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Life Being the Best and Other Stories

by Kay Boyle

3.22 · rating details · 9 ratings · 1 review

In both her art and her life, Kay Boyle has exemplified that quality she values most in other artists--the bold articulation of a passionately held belief. An American expatriate in Europe from 1923-1941, Boyle was part of that pioneering group of modernists forging the 'revolution of the word.'

Paperback, 140 pages

Published April 1st 1988 by New Directions Publishing Corporation

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Aug 15, 2011

Greg rated it

Shelves: new-directions, short-stories, fiction

Ugh.

I feel a little weird / bad / like a philistine for giving this collection of short stories two stars, but when I tried to click three stars I felt a little bit like a liar. I liked that I could read this book in one evening, and I wondered if maybe I read it too fast and didn't 'get' it properly, but then I said to myself, 'you've read lots of books and none of these stories did anything to grab you, they didn't dazzle you, they didn't even confuse you so you thought it was you...moreUgh.

I feel a little weird / bad / like a philistine for giving this collection of short stories two stars, but when I tried to click three stars I felt a little bit like a liar. I liked that I could read this book in one evening, and I wondered if maybe I read it too fast and didn't 'get' it properly, but then I said to myself, 'you've read lots of books and none of these stories did anything to grab you, they didn't dazzle you, they didn't even confuse you so you thought it was your own damn fault for not enjoying them, so don't be a twit and give this an extra star just because she is probably the type of writer that deserves at least three stars.' And then I thought, 'no, you're not going to get an extra star from me out of guilt that I've rated fluffy and 'trashy' (in a non-judgemental use of the term of course) memoirs by UFC fighters higher than your book. Yeah it's cool that you were buddies with James Joyce and Duchamp, and that you hung out with all the 1920's ex-pats in Paris, and William Carlos Williams might think you were a master with language and uncovering truths but I got more insight into the human condition from Got Fight? by Forrest Griffin*

*I was told there should be more pictures of bloody fighters in my reviews and less talk about fighting. So here is a gory picture of Forrest Griffin.

So yeah, no extra star for you Kay Boyle!

One the positive side this book can be read in a pretty zippy manner. The back of the book praises the stories as being "masterful in their complex, innovative use of language and their ironic acknowledgement of the subversive realities of life" and I never felt like she was doing too much with language that any competent writer would do, and I have no fucking clue what the last part about ironic blah blah blah even means (well I know what the words mean, but I have no idea what those words signify in a narrative, it sounds like grad school hookum to me).

Nothing in this book made my head hurt, it didn't make me angry (well that nonsense about ironic blah blah blah sort of annoyed me, but that isn't her fault, she didn't write the copy on the back cover) but none of the stories had too much interest for me either. At times my interest was almost piqued by what a reviewer of Death of a Man called the 'Nazi idyllic' quality of that novel, but I couldn't even muster up enough interest in any of the stories to feel like she was really even treading in an interesting manner on the blood and soil motifs of writers like Knut Hamsun. Instead she seems to love writing naturalism themes into the stories but so what. Her descriptions of nature more felt like filler to me than any possible crypto-facism or some nonsense like that. And really the only reason I'd even start thinking along these lines is because of criticism she received for that novel, even though I'm very aware that she was more of a bleeding heart liberal than an undercover Nazi.

I think I would have enjoyed this book more if I had even a negative reaction to it.

Instead I'll probably forget all details about this book, and maybe a year from now I'll be looking through my shelves on goodreads and go, oh yeah I read that book. Or I'll be looking for books to bring to used bookstores and see this on a real bookshelf and I'll have to go online to confirm, 'yes, Greg, you have read this book, you didn't seem to care for it too much and it will be safe for you to sell it for a dollar'. (less)

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Shelves: english-language-modernism, modernism, short-stories

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