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Gallimaufry
Compilation of twenty-one short stories. It contains both speculative and regular fiction, old and new stories, many of which have not been included in any previous compilations, and a variety of prosaic styles.
- GenresShort Stories
134 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2021
3 people are currently reading
8 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Boston
352 books118 followersI've published more than sixty books and chapbooks, including the novels Stained Glass Rain and the best-of fiction collection Masque of Dreams. My work ranges from broad humor to literary surrealism, with many stops along the way for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. My novel The Guardener's Tale (Sam's Dot, 2007) was a Bram Stoker Award Finailist and a Prometheus Award Nominee. My stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of publications, including Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase, and received a number of awards, most notably, a Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov's Readers' Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. For more information, please visit my website at http://www.bruceboston.com/
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 2, 2021
A ray of talent through a prism; short stories of every colour and nuance, each divergent and lighting its own path, each impacted by the white light gestalt from where they came.
The one-oh-one on how to make gallimaufry starts with a pantry (or wherever else one is wont to store pantry related items) and inside this pantry (or aff.) there are contents. These will serve as the ingredients to what most of us might associate with the infamous I-cannot-be-bothered-to-go-to-the-store-(though-I-probably-should) casserole, which would give a faulty impression of a sloppy result, the product of meh-handedness and a lack of interest in the artistry involved, when it is just as true that a stock of high quality ingredients in the hands of a master chef can turn out a dish of magic and wonder whether it is pre-composed or drawn from a bout of concurrent inspiration. Gallimaufry, as a dish, if served, would be awarded all of Michelin’s three stars, and make TripAdvisor implode. The pantry is filled with an authorship that exceeds half a decade and which currently holds the record amount of Rhysling Awards for Speculative Poetry, Asimov’s Readers Awards for Poetry, Bram Stoker Awards for Poetry Collections, and the first Grandmaster Award ever given by the Science Fiction Poetry Association; all of them testimony to the quality craft of language and expression which is found therein. And this very same mastery is also applied to the short stories, words strung with the intent of perfection and the rare ability to bring it within reach; they may be labelled short stories, but at incipit and therefrom the poet is instantly and unavoidably recognised.
Returning to the pantry. If one looks towards the back there is a coveted Pushcart Prize for Fiction, won for the story ‘Broken Portraiture,’ and this story has found its way to the pot as one of the most indispensable of ingredients. Indispensable not just because it hasn’t been reprinted since 1982,¹ and thus having long been out of reach for most readers without a second hand book store nearby which just happen to have a copy; nor because it first appeared in the magazine Gallimaufry #5 (fall of 1975), and therefore would (in a sense) come full circle by its inclusion here; it is indispensable simply because it is. It is exemplary of almost every characteristic of Boston’s authorship, and excels on every one.
E.g: The three-hundred-and-fifty-four-word first sentence may seem long, and of course it is, but Boston’s stories, in particular the older ones, often use such stylistic choices to great effect. In this case the sentence covers a life lived, a backlog of memories, and by crowding it like this, a long string of short clauses, the text mimics how we experience a retrospection of an entire past, to us it is a unity of disjunctions, singular and vague journal entries that amount to an entity bound for no other reason than that we have an idea of a self which they all attach to – a feat which is difficult to replicate by any other means than this – and it is against this massive slab of a backdrop that the remaining story leans, like a dream souring or a nightmare because precisely of what was rather than what is.
Another feat of a similar kind comes from ‘Wasp Light,’ (jointly authored with Lee Ballentine) and that feat is answering the question of what ‘wasp light’ is. It is introduced thus:
I was riding black fields in a metal cart when the chronometers shifted and it began to rain heavily. Small explosions as each drop touched the ground. Light and shadow lacquered in the muddy pools. A gate of the city, scrolled with grime, creaked open — and I saw a slash of color. There against the wall. Nothing more.
