Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "realism"
The outsider inside
Masks & Other Stories From Colombia by Richard Crosfield
If you study English history of the Renaissance period, one of the most helpful characters you are likely to encounter is the Venetian Ambassador, whose dispatches home contain valuable insights into what was really going on, free of the pride and prejudice of the “official” versions preserved for posterity. To help us understand today's more visceral Colombia, Richard Crosfield gives us another outsider, a British businessman named Printer, whose nose and taste for good stories lead him to intriguing characters and tales by the bucketful. Through Printer, Crosfield coats what he writes about in a velvet glove of detached humour liable to remind the reader of Saki, though like that master's, Crosfield's stories can sometimes pack an iron punch. I think the impact is even greater in the stories in which Crosfield relinquishes his foreign characters and goes straight to the heart of Colombia, where he is clearly at home.
My favourites in the collection are “Guatavita Nueva”, in which a provincial priest puts his faith in the next generation, and “ Landevino's”, in which success makes a peasant painter more equal than others.
5 stars.
If you study English history of the Renaissance period, one of the most helpful characters you are likely to encounter is the Venetian Ambassador, whose dispatches home contain valuable insights into what was really going on, free of the pride and prejudice of the “official” versions preserved for posterity. To help us understand today's more visceral Colombia, Richard Crosfield gives us another outsider, a British businessman named Printer, whose nose and taste for good stories lead him to intriguing characters and tales by the bucketful. Through Printer, Crosfield coats what he writes about in a velvet glove of detached humour liable to remind the reader of Saki, though like that master's, Crosfield's stories can sometimes pack an iron punch. I think the impact is even greater in the stories in which Crosfield relinquishes his foreign characters and goes straight to the heart of Colombia, where he is clearly at home.
My favourites in the collection are “Guatavita Nueva”, in which a provincial priest puts his faith in the next generation, and “ Landevino's”, in which success makes a peasant painter more equal than others.
5 stars.
