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Through Elegant Eyes Stories of Austro and Men Who Know Everything
Short story collection. Through Elegant Stories of Austro and the Men Who Know Everything [only 1000 copies printed]
237 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1983
About the author
R.A. Lafferty
541 books316 followersRaphael Aloysius Lafferty, published under the name R.A. Lafferty, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer known for his original use of language, metaphor, and narrative structure, as well as for his etymological wit. He also wrote a set of four autobiographical novels, a history book, and a number of novels that could be loosely called historical fiction.
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February 14, 2015
This volume gathers all the stories (so far as I know) concerning the Four Men Who Knew Everything and Laff (the author) who doesn't--but who recounts their adventures in more detail than any of the others could be aware of.
It could almost be read as a novel in consecutive stories. It wouldn't quite work, as a look at Arrive At Easterwine (which is based on another ongoing series, The Institute of Impure Science Stories) would show. An anthology of those stories (What's the Name of That Town?, Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread, Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne, Through Other Eyes, All But the Words etc.) might be similarly semi-novelistic if arranged sequentially (although these may not be as clear a sequence--the only thing I know for sure is that the last story would be All But the Words, since that looks forward to a time when the Insitute is no more, its members scattered and largely silent. I'm reasonably sure that wasn't the last story he wrote in the series however. Who knows? it might even be the first story in a collection like that, if an ongoing Sword of Damocles effect was desired.)
The first stories in Through Elegant Eyes, at least, are precisely sequential.. A lead character is subtracted in The All-At-Once Man, but the four men who know everything and the author, who doesn't, are all assembled. Mud Violet adds the sawdust ghost Loretta Sheen and the schizo ghost Mary Mondo (and the electronic genius Roy Mega) and Barnaby's Clock introduces the last of the main recurring characters, Austro. The other stories could possibly follow in different sequence, but he deliberately builds from one to the next. Reading them independently, a reader could follow what was happening (especially with the helpful synopses of backstory the author supplies), but if you've read those three in that order there's a surer sense of continuity in what follows. (Old Hallowe'ens on the Guna Slopes, for instance, gains a great deal of resonance from a previous acquaintance with Mud Violet.)
I wonder how far Lafferty was following an original plan, and how far improvising in response to the material, in the characterizations of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo particularly? Their development isn't inconsistent, taken all together, but it certainly is surprising given their starting point as listless suicides.
It could almost be read as a novel in consecutive stories. It wouldn't quite work, as a look at Arrive At Easterwine (which is based on another ongoing series, The Institute of Impure Science Stories) would show. An anthology of those stories (What's the Name of That Town?, Flaming Ducks and Giant Bread, Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne, Through Other Eyes, All But the Words etc.) might be similarly semi-novelistic if arranged sequentially (although these may not be as clear a sequence--the only thing I know for sure is that the last story would be All But the Words, since that looks forward to a time when the Insitute is no more, its members scattered and largely silent. I'm reasonably sure that wasn't the last story he wrote in the series however. Who knows? it might even be the first story in a collection like that, if an ongoing Sword of Damocles effect was desired.)
The first stories in Through Elegant Eyes, at least, are precisely sequential.. A lead character is subtracted in The All-At-Once Man, but the four men who know everything and the author, who doesn't, are all assembled. Mud Violet adds the sawdust ghost Loretta Sheen and the schizo ghost Mary Mondo (and the electronic genius Roy Mega) and Barnaby's Clock introduces the last of the main recurring characters, Austro. The other stories could possibly follow in different sequence, but he deliberately builds from one to the next. Reading them independently, a reader could follow what was happening (especially with the helpful synopses of backstory the author supplies), but if you've read those three in that order there's a surer sense of continuity in what follows. (Old Hallowe'ens on the Guna Slopes, for instance, gains a great deal of resonance from a previous acquaintance with Mud Violet.)
I wonder how far Lafferty was following an original plan, and how far improvising in response to the material, in the characterizations of Loretta Sheen and Mary Mondo particularly? Their development isn't inconsistent, taken all together, but it certainly is surprising given their starting point as listless suicides.
Displaying 1 of 1 review