And now though I watch the streets and alleys each hour from my lab — I cannot trace the source of that aberrant illumination. I do not know why the tocsins suddenly sound with obsessive regularity. In no way can I guess who has fused the lintels over Southgate so they glisten like a nest of glass eels. (p. 87)
The very same feat (or near enough) that Lovecraft attempted² with ‘The Color Out of Space,’ to induce a mental image of dangerous colours, which, like describing colour in general, is utterly impossible to do without going about it in a cleverly roundabout manner. One of Boston’s foremost talents is sensory invocation and this story, like its impossible subject, is entirely dependent on this ability; it stands as a rarity among speculative fiction, but also as an exemplar of what the author has done more times than this reviewer can be bothered to count.
It is not uncommon for Boston to take on subjects that are better painted indirectly, such as Mulligan’s drug and fever induced transformation into a cosmical native (‘Death and the Hippie,’ previously published as ‘Mulligan’), as well as the two aforementioned examples, and to describe the contradictory feeling of the protagonist in ‘Curse of the Alien’s Wife’ – (the example again taken from the first lines of its story):
He has become the darkest star of her erotic obsessions, the critical mass beyond which her personality can no longer ascend or even express itself. Whenever she considers leaving, he launches the precise sensual bullet that slaughters her resolve and elevates her consciousness to new heights of excitation. He is an incendiary of the flesh who ignites her neural corridors with undivided passion. (p. 121)
– which is perhaps the compilation’s best example of what can be effectuated by a nit-picky poet with a grand vocabulary and the will and ability to weave satin for the mind. Yet, when satin is not the design, when the demands of the story is asphalt and chain link fencing, the poet flicks their wrist and changes language without abandoning the skill, like (to keep to the cooking metaphor from the compilation’s title) a master chef does not leave the hat behind just because they are making bolognaise. For instance, the emotional weight of ‘Cold Finale’ (jointly authored with Marge Simon) seems even greater (according to this reviewer, anyway) because the language was not elevated, but kept at layman’s height. It’s introductory paragraph is a simple description, a visual setting of the scene with hints of a sad fate, nothing more, leaving it to the second paragraph to deliver the impact proper:
It is a cold December afternoon shrouded by a slate of swift dark clouds. An old woman shuffles along a city sidewalk, a large cat curled on top of the junk in her cart. She wears several layers of clothing against the cold, topped off by a worn blue sweater and a shapeless black skirt that reaches to her ankles.
The woman has a name, but her few homeless friends don’t know what it is, and she no longer cares. (p. 68)
But she took great care when naming her cats, elevating them to great heroes of legend and high literature, the same books she once took such joy in reading to the children who came to her library. There is much to be said about people who neglect themselves in favour of altruism simply because it is their nature, at the very least that they are the kind that we want and need in our society more than any other. The title of the story call upon the grand finales of a symphony, which is surely what such a person deserves, but it turns out not to be grand but cold, and therein the tragedy shines even stronger. And because of this, clearly, an elegant, flowery prose would utterly defeat the feeling of the story.
There is much more to be said about Gallimaufry and the authorship, but at some point the readers of this review needs to evaluate the spoonfuls given them for the taste and make up their mind on whether they want the whole bowl or not. Those who have already tried out Boston’s cooking on previous occasions would already have made up their mind, and those who are new to the authorship would do well to start either here or with the best-of compilation Masque of Dreams, or both since they each contain essential stories which the other does not. This book is relatively short, but hopefully the examples I have selected will have carried across that it is worth spending some time with each story, and that sometimes quality weighs heavier than page count.
(This review is based on a complimentary e-book which was given to me. My favourable opinion was a given, though, since I have long been fond of this authorship. I think every avid reader finds a few authors who can do no wrong according to them, and Boston is one of those for me. Hence the frequent use of quotes; I wanted the curious to see the text itself and not just my own excitement, and my own additions to be but incentives to make the effort of thought which I find enhances the experience of it.)
1. I.e. the compilation She Comes When You’re Leaving & Other Stories. It was also included in the boxed collection The New Bruce Boston Omnibus from 1988, but these were leftover copies from the original run.
2. Whether Lovecraft succeeded or not has been debated heavily and a unanimity seems unlikely to occur, but it is still a noteworthy attempt which undeniably did get a lot right.
The one-oh-one on how to make gallimaufry starts with a pantry (or wherever else one is wont to store pantry related items) and inside this pantry (or aff.) there are contents. These will serve as the ingredients to what most of us might associate with the infamous I-cannot-be-bothered-to-go-to-the-store-(though-I-probably-should) casserole, which would give a faulty impression of a sloppy result, the product of meh-handedness and a lack of interest in the artistry involved, when it is just as true that a stock of high quality ingredients in the hands of a master chef can turn out a dish of magic and wonder whether it is pre-composed or drawn from a bout of concurrent inspiration. Gallimaufry, as a dish, if served, would be awarded all of Michelin’s three stars, and make TripAdvisor implode. The pantry is filled with an authorship that exceeds half a decade and which currently holds the record amount of Rhysling Awards for Speculative Poetry, Asimov’s Readers Awards for Poetry, Bram Stoker Awards for Poetry Collections, and the first Grandmaster Award ever given by the Science Fiction Poetry Association; all of them testimony to the quality craft of language and expression which is found therein. And this very same mastery is also applied to the short stories, words strung with the intent of perfection and the rare ability to bring it within reach; they may be labelled short stories, but at incipit and therefrom the poet is instantly and unavoidably recognised.
Returning to the pantry. If one looks towards the back there is a coveted Pushcart Prize for Fiction, won for the story ‘Broken Portraiture,’ and this story has found its way to the pot as one of the most indispensable of ingredients. Indispensable not just because it hasn’t been reprinted since 1982,¹ and thus having long been out of reach for most readers without a second hand book store nearby which just happen to have a copy; nor because it first appeared in the magazine Gallimaufry #5 (fall of 1975), and therefore would (in a sense) come full circle by its inclusion here; it is indispensable simply because it is. It is exemplary of almost every characteristic of Boston’s authorship, and excels on every one.
E.g: The three-hundred-and-fifty-four-word first sentence may seem long, and of course it is, but Boston’s stories, in particular the older ones, often use such stylistic choices to great effect. In this case the sentence covers a life lived, a backlog of memories, and by crowding it like this, a long string of short clauses, the text mimics how we experience a retrospection of an entire past, to us it is a unity of disjunctions, singular and vague journal entries that amount to an entity bound for no other reason than that we have an idea of a self which they all attach to – a feat which is difficult to replicate by any other means than this – and it is against this massive slab of a backdrop that the remaining story leans, like a dream souring or a nightmare because precisely of what was rather than what is.
Another feat of a similar kind comes from ‘Wasp Light,’ (jointly authored with Lee Ballentine) and that feat is answering the question of what ‘wasp light’ is. It is introduced thus:
I was riding black fields in a metal cart when the chronometers shifted and it began to rain heavily. Small explosions as each drop touched the ground. Light and shadow lacquered in the muddy pools. A gate of the city, scrolled with grime, creaked open — and I saw a slash of color. There against the wall. Nothing more.
And now though I watch the streets and alleys each hour from my lab — I cannot trace the source of that aberrant illumination. I do not know why the tocsins suddenly sound with obsessive regularity. In no way can I guess who has fused the lintels over Southgate so they glisten like a nest of glass eels. (p. 87)
The very same feat (or near enough) that Lovecraft attempted² with ‘The Color Out of Space,’ to induce a mental image of dangerous colours, which, like describing colour in general, is utterly impossible to do without going about it in a cleverly roundabout manner. One of Boston’s foremost talents is sensory invocation and this story, like its impossible subject, is entirely dependent on this ability; it stands as a rarity among speculative fiction, but also as an exemplar of what the author has done more times than this reviewer can be bothered to count.
It is not uncommon for Boston to take on subjects that are better painted indirectly, such as Mulligan’s drug and fever induced transformation into a cosmical native (‘Death and the Hippie,’ previously published as ‘Mulligan’), as well as the two aforementioned examples, and to describe the contradictory feeling of the protagonist in ‘Curse of the Alien’s Wife’ – (the example again taken from the first lines of its story):
He has become the darkest star of her erotic obsessions, the critical mass beyond which her personality can no longer ascend or even express itself. Whenever she considers leaving, he launches the precise sensual bullet that slaughters her resolve and elevates her consciousness to new heights of excitation. He is an incendiary of the flesh who ignites her neural corridors with undivided passion. (p. 121)
– which is perhaps the compilation’s best example of what can be effectuated by a nit-picky poet with a grand vocabulary and the will and ability to weave satin for the mind. Yet, when satin is not the design, when the demands of the story is asphalt and chain link fencing, the poet flicks their wrist and changes language without abandoning the skill, like (to keep to the cooking metaphor from the compilation’s title) a master chef does not leave the hat behind just because they are making bolognaise. For instance, the emotional weight of ‘Cold Finale’ (jointly authored with Marge Simon) seems even greater (according to this reviewer, anyway) because the language was not elevated, but kept at layman’s height. It’s introductory paragraph is a simple description, a visual setting of the scene with hints of a sad fate, nothing more, leaving it to the second paragraph to deliver the impact proper:
It is a cold December afternoon shrouded by a slate of swift dark clouds. An old woman shuffles along a city sidewalk, a large cat curled on top of the junk in her cart. She wears several layers of clothing against the cold, topped off by a worn blue sweater and a shapeless black skirt that reaches to her ankles.
The woman has a name, but her few homeless friends don’t know what it is, and she no longer cares. (p. 68)
But she took great care when naming her cats, elevating them to great heroes of legend and high literature, the same books she once took such joy in reading to the children who came to her library. There is much to be said about people who neglect themselves in favour of altruism simply because it is their nature, at the very least that they are the kind that we want and need in our society more than any other. The title of the story call upon the grand finales of a symphony, which is surely what such a person deserves, but it turns out not to be grand but cold, and therein the tragedy shines even stronger. And because of this, clearly, an elegant, flowery prose would utterly defeat the feeling of the story.
There is much more to be said about Gallimaufry and the authorship, but at some point the readers of this review needs to evaluate the spoonfuls given them for the taste and make up their mind on whether they want the whole bowl or not. Those who have already tried out Boston’s cooking on previous occasions would already have made up their mind, and those who are new to the authorship would do well to start either here or with the best-of compilation Masque of Dreams, or both since they each contain essential stories which the other does not. This book is relatively short, but hopefully the examples I have selected will have carried across that it is worth spending some time with each story, and that sometimes quality weighs heavier than page count.
(This review is based on a complimentary e-book which was given to me. My favourable opinion was a given, though, since I have long been fond of this authorship. I think every avid reader finds a few authors who can do no wrong according to them, and Boston is one of those for me. Hence the frequent use of quotes; I wanted the curious to see the text itself and not just my own excitement, and my own additions to be but incentives to make the effort of thought which I find enhances the experience of it.)
1. I.e. the compilation She Comes When You’re Leaving & Other Stories. It was also included in the boxed collection The New Bruce Boston Omnibus from 1988, but these were leftover copies from the original run.
2. Whether Lovecraft succeeded or not has been debated heavily and a unanimity seems unlikely to occur, but it is still a noteworthy attempt which undeniably did get a lot right.
June 7, 2021
GALLIMAUFRY: By Bruce Boston. Plum White Press, 2021, 134 pages.
Bruce Boston is a Bram Stoker Award winner, but that says little about the breadth and depth of his talent. As others have remarked on his work, you’ll find facets of language and story that resonate with the art of Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, and Oscar Wilde in his offerings. But all of his work is uniquely “Boston,” and I hope that someday, someone will remark that they see a little of Bruce Boston in my work. It would be a high honor.
This is a collection of Boston’s short stories that span some fifty years of his life. Every single one of these is a small jewel of effort and art, from the profound sadness of “Cold Finale,” written with Marge Simon, to the absolute hilarity of “An Unrecognized Masterwork,” to the peyote-like stream of images in “Surreal Chess (which I desperately wish I’d written.)
Let Boston tell you where luck comes from in “Tales of the Dead Wizard,” or scratch an itch with “The Infernal Itch.” I highly recommend this collection. I loved it.
Bruce Boston is a Bram Stoker Award winner, but that says little about the breadth and depth of his talent. As others have remarked on his work, you’ll find facets of language and story that resonate with the art of Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, and Oscar Wilde in his offerings. But all of his work is uniquely “Boston,” and I hope that someday, someone will remark that they see a little of Bruce Boston in my work. It would be a high honor.
This is a collection of Boston’s short stories that span some fifty years of his life. Every single one of these is a small jewel of effort and art, from the profound sadness of “Cold Finale,” written with Marge Simon, to the absolute hilarity of “An Unrecognized Masterwork,” to the peyote-like stream of images in “Surreal Chess (which I desperately wish I’d written.)
Let Boston tell you where luck comes from in “Tales of the Dead Wizard,” or scratch an itch with “The Infernal Itch.” I highly recommend this collection. I loved it.
November 11, 2021
Short stories by a master of the craft! I love the review by Arnstein, touching on the elements I find enjoyment from too in this collection, as a fan of Boston's works - not only fiction, but his poetry as well. The discerning reader can probably pick up on the fact he's a poet as well as writer simply by reading one of the stories within this collection. Try "Mammy and the Flies", for example.
March 4, 2022
Anthropomorphized tarot cards, an exiled magus who advocates rationality over magic, an actor unaware that he is actually a hologram, and much more populate the pages of this book of imaginative and varied tales. Gallimaufry is a first-rate collection of speculative short stories by a master storyteller.
October 23, 2024
Caviar or Gourmet Chocolate?
Review of Bruce Boston's Gallimaufry
If you like "Ubu Roi," you'll love this collection even more.
Boston says that his title, Gallimaufry, means that the collection is a medley of differently-themed stories. And this is true; characters range from children to the very very aged, from innocents to the criminal, from ordinary people to mages. But what these stories all have in common is Boston's remarkable gift for the outrageous, the grotesque, the unique music and playfulness of his language, and his ability to open the reader's eyes to the bizarre, haunted, and unthinkable in the world around us.
Some of the stories are fantastic and some slice-of-life---although life looked at through atypical, unconventional eyes.
"Mammy and the Flies" is an exceedingly dark fantasy piece. In this tale of pathos and abuse, a young boy is locked in a nasty basement while his mother, or more probably his grandmother, conducts paid (or unpaid?) sex with their landlord or other "gentlemen callers." It gradually dawns on the reader that the boy is "special," but I won't spoil it by saying how. It was originally published in Skin Trades," a Chris Drumm "pamphlet," which I would call more a fiction chapbook and well worth looking up.
"Cold Finale" with Margaret Boston, Boston's wife, also a celebrated author, is a poignant story of the last hours of an ancient homeless woman's life, as she wanders in bitter winter weather, her hapless company a cat who is devoted to the crone despite her inability to feed or shelter it. The story is entirely realistic--no magic to save a decrepit homeless woman's life. A boy happening upon her seems to be her salvation, but it is not to be--she is doomed by the freezing weather and her own fragility. Moving depiction of despair and the inevitability of death.
Several of the stories depict artists, as in "My Grandfather, the Carver," and writers, as in "Biographical Sketch of an Unknown Surrealist," and other creators. Sometimes they are victims, as in "Complete Artistic Control ," which depicts a writer trapped, not by an AI competitor, but by a dispassionate computerized literary industry. Sometimes Boston's heroes are unknown masters of art, as in "An Unrecognized Masterwork" (complete with privy references to a bidet and more). One prophetic piece, "That's Show Business," depicts the entire movie industry taken over by AI actors, writers, producers, and even directors. Could it happen? Boston could be the first to warn us.
Some of the stories are so literary that they might have appeared in The New Yorker (I didn't look up all his credits). Such is "Death and the Hippie," a very 60's gem.
My favorite story is "Surreal Chess," which features opponents conducting a savage, over-the-top battle to near death (not just checkmate) in a hypnogogic, then REM, state: conscious dreaming. It's funny and outrageous and I just loved the droll progression of panthers, hetaira, wolves, and toreadors, not to omit brocade-clad elephants on stilts firing flames from their trunks and venting smoke from their ears. (I want to see a manga based on this.)
Boston's influences and progenitors include Dada, New Weird, Beatnik, and Surrealism. Many of these tales read like Salvador Dali in narrative form. He includes themes of physical ailments ("That Infernal Itch") and legal problems as metaphors--or parallels--of artistic agony.
It is effulgent and dark, sophisticated, arch, and often droll.
Highly recommended-- I don't know whether to compare it with beluga caviar or to Thierry Atlan chocolate. Try it, and make up your own mind.
Mary A. Turzillo
Review of Bruce Boston's Gallimaufry
If you like "Ubu Roi," you'll love this collection even more.
Boston says that his title, Gallimaufry, means that the collection is a medley of differently-themed stories. And this is true; characters range from children to the very very aged, from innocents to the criminal, from ordinary people to mages. But what these stories all have in common is Boston's remarkable gift for the outrageous, the grotesque, the unique music and playfulness of his language, and his ability to open the reader's eyes to the bizarre, haunted, and unthinkable in the world around us.
Some of the stories are fantastic and some slice-of-life---although life looked at through atypical, unconventional eyes.
"Mammy and the Flies" is an exceedingly dark fantasy piece. In this tale of pathos and abuse, a young boy is locked in a nasty basement while his mother, or more probably his grandmother, conducts paid (or unpaid?) sex with their landlord or other "gentlemen callers." It gradually dawns on the reader that the boy is "special," but I won't spoil it by saying how. It was originally published in Skin Trades," a Chris Drumm "pamphlet," which I would call more a fiction chapbook and well worth looking up.
"Cold Finale" with Margaret Boston, Boston's wife, also a celebrated author, is a poignant story of the last hours of an ancient homeless woman's life, as she wanders in bitter winter weather, her hapless company a cat who is devoted to the crone despite her inability to feed or shelter it. The story is entirely realistic--no magic to save a decrepit homeless woman's life. A boy happening upon her seems to be her salvation, but it is not to be--she is doomed by the freezing weather and her own fragility. Moving depiction of despair and the inevitability of death.
Several of the stories depict artists, as in "My Grandfather, the Carver," and writers, as in "Biographical Sketch of an Unknown Surrealist," and other creators. Sometimes they are victims, as in "Complete Artistic Control ," which depicts a writer trapped, not by an AI competitor, but by a dispassionate computerized literary industry. Sometimes Boston's heroes are unknown masters of art, as in "An Unrecognized Masterwork" (complete with privy references to a bidet and more). One prophetic piece, "That's Show Business," depicts the entire movie industry taken over by AI actors, writers, producers, and even directors. Could it happen? Boston could be the first to warn us.
Some of the stories are so literary that they might have appeared in The New Yorker (I didn't look up all his credits). Such is "Death and the Hippie," a very 60's gem.
My favorite story is "Surreal Chess," which features opponents conducting a savage, over-the-top battle to near death (not just checkmate) in a hypnogogic, then REM, state: conscious dreaming. It's funny and outrageous and I just loved the droll progression of panthers, hetaira, wolves, and toreadors, not to omit brocade-clad elephants on stilts firing flames from their trunks and venting smoke from their ears. (I want to see a manga based on this.)
Boston's influences and progenitors include Dada, New Weird, Beatnik, and Surrealism. Many of these tales read like Salvador Dali in narrative form. He includes themes of physical ailments ("That Infernal Itch") and legal problems as metaphors--or parallels--of artistic agony.
It is effulgent and dark, sophisticated, arch, and often droll.
Highly recommended-- I don't know whether to compare it with beluga caviar or to Thierry Atlan chocolate. Try it, and make up your own mind.
Mary A. Turzillo
December 20, 2023
Although this collection has been titled ‘Gallimaufry’—‘a mixture, especially of heterogeneous elements’, a jumble, a hash—it could have been called with equal truth, ‘Clown Car’ or ‘Bouillon Cube’.
I first read it as an ebook and had to order a dead-tree edition because the page count is unbelievable—but it’s accurate. This collection is highly concentrated goodness with an extraordinary range in tone, subject matter, and I guess, genre (a categorising that I dislike for the best fiction, and these stories qualify).
Boston reminds me in these stories written over many years, of Swift (before Swift turned bitter) and of Lem. I don’t know which came first in Boston’s writing persona, the poet or the fiction writer, but these stories have such an economy of words, they’ve the power of haiku.
I compared him to Swift and Lem in particular because they’re two if my favourite authors but Saki, another fave, is probably an even better fit for this deceptively compact compilation, for Boston has two great skills that were also what made Saki’s few stories classics: an ability to describe a person’s character in a few perfect words, and to eviscerate society with a touch so light and lethal, it leaves society standing momentarily till it falls at that flash of tragicomic wit. There are places I laughed out loud and others where I sniggered, such as the references in 'Biographical Sketches of an Unknown Surrealist'.
Satire is the most difficult of all arts, yet the temptation to express superiority is irresistible, especially when an ego has swollen to an unhealthy size from years of uncritical praise. One example, imo, is Michael Moorcock’s ‘Casablanca’.
There is none of that smugness in Boston’s works. There are, on the other hand, frequent startling pinpricks to this reader’s eyes, as the invisible writer’s empathy brought people and situations alive in all their painful reality. I would call this writer a great humanist at the risk of making him seem uncool.
I only have one criticism, but it’s only partial. I would have liked one page of publishing details to be able to date the works' first appearances so I could then note them before I read a story. I know it’s a personal fetish of mine to wish to know when (and if relevant, where) something was published (and maybe written, if there's a great lag), not for biographical reasons but for social context.
I first read it as an ebook and had to order a dead-tree edition because the page count is unbelievable—but it’s accurate. This collection is highly concentrated goodness with an extraordinary range in tone, subject matter, and I guess, genre (a categorising that I dislike for the best fiction, and these stories qualify).
Boston reminds me in these stories written over many years, of Swift (before Swift turned bitter) and of Lem. I don’t know which came first in Boston’s writing persona, the poet or the fiction writer, but these stories have such an economy of words, they’ve the power of haiku.
I compared him to Swift and Lem in particular because they’re two if my favourite authors but Saki, another fave, is probably an even better fit for this deceptively compact compilation, for Boston has two great skills that were also what made Saki’s few stories classics: an ability to describe a person’s character in a few perfect words, and to eviscerate society with a touch so light and lethal, it leaves society standing momentarily till it falls at that flash of tragicomic wit. There are places I laughed out loud and others where I sniggered, such as the references in 'Biographical Sketches of an Unknown Surrealist'.
Satire is the most difficult of all arts, yet the temptation to express superiority is irresistible, especially when an ego has swollen to an unhealthy size from years of uncritical praise. One example, imo, is Michael Moorcock’s ‘Casablanca’.
There is none of that smugness in Boston’s works. There are, on the other hand, frequent startling pinpricks to this reader’s eyes, as the invisible writer’s empathy brought people and situations alive in all their painful reality. I would call this writer a great humanist at the risk of making him seem uncool.
I only have one criticism, but it’s only partial. I would have liked one page of publishing details to be able to date the works' first appearances so I could then note them before I read a story. I know it’s a personal fetish of mine to wish to know when (and if relevant, where) something was published (and maybe written, if there's a great lag), not for biographical reasons but for social context.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews