The Darts of Cupid: Stories

by Edith Templeton

When Edith Templeton’s stories began appearing in The New Yorker in the late 1950s, she quickly became a favorite of the magazine’s discerning readers. Her finely honed writing, honestly drawn heroines, and distinctive themes secured her reputation.

The Dart’s of Cupid collects seven of Templeton’s stories for the first time and reintroduces one of the truly great writers of the twentieth century. In settings ranging from a decrepit Bohemian castle between the wars to London during World War II to the Italian Riviera in the 1990s, the heroines of these stories often find themselves confronting unfathomable passsions and perplexing actions by others, but they seldom feel regret.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Erotica

321 pages, Paperback

First published January 29, 2002

About the author

Edith Templeton was born in Prague, in 1916, in what used to be the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now the Czech Republic. She died in 2006. She wrote both short stories and novels. She also used the pen name Louise Walbrook.

Reviews

[Kasandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea. These stories had a lot of great *lines* in them, but the protagonists are mostly unlikeable, uninteresting, or both. And the stories mostly end in vague terms, with nothing really feeling settled, but up until their endings, they read as if they should be pointing to something, so I guess her subtleties are lost on me. Though I got into the later stories more than the first few, at the end of each, I felt myself saying "So what?", and the whole seemed largely full of promise but ultimately unremarkable, with no lasting impact. Disappointing.

[Cassie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories were poignant and interesting, but I found many of them full of very unlikable (but remarkably rendered) characters.

[Livia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an extremely strange set of stories. It was hard for me to relate to most of them.

[Veroni · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a journey in countries, languages, space, time and men.

[Pascale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this collection straight after "Summer in the Country", I was bound to be disappointed. In fact, none of these stories come close to packing the same punch as her earlier fiction and if they grabbed me at all it was because of the light they threw on the life on this singular writer. The title story is one of the most unmemorable of the lot. It's a war story revolving around the ironic and subtly sado-masochistic courtship and affair between a Major and a female staff in his medical coding department. "Irresistibly" is about a teenage girl's fascination with a painter who meets a bizarre death, struck by lighting on the Champs Elysées (as Odon von Hórvath did in real life I believe). "Equality Cake" is more interesting as it starts with precocious little Edith fantasizing that her favorite treat was named after Robespierre, then switches to grown up Edith revisiting her childhood estate in Bohemia decades after Communism transformed but actually preserved it. "A Coffeehouse Acquaintance" is again about Edith revisiting Prague as an émigrée unsure of her standing in, and relationship to, her former country. In her hotel she meets a Russian who quickly invites her to move into his apartment. Although her own cousin warns him that the man must be a high-level spy, Edith sleepwalks into the relationship, as if mesmerized by the guy's very blatant lies. On a second visit, 3 years later, in 1968, they meet again, but time hasn't been kind to the man and Edith refuses to pick up where they left off. In "The Blue Hour" the narrator ends up with a broken rib after her cousin's husband makes a pass at her. "Nymph & Faun" is the best of the bunch. Here Edith decides to part with a trove of silverware her dead husband kept in duty-free storage at Chiasso, mostly because she has fallen in love with the auctioneer's voice over the phone. What really happens is that as the narrator proceeds with the plan of divesting herself of these heirlooms she never used or even properly saw, she reassess her entire marriage and discovers that her husband spent not only the last year of his life, but most of their relationship, trying to belittle and control her. Strangely enough, she comes to this realization by confessing to the young auctioneer all sorts of extremely private memories which add up to a new picture of what her married life was like.

[Bookeater504 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read like eavesdropping on an interesting, sometimes not, rambling conversation lead by a woman whose life started in the early 20th Century. A reminder of how far we have come and how so much is still the same. Interesting voice that takes a while to snuggle into.

[Carmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edith Templeton has an honest voice and a good perspective. Her short stories tell of her varied, continental life, but what makes me want to read all of her stories is the distance that she creates between herself as a character and a storyteller. What woman could admit, without saying it, that her life had been completely dominated by the men in it.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading her short stories as I have time.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Evocative. Her characters leave the page, inhabit your mind. The title story is almost a novella,is sensual and surprising.