
It's too bad that Christina Stead didn't have a teacher like him.
The Salzburg Tales is one serpentine, logorrheic circumbendibus.
Doesn't that sound pretentious? I think it does. So if you expand those types of sentences and stretch them into five hundred pages of below-average stories, you'll get The Salzburg Tales. That's how poorly-written this book was.
This isn't the Decameron. I read that book when I was in the fourth grade, and I was a lot more entertained despite having much less patience. Although the stories there were uneven, I could appreciate the quality of certain stories like 'Federigo's Falcon' interspersed with the other tales. This book was just an interminable meandering. If I didn't have patience, I would have dropped this book when nothing happened even after the book's first fifty pages. I bought this book primarily because of its attractive cover, and because of the lofty comparisons to Decameron and The Canterbury Tales.
They should have compared this to perfectly-sculpted turd. It's an iridescent, ostentatiously-described, well-overwritten, piece of shit. And no, I'm not against female writers: I love Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles, and Flannery O'Connor. But all three didn't take more than fifty pages to make a point - and that's the three of them combined.
November 15, 2017
I knew straight away that The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead would be one of those books that demanded more of my attention than I had been used to giving of late.
After several false starts, I sat down one Saturday morning with a cup of tea and a pencil in hand, determined to find my way in.
Careful reading and judicious underlining slowly brought the threads together as I made my way through the Prologue which gave us our sense of time and place, through to The Personages, where Stead introduced us to her storytellers.
Like The Canterbury Tales, her characters are labelled, so that we have The Festival Director, The Viennese Conductor, The Italian Singer, a French Woman, a Doctress, an English Gentleman, a School Teacher, The Poet, a School Girl, A Lawyer and The Philosopher, just to name a few.
And like The Caterbury Tales, Stead set out to write a fairly traditional 'frame tale', whereby one story leads onto the next story and the next, almost like a nesting doll of tales sitting one inside the other....
I enjoyed some of the stories and some of the storytellers more than others. I constantly referred back to The Personages chapter to see if I could make any link between the storyteller's bio and the type of story they told. Sometimes I could, and sometimes I was left scratching my head, perplexed. Sometimes one story feed into the next, but most of the time they didn't.
Stead obviously enjoyed the intellectual exercise that is The Salzburg Tales. I was able to detect versions of well-known fairytales, classical myths and legends and gothic stories not unlike Poe. She was also apparently influenced by Chekhov, Gogol, Balzac, Maupassant, Hoffman & Hawthorne, but as I am not familiar enough with any of these writers, I failed to make the connections.
The thing I missed most whilst reading this book though, was character development.
I realised that I much prefer books with interesting, engaging, evolving characters. Characters that I can get inside of who have complex, nuanced behaviours. I want to be able to walk around in their skin for a while; to see things from another perspective.
Stead's Tales provided entertainment to my intellectual self, but most of them failed to touch my heart or soul.
Full review here - http://bronasbooks.blogspot.com.au/20...
After several false starts, I sat down one Saturday morning with a cup of tea and a pencil in hand, determined to find my way in.
Careful reading and judicious underlining slowly brought the threads together as I made my way through the Prologue which gave us our sense of time and place, through to The Personages, where Stead introduced us to her storytellers.
Like The Canterbury Tales, her characters are labelled, so that we have The Festival Director, The Viennese Conductor, The Italian Singer, a French Woman, a Doctress, an English Gentleman, a School Teacher, The Poet, a School Girl, A Lawyer and The Philosopher, just to name a few.
And like The Caterbury Tales, Stead set out to write a fairly traditional 'frame tale', whereby one story leads onto the next story and the next, almost like a nesting doll of tales sitting one inside the other....
I enjoyed some of the stories and some of the storytellers more than others. I constantly referred back to The Personages chapter to see if I could make any link between the storyteller's bio and the type of story they told. Sometimes I could, and sometimes I was left scratching my head, perplexed. Sometimes one story feed into the next, but most of the time they didn't.
Stead obviously enjoyed the intellectual exercise that is The Salzburg Tales. I was able to detect versions of well-known fairytales, classical myths and legends and gothic stories not unlike Poe. She was also apparently influenced by Chekhov, Gogol, Balzac, Maupassant, Hoffman & Hawthorne, but as I am not familiar enough with any of these writers, I failed to make the connections.
The thing I missed most whilst reading this book though, was character development.
I realised that I much prefer books with interesting, engaging, evolving characters. Characters that I can get inside of who have complex, nuanced behaviours. I want to be able to walk around in their skin for a while; to see things from another perspective.
Stead's Tales provided entertainment to my intellectual self, but most of them failed to touch my heart or soul.
Full review here - http://bronasbooks.blogspot.com.au/20...
Want to read
December 23, 2010bargain = 1 of 29 books for $5.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews