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Sadness
Paperback, 159 pages
Published
by Pocket Books
(first published 1972)
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I'm reading Sadness and I'm not loving it. The stories move, but they are too clever, too experimental, too distracted by pop culture, fads, and crappy contemporaneous slang. And I'm wondering, why did I ever love Barthelme so? Is the romance over? Is he yet another love lost to age? But then I remember that I'm probably not old enough to ask those questions, and that there were things I loved when I was 10 that I no longer loved when I was 16. Maybe. But I recently re-read Barthelme's "The Scho...more
Maybe this has already been mentioned by others, but just in case --
I believe that some (perhaps all?) of the stories from this beautiful work have been republished in later collections under a different name, so if you can't find this out of print tome, check out those later compilations.
Sadness struck mean as a hilarious and yet poignant collection of Barthelme's works. The stories are moving and touching, the language truly beautiful - Barthelme really knows how to take conventional English a...more
I believe that some (perhaps all?) of the stories from this beautiful work have been republished in later collections under a different name, so if you can't find this out of print tome, check out those later compilations.
Sadness struck mean as a hilarious and yet poignant collection of Barthelme's works. The stories are moving and touching, the language truly beautiful - Barthelme really knows how to take conventional English a...more
Another 5 star review to a Donald Barthelme book? Maybe you ask this question and that's fine. I know I did. My reasoning is that this is one of his funniest. Take, for instance, "The Sandman." The story is contained in a letter the narrator is writing to his girlfriend Susan's shrink. "She tells me what she said and what you said," the narrator writes. He defends Susan artistically, writing, "But the proposition, 'Susan becomes an artist and lives happily ever after' is ridiculous...Let me poin...more
I enjoyed the stories early in this collection but the later ones left me feeling empty. The same way I feel if I masturbate more than once in a day. Maybe I will give it another try one day and just read one story each day.
One of his better colletions. Most or all of the works in Sadness have been assimilated into larger collections (40 Stories/60 Stories) at this point, so there isn't much sense in buying it at this point.
short, but intriguing tales of oddness. two of my favorite stories are in this collection and it's just the perfect thing to read when you have 10 minutes to kill.
An outstanding collection of short stories first published in 1972. Barthelme is possibly my favourite short story writer ever. His work is always profound, always funny, always highly inventive. Despite the title of this book, it is a very life-enhancing read. Barthelme's influence on me is colossal and ...unshakeable. Every time I read a Barthelme story I want to write exactly the same way he does, which is an impossible thing to do properly... The finest story in this collection is probably t...more
Probably my favorite by Barthelme. I read this sometime during 1991.
Barthelme at his best.
SO GOOD
If there's a better book to start Fall with don't tell me about it. I want to enjoy this moment. No story in the collection failed to make me laugh. The first story, about you and your wife Wanda, and the Daumier surrogate, and "The Party" are the stand-outs, in MY humble opinion. Maybe I'd say more but I'm in New York and Kiel fast approaches and I'm naked and need to get to showering so I'm fresh for the new day. Fresh for the Fall.
Started reading it as I was listening to Sixty Stories and realized they were all compiled in that book. Well, now I have it as a hardcover edition, and it's got a really nice cover and has most of my favorite stories in it. Still a really, really good book.
Another mui excellente collection, second only to Come Back, Dr. Caligari. I actually pulled this off the shelves a month or so back and re-read for the twentieth time. Still pure poetry after 15 years.
Some (Read: Most) of this content is pretty far out. Sometimes the obtuse offers the most direct portrait of something more abstract.
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Donald Barthelme was born to two students at the University of Pennsylvania. The family moved to Texas two years later, where Barthelme's father would become a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme would later major in journalism. In 1951, still a student, he wrote his first articles for the Houston Post. Barthelme was drafted into the Korean War in 1953, arriving...more
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1 trivia question
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“The world in the evening seems fraught with the absence of promise, if you are a married man. There is nothing to do but go home and drink your nine drinks and forget about it.”
—
2 people liked it
“Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn’t like things that were ineffable…
…a lot of people don’t like things that are unearthly, the things of this earth are good enough for them, and they don’t mind telling you so. “If he’d just go out and get a job, like everybody else, then he could be saintly all day long…”
—from “The Temptations of St. Anthony,” by Donald Barthelme”
—
1 person liked it
More quotes…
…a lot of people don’t like things that are unearthly, the things of this earth are good enough for them, and they don’t mind telling you so. “If he’d just go out and get a job, like everybody else, then he could be saintly all day long…”
—from “The Temptations of St. Anthony,” by Donald Barthelme”
It's not so easy no matter how hard I try
All that syrupy unctuousness
It makes me sit down and cry
Imagine all the radios
Playi...more
Jan 20, 2010 12:13pm
But I'm not the only one"
I hope someday you'll join us
cause the world can't have too many cyni...
(sor...more
Jan 20, 2010 01:12pm