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Forty Stories
William H. Gass has written of Donald Barthelme that "he has permanently enlarged our perception of the possibilities open to short fiction." In Forty Stories, the companion volume to Sixty Stories, we encounter a dazzling array of subjects: Paul Klee, Goethe, Captain Blood, modern courtship, marriage and divorce, armadillos, and other unique Barthelmean flights of fancy. These pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces tangle with the ludicrous, pose questions that remain unresolved, and challenge familiar bits of language heretofore unexamined. Forty Stories demonstrates Barthelme's unrivaled ability to surprise, to stimulate, and to explore.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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About the author
Donald Barthelme
158 books765 followers
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts
(1968) apparently collects sometimes surrealistic stories of modern life of American writer Donald Barthelme.
A student at the University of Pennsylvania bore Donald Barthelme. Two years later, in 1933, the family moved to Texas, where father of Barthelme served as a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme later majored in journalism.
In 1951, this still student composed his first articles for the Houston Post. The Army drafted Barthelme, who arrived in Korea on 27 July 1953, the very day, when parties signed the ceasefire, ending the war. He served briefly as the editor of a newspaper of Army before returning to the United States and his job at the Houston Post. Once back, he continued his studies of philosophy at the University of Houston. He continued to take classes until 1957 but never received a degree. He spent much of his free time in “black” jazz clubs of Houston and listened to musical innovators, such as Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelly; this experience influenced him later.
Barthelme, a rebellious son, struggled in his relationship with his demanding father. In later years, they tremendously argued about the kinds of literature that interested Barthelme. His avant-garde father in art and aesthetics in many ways approved not the postmodern and deconstruction schools. The Dead Father and The King , the novels, delineate attitude of Barthelme toward his father as King Arthur and Lancelot, the characters, picture him. From the Roman Catholicism of his especially devout mother, Barthelme independently moved away, but this separation as the distance with his father troubled Barthelme. He ably agreed to strictures of his seemingly much closer mother.
Barthelme went to teach for brief periods at Boston University and at University at Buffalo, and he at the college of the City of New York served as distinguished visiting professor from 1974-1975. He married four times. Helen Barthelme, his second wife, later entitled a biography Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound , published in 2001. With Birgit Barthelme, his third wife and a Dane, he fathered Anne Barthelme, his first child, a daughter. He married Marion Barthelme near the end and fathered Kate Barthelme, his second daughter. Marion and Donald wed until his death from throat cancer. People respect fiction of Frederick Barthelme and Steven Barthelme, brothers of Donald Barthelme and also teachers at The University of Southern Mississippi.
A student at the University of Pennsylvania bore Donald Barthelme. Two years later, in 1933, the family moved to Texas, where father of Barthelme served as a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme later majored in journalism.
In 1951, this still student composed his first articles for the Houston Post. The Army drafted Barthelme, who arrived in Korea on 27 July 1953, the very day, when parties signed the ceasefire, ending the war. He served briefly as the editor of a newspaper of Army before returning to the United States and his job at the Houston Post. Once back, he continued his studies of philosophy at the University of Houston. He continued to take classes until 1957 but never received a degree. He spent much of his free time in “black” jazz clubs of Houston and listened to musical innovators, such as Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelly; this experience influenced him later.
Barthelme, a rebellious son, struggled in his relationship with his demanding father. In later years, they tremendously argued about the kinds of literature that interested Barthelme. His avant-garde father in art and aesthetics in many ways approved not the postmodern and deconstruction schools. The Dead Father and The King , the novels, delineate attitude of Barthelme toward his father as King Arthur and Lancelot, the characters, picture him. From the Roman Catholicism of his especially devout mother, Barthelme independently moved away, but this separation as the distance with his father troubled Barthelme. He ably agreed to strictures of his seemingly much closer mother.
Barthelme went to teach for brief periods at Boston University and at University at Buffalo, and he at the college of the City of New York served as distinguished visiting professor from 1974-1975. He married four times. Helen Barthelme, his second wife, later entitled a biography Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound , published in 2001. With Birgit Barthelme, his third wife and a Dane, he fathered Anne Barthelme, his first child, a daughter. He married Marion Barthelme near the end and fathered Kate Barthelme, his second daughter. Marion and Donald wed until his death from throat cancer. People respect fiction of Frederick Barthelme and Steven Barthelme, brothers of Donald Barthelme and also teachers at The University of Southern Mississippi.
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August 7, 2024
I openly admit my tastes tends to be a bit quirky, even oddball, which probably accounts for the fact that I really, really, really enjoyed two stories in this collection, two stories not given so much as a mention in other reviews, at least the ones I’ve read on this thread. And what, you may ask, are those two Donald Barthelme stories? Answer: Chablis and The New Owner. And I really, really, really had a blast doing the write-up of each of these yummy chocolate snappers. After sampling as per below, you might even consider picking up the entire box of forty:
CHABLIS
Domestic Impasse: Our first-person narrator lets it be known quite emphatically he is happy remaining a husband and father (he has an almost 2-year-old baby girl), rather than becoming a husband, father and dog-owner. But, damn, his wife says not only does she want a dog but now the baby wants a dog. Sidebar: One way to read this Barthelme shorty is as Raymond Carver parody.
Bah, Bah, Black Sheep: His wife tells him the kind of dog the baby wants is a Carin terrier since a Carin terrier is a good Presbyterian just like herself and the baby. Meanwhile, he reflects: “I didn’t go to church because I was the black sheep. There were five children in my family and the males rotated the position of black sheep among us, the oldest one being the black sheep for a while while he was in his DWI period or whatever and then getting grayer as he maybe got a job or was in the service and then finally becoming a white sheep when he got married and had a grandchild. My sister was never a black sheep because she was a girl.” Stark, mostly staccato sentences and deadpan narrative voice – oh yeah, Donald Barthelme, you sly Texas dog, clicking into that Raymond Carver rhythm.
Baby, Baby: Although he told his wife a baby was too expensive, those women will wear a man down, even if it takes years, and this is exactly what happened to him. So, he hangs around and hugs the baby named Joanna, every chance he gets. But when Joanna watches television she just looks dumb and forgets you’re there. Oh, Joanna - welcome to Carver country, even parody Carver country, where you sit around all day watching television. In another few years you’ll have a chance to partake of that other Carver country preoccupation – heavy drinking.
Dog, Redux: Back on the dog. We sense our narrator on the cusp of a little Carver country male rage when he reflects how he can see himself walking all over their subdivision hunting down his damn runaway terrier, a little brown dog named Michael, a possibly rabid dog, a dog that might even have bitten someone in the subdivision. “It’s enough to make you think about divorce.” Sounds like our male narrator needs to have a serious talk with his wife before things really get out of hand.
Self-Examination: He finally reaches the point of critical self-appraisal, wondering why he himself isn’t a more natural person like his wife wants him to be. He sits in his second-floor den at his desk at five-thirty in the morning, looking out the window at the joggers, worrying, worrying about Joanna jamming a kitchen knife into an electric socket or worrying about Joanna eating her crayons, all the time smoking and drinking Gallo Chablis. Ha! Gallo Chablis – at least Donald Barthelme lets his narrator drink a glass of Chablis instead of beer. Now that’s a step up! Maybe our narrator is even a regular reader of the New Yorker.
Congratulations: His memory travels back to a time when he was the family black sheep, when he was driving his friend’s Buick and swerved into a cornfield to avoid a head-on collision. Well that was one time when he did something right for a change. He pats himself on the back and goes to check on the baby. The story ends here on an upbeat (one of the advantages of drinking Chablis instead of beer, perhaps?), a real honest-to-goodness escape from the usual fare in Carver country.
THE NEW OWNER
Not-So-Good Vibrations: “When he came to look at the building, with a real estate man hissing and oozing beside him, we lowered the blinds, muted or extinguished lights, threw newspapers and dirty clothes on the floor in piles, burned rubber bands in ashtrays, and played Buxtehude on the hi-fi – shaking organ chords whose vibrations made the plaster falling from the ceiling fall faster.” So begins the dreaded nightmare come true for any long-standing apartment renter: the new landlord is the landlord from hell.
Immediate Changes: Oh, no, little rent bills start appearing in the mailboxes, the rent goes up and the heat goes down. Bicycles must be removed from the halls; shopping carts must be removed from the halls. Sure, you’ve lived in your apartment for decades with your friends and neighbors, everything going along smoothly, but guess what – you can be replaced tomorrow; actually, it would be better all round (at least according to the new landlord) if you moved out. Oh, Donald Barthelme, you have touched on one very raw nerve here.
The Old Super: Your old super is great; he takes out the garbage, keeps the halls mopped and fixes all the things needing fixing. Now he’s a goner. Was that him arguing with the new landlord at 10:00 last night? So it goes. Now you have a new super you never see – garbage piles up, halls are a mess and because the new landlord stopped the extermination service, the roaches begin taking over. No doubt about it – the new landlord wants you out.
Giving and Taking: The new landlord gives you and your neighbors a new month-to-month lease. He places a clear plastic cover, locked, over the thermostat. He holds a manila folder with new floor plans for your apartment building (no, that’s quite not accurate; you quickly revise your last thought to ‘his apartment building’). You are still young and working but how about Levon and Priscilla, the old couple upstairs? Lots of fear and trembling, to be sure.
Not-So-Well Wishes: I suspect nearly everybody reading these words can relate with the narrator’s sentiments, “The new owner stands on the roof, where the tomato plants are, owning the roof. May a good wind blow him to hell.”
Coda: For me, this story of an evil landlord is the bare bones many other writers could use to write their own ten to twenty page stories. Donald Barthelme captures some real magic by compressing the drama into less than three pages. No wonder William H. Gass said he set the ground for an entire genre of flash fiction.
April 24, 2018
Forty Things to Know About Barthelme
1. He had a beard.
2. He had a bad relationship with his father.
3. His father was an architect of some renown
4. He was an experimental writer, considered by many to be among the best of his generation.
5. Taking a sample of ten Barthelme stories, three will be genius, six will be good, one will be crap.
6. His more famous stories include "The Balloon," "Me and Mrs. Mandible," "At the End of the Mechanical Age," "King of Jazz" (none of which are included here), "The Temptation of St. Anthony," and "A Few of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby" (both included here).
7. On point, Sixty Stories might be a slightly better collection than this.
8. It can take time to sink into Barthelme's rhythm, but his prose will probably hook you sooner or later.
9. Unless you do not particularly enjoy this sort of out-there formalism. Barthelme likes to play with form.
10. He's funny.
11. Many current writers cite him as an influence.
12. He enjoyed jazz.
13. It's hard to put his work into a particular school.
14. A Barthelme story demands to be read on its own terms; it's hard to fit him into any sort of ideology or political movement or cause-stumping. Barthelme's stories celebrate themselves and their own language first and foremost.
15. His pieces run short, and he's often cited as an ancestor of the now-popular flash fiction genre.
16. It's hard to imagine Lydia Davis without Donald Barthelme. Perhaps this is more of an 11a).
17. He writes stories about everything from domestic disputes to types of angels and bodyguards.
18. He dislikes exposition. He tends instead to give the reader just as much information as they need to understand the story. As such, his work might seem difficult at first, but again, rhythms establish themselves.
19. Perhaps as a corollary to 13, it's easy to see why some have labeled him "postmodern." His fiction often comments on the instability of language and uses certain metafictive techniques. Irony is frequent.
20. However, he also favors collages, like "At the Tolstoy Museum."
21. His dialog is terrific.
22. There's either something funky going on in terms of the form or the content of his sto
While the reader was promised 40 aspects of Barthelme, work on this list was not begun until shortly before its deadline, thus allowing our writer to only compile 21 complete reasons. The management apologizes for any inconvenience this might have caused
Furthermore, on account of the deadline pressures, it has come to our attention that a few of these reasons were rather disappointing, non-descriptive, and/or apropos of absolutely nothing. The management apologizes for any inconvenience this might have caused, too.
"So, Don, I like you a lot on a whole. I think you were a remarkably original, funny, and warm writer. But when you bounce around from topic to topic like crazy, which I get comes from your interest in jazz, it sometimes results in half-baked stories like 'Sinbad.'"
"'Sinbad' was written to reflect my interest in fairy tales and legends. You can also see this in pieces like 'Bluebeard' and 'the Glass Mountain.'"
"Bluebeard was also a novel by Kurt Vonnegut."
"Kurt Vonnegut wrote many novels. They were also known to bounce around from topic to topic, most notably Breakfast of Champions."
"I mean, don't get me wrong, Don. Sometimes it was beautiful, like with 'Departure.' But when it didn't work, it really didn't work."
"Would you like to see my pet elephant?"
"Your pet elephant?"
"Yes, I bought it from the maharaja during my trip to India. I went there with the Beatles, you know."
Consider the experimental writer. Does the experimental writer sit down at a typewriter, or a word processor, or in this modern age a computer, with the idea to write an experimental piece in their head? Or do their pieces only reveal themselves as experiments as they write? How conscious is the experimental writer of the fact that they are experimental?
When an experimental writer's experiment fails, is it to be praised for being an experiment, or to be condemned for being a failure?
Is the experimental writer an artist or a scientist? A politician? An assassin? All? None?
What is the intended end result of the experimental writer's experiments?
Has the experimental writer ever considered telling the story in a conventional fashion? How many stories that begin conventionally are then made experimental by a flash of inspiration? How many forms is the experimental writer allowed to experiment with before the stories cease to be stories? Is the experimental writer necessarily postmodern? Metamodern?
When is the experimental writer pretentious? Is it possible for any art to be pretentious? Is all art pretentious by definition?
You have fifteen minutes to answer. Go!
1. He had a beard.
2. He had a bad relationship with his father.
3. His father was an architect of some renown
4. He was an experimental writer, considered by many to be among the best of his generation.
5. Taking a sample of ten Barthelme stories, three will be genius, six will be good, one will be crap.
6. His more famous stories include "The Balloon," "Me and Mrs. Mandible," "At the End of the Mechanical Age," "King of Jazz" (none of which are included here), "The Temptation of St. Anthony," and "A Few of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby" (both included here).
7. On point, Sixty Stories might be a slightly better collection than this.
8. It can take time to sink into Barthelme's rhythm, but his prose will probably hook you sooner or later.
9. Unless you do not particularly enjoy this sort of out-there formalism. Barthelme likes to play with form.
10. He's funny.
11. Many current writers cite him as an influence.
12. He enjoyed jazz.
13. It's hard to put his work into a particular school.
14. A Barthelme story demands to be read on its own terms; it's hard to fit him into any sort of ideology or political movement or cause-stumping. Barthelme's stories celebrate themselves and their own language first and foremost.
15. His pieces run short, and he's often cited as an ancestor of the now-popular flash fiction genre.
16. It's hard to imagine Lydia Davis without Donald Barthelme. Perhaps this is more of an 11a).
17. He writes stories about everything from domestic disputes to types of angels and bodyguards.
18. He dislikes exposition. He tends instead to give the reader just as much information as they need to understand the story. As such, his work might seem difficult at first, but again, rhythms establish themselves.
19. Perhaps as a corollary to 13, it's easy to see why some have labeled him "postmodern." His fiction often comments on the instability of language and uses certain metafictive techniques. Irony is frequent.
20. However, he also favors collages, like "At the Tolstoy Museum."
21. His dialog is terrific.
22. There's either something funky going on in terms of the form or the content of his sto
While the reader was promised 40 aspects of Barthelme, work on this list was not begun until shortly before its deadline, thus allowing our writer to only compile 21 complete reasons. The management apologizes for any inconvenience this might have caused
Furthermore, on account of the deadline pressures, it has come to our attention that a few of these reasons were rather disappointing, non-descriptive, and/or apropos of absolutely nothing. The management apologizes for any inconvenience this might have caused, too.
"So, Don, I like you a lot on a whole. I think you were a remarkably original, funny, and warm writer. But when you bounce around from topic to topic like crazy, which I get comes from your interest in jazz, it sometimes results in half-baked stories like 'Sinbad.'"
"'Sinbad' was written to reflect my interest in fairy tales and legends. You can also see this in pieces like 'Bluebeard' and 'the Glass Mountain.'"
"Bluebeard was also a novel by Kurt Vonnegut."
"Kurt Vonnegut wrote many novels. They were also known to bounce around from topic to topic, most notably Breakfast of Champions."
"I mean, don't get me wrong, Don. Sometimes it was beautiful, like with 'Departure.' But when it didn't work, it really didn't work."
"Would you like to see my pet elephant?"
"Your pet elephant?"
"Yes, I bought it from the maharaja during my trip to India. I went there with the Beatles, you know."
Consider the experimental writer. Does the experimental writer sit down at a typewriter, or a word processor, or in this modern age a computer, with the idea to write an experimental piece in their head? Or do their pieces only reveal themselves as experiments as they write? How conscious is the experimental writer of the fact that they are experimental?
When an experimental writer's experiment fails, is it to be praised for being an experiment, or to be condemned for being a failure?
Is the experimental writer an artist or a scientist? A politician? An assassin? All? None?
What is the intended end result of the experimental writer's experiments?
Has the experimental writer ever considered telling the story in a conventional fashion? How many stories that begin conventionally are then made experimental by a flash of inspiration? How many forms is the experimental writer allowed to experiment with before the stories cease to be stories? Is the experimental writer necessarily postmodern? Metamodern?
When is the experimental writer pretentious? Is it possible for any art to be pretentious? Is all art pretentious by definition?
You have fifteen minutes to answer. Go!
January 18, 2013
From "Engineer-Private Paul Klee misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshofen and Cambral, March 1916" :
"We do not have your secrets and that is what we are after, your secrets. Our first secret is where we are. No one knows. Our second secret is how many of us there are. No one knows. Omnipresence is our goal. We do not even need real omnipresence. The theory of omnipresence is enough. With omnipresence, hand-in-hand as it were, goes omniscience. And with omniscience and omnipresence, hand-in-hand-in-hand as it were, goes omnipotence. We are a three-sided waltz. However our mood is melancholy. There is a secret sigh that we sigh, secretly. We yearn to be known, acknowledged, admired even. What is the good of omnipotence if nobody knows? However that is a secret."
Monty Python:
"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our THREE weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our FOUR...no... AMONGST our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again."
Donald Barthelme exists in an uneasy limbo somewhere between Dada and stand-up comedy. His best ones are just like the kind of outrageous riffing on a crazy subject some comics like Billy Connolly or the early Woody Allen could get into. Billy tells us about a terrible misprint in the Bible and the Crucifixion really happened in Gallowgate, a rather rough area of Glasgow, not Galilee, and Billy proceeds to tell us what really happened; or Woody starts off "I shot a moose, and I strap him on to the fender of my car, and I'm driving home along the west side highway, but what I didn't realize was, that the bullet did not penetrate the moose, it just creased the scalp, knocking him unconscious". Or "I bought a little city. It was Galveston" (that's Donald) or "Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him" (Donald too).
Those are the good ones but for me there are far too many which aren't funny, just crazy, full of what appears to be an intense straining after the jarring juxtaposition and the bizarre literary pranking. What kind of sense can we make of stories which aren't supposed to make sense? After a while Donald Barthelme turned out to be a little bit too much like someone telling you about their dreams - can there be a more tedious conversation with anyone? and isn't it really awkward to explain to your partner that her or his dreamlife is colossally boring without detonating the entire relationship ("so...what are you saying about my unconscious? it's dull??") - or a yawn-inducing acid trip, an achievement in oxymoronicism if ever there was one. Reading this was strange - at the beginning I thought I was a real big fan and by the middle I had so far fallen out of love with DB that I was beginning to fall into aggressive parental confrontation mode : "Look Donald, would you wipe your non-sequitors on the mat before you come in? Look at this mess! Now go out and come back in properly!" It was going to end in tears, for sure, and with Donald the tears were going to be the size of a blue whale and have Popes and news anchorwomen dressed as camels living inside them.
"We do not have your secrets and that is what we are after, your secrets. Our first secret is where we are. No one knows. Our second secret is how many of us there are. No one knows. Omnipresence is our goal. We do not even need real omnipresence. The theory of omnipresence is enough. With omnipresence, hand-in-hand as it were, goes omniscience. And with omniscience and omnipresence, hand-in-hand-in-hand as it were, goes omnipotence. We are a three-sided waltz. However our mood is melancholy. There is a secret sigh that we sigh, secretly. We yearn to be known, acknowledged, admired even. What is the good of omnipotence if nobody knows? However that is a secret."
Monty Python:
"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our THREE weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our FOUR...no... AMONGST our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again."
Donald Barthelme exists in an uneasy limbo somewhere between Dada and stand-up comedy. His best ones are just like the kind of outrageous riffing on a crazy subject some comics like Billy Connolly or the early Woody Allen could get into. Billy tells us about a terrible misprint in the Bible and the Crucifixion really happened in Gallowgate, a rather rough area of Glasgow, not Galilee, and Billy proceeds to tell us what really happened; or Woody starts off "I shot a moose, and I strap him on to the fender of my car, and I'm driving home along the west side highway, but what I didn't realize was, that the bullet did not penetrate the moose, it just creased the scalp, knocking him unconscious". Or "I bought a little city. It was Galveston" (that's Donald) or "Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him" (Donald too).
Those are the good ones but for me there are far too many which aren't funny, just crazy, full of what appears to be an intense straining after the jarring juxtaposition and the bizarre literary pranking. What kind of sense can we make of stories which aren't supposed to make sense? After a while Donald Barthelme turned out to be a little bit too much like someone telling you about their dreams - can there be a more tedious conversation with anyone? and isn't it really awkward to explain to your partner that her or his dreamlife is colossally boring without detonating the entire relationship ("so...what are you saying about my unconscious? it's dull??") - or a yawn-inducing acid trip, an achievement in oxymoronicism if ever there was one. Reading this was strange - at the beginning I thought I was a real big fan and by the middle I had so far fallen out of love with DB that I was beginning to fall into aggressive parental confrontation mode : "Look Donald, would you wipe your non-sequitors on the mat before you come in? Look at this mess! Now go out and come back in properly!" It was going to end in tears, for sure, and with Donald the tears were going to be the size of a blue whale and have Popes and news anchorwomen dressed as camels living inside them.
June 8, 2023
CRITIQUE:
Slices of Life
In these 40 stories, Barthelme challenges the definition or nature of short stories.
About the only quality they have in common with the standard definition is that they're short - most are between three and five pages long.
You could even question whether they are, strictly speaking, "stories", because they contain no narrative, let alone a beginning, a middle and an end. They're short pieces of fiction, rather than structured stories or narratives.
In the words of Anton Chekhov, each of the stories consists of a "slice of life". It's a cross-section of, or a moment in, time or a relationship, from which we are tempted to infer that the segment is indicative or representative of the whole.
Ruminations
On first starting these stories and beginning to develop a hypothesis about what Barthelme was trying to achieve, I thought of the word "rumination": each story is a rumination on its subject matter, which is usually stated in the title of the story.
To test my hypothesis, I first looked up the definition of "rumination", and was surprised to see that it has a largely negative connotation. For example, the American Psychiatric Association defines "rumination" as -
Perspicacity and Detail
While some of the relationships in "40 Stories" might be damaged or under threat (from either the inside or the outside), it wouldn't be fair to say that Barthelme writes about them from a negative point of view. He presents them as he sees them. The stories are almost clinical in perspicacity and detail.
Each small slice of life is representative of the particular life, or of life in general. They seem to capture the (funny, peculiar) idiosyncrasies of both mundane and literate Americans living in the 1980's (when most of the stories were written) and perhaps, even earlier, in the 1970's (to which the characters were still responding or from which they were still recovering).
HOMAGE:
It's Only Castles Burning (Bob, Neil, Van and Freddie)
F. M. Sushi: Would you like to play some music? It's not much fun driving silent.
D.J. Ian: Yeh, sure.
F. M. Sushi: Who's that?
D.J. Ian: Bob Dylan.
F. M. Sushi: I don't like it.
D. J. Ian: It's a track off "Blood on the Tracks" - one of my favourite Dylan albums.
F. M. Sushi: I've never liked his voice.
D. J. Ian: You don't have to like his voice on this album. The lyrics are so good.
F. M. Sushi: Can you play something else?
D. J. Ian: O.K.
F. M. Sushi: This isn't Neil Young, is it?
D. J. Ian: Yeh, it's off "After the Gold Rush". His third solo album.
F. M. Sushi: It sounds like the song the cat dragged in.
D. J. Ian: It's called: "Don't Let It Bring You Down".
F. M. Sushi: It's terrible.
D. J. Ian: When Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played it live on "4 Way Street", Neil Young said: "Here's a new song. It's guaranteed to bring you right down. It's called 'Don't Let It Bring You Down.' It sorta starts out real slow and then fizzles out altogether."
F. M. Sushi: It can't fizzle out soon enough. Turn it off.
D. J. Ian: If you exist...
F. M. Sushi: Can't you play something more upbeat?
D. J. Ian: Sure. What about some Van Morrison?
F. M. Sushi: O.K...This is just as bad as Bob Dylan. I thought you were going to put on "Moondance".
D. J. Ian: It's "Astral Weeks". It's a classic album, and an even better song.
F. M. Sushi: Maybe I should choose something myself?
D. J. Ian: As long as it's not INXS.
F. M. Sushi: What's wrong with INXS?
D. J. Ian: I've already told you what I think of Michael Hutchence.
F. M. Sushi: Try this.
D. J. Ian: Oh my god. Of all the Queen songs you could have played. I mean, I like the first four albums, but not the later novelty crap they got into. At least you can't blame Freddie. Brian May wrote this. I never liked "Fat Bottomed Girls" in any of their manifestations.
F. M. Sushi: You always took Queen too seriously. You're meant to have a laugh.
SOUNDTRACK:
Slices of Life
In these 40 stories, Barthelme challenges the definition or nature of short stories.
About the only quality they have in common with the standard definition is that they're short - most are between three and five pages long.
You could even question whether they are, strictly speaking, "stories", because they contain no narrative, let alone a beginning, a middle and an end. They're short pieces of fiction, rather than structured stories or narratives.
In the words of Anton Chekhov, each of the stories consists of a "slice of life". It's a cross-section of, or a moment in, time or a relationship, from which we are tempted to infer that the segment is indicative or representative of the whole.
Ruminations
On first starting these stories and beginning to develop a hypothesis about what Barthelme was trying to achieve, I thought of the word "rumination": each story is a rumination on its subject matter, which is usually stated in the title of the story.
To test my hypothesis, I first looked up the definition of "rumination", and was surprised to see that it has a largely negative connotation. For example, the American Psychiatric Association defines "rumination" as -
"repetitive thinking or dwelling on negative feelings and distress and their causes and consequences. The repetitive, negative aspect of rumination can contribute to the development of depression or anxiety and can worsen existing conditions."
Perspicacity and Detail
While some of the relationships in "40 Stories" might be damaged or under threat (from either the inside or the outside), it wouldn't be fair to say that Barthelme writes about them from a negative point of view. He presents them as he sees them. The stories are almost clinical in perspicacity and detail.
Each small slice of life is representative of the particular life, or of life in general. They seem to capture the (funny, peculiar) idiosyncrasies of both mundane and literate Americans living in the 1980's (when most of the stories were written) and perhaps, even earlier, in the 1970's (to which the characters were still responding or from which they were still recovering).
HOMAGE:
It's Only Castles Burning (Bob, Neil, Van and Freddie)
F. M. Sushi: Would you like to play some music? It's not much fun driving silent.
D.J. Ian: Yeh, sure.
F. M. Sushi: Who's that?
D.J. Ian: Bob Dylan.
F. M. Sushi: I don't like it.
D. J. Ian: It's a track off "Blood on the Tracks" - one of my favourite Dylan albums.
F. M. Sushi: I've never liked his voice.
D. J. Ian: You don't have to like his voice on this album. The lyrics are so good.
F. M. Sushi: Can you play something else?
D. J. Ian: O.K.
F. M. Sushi: This isn't Neil Young, is it?
D. J. Ian: Yeh, it's off "After the Gold Rush". His third solo album.
F. M. Sushi: It sounds like the song the cat dragged in.
D. J. Ian: It's called: "Don't Let It Bring You Down".
F. M. Sushi: It's terrible.
D. J. Ian: When Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played it live on "4 Way Street", Neil Young said: "Here's a new song. It's guaranteed to bring you right down. It's called 'Don't Let It Bring You Down.' It sorta starts out real slow and then fizzles out altogether."
F. M. Sushi: It can't fizzle out soon enough. Turn it off.
D. J. Ian: If you exist...
F. M. Sushi: Can't you play something more upbeat?
D. J. Ian: Sure. What about some Van Morrison?
F. M. Sushi: O.K...This is just as bad as Bob Dylan. I thought you were going to put on "Moondance".
D. J. Ian: It's "Astral Weeks". It's a classic album, and an even better song.
F. M. Sushi: Maybe I should choose something myself?
D. J. Ian: As long as it's not INXS.
F. M. Sushi: What's wrong with INXS?
D. J. Ian: I've already told you what I think of Michael Hutchence.
F. M. Sushi: Try this.
D. J. Ian: Oh my god. Of all the Queen songs you could have played. I mean, I like the first four albums, but not the later novelty crap they got into. At least you can't blame Freddie. Brian May wrote this. I never liked "Fat Bottomed Girls" in any of their manifestations.
F. M. Sushi: You always took Queen too seriously. You're meant to have a laugh.
SOUNDTRACK:
September 23, 2013
Usually when I find a pile of books in a box on the sidewalk it's filled with junk books, like self-help finance twaddle and new-age crap about death and terrible pop fiction. So imagine my surprise when, underneath The Artist's Way and Lovely Bones, I found this book! Yay!!
Anyway, this was both better and worse than I expected. As a collection, it's really uneven; some stories I could only read a paragraph or two before frantically paging through to the next one, whereas others I actually re-read as soon as I finished them.
So I can't exactly endorse this book as a whole, though it certainly demonstrates good range and gives an idea of what Barthelme is capable of. I'd previously only attempted his novels now and again, and usually found them too absurd and strange to get through. And here too, some of the stories are just ridiculous, so self-consciously crazy that you can't ever get a foothold on what's even happening. (Ex: in "Sindbad," Sindbad teaches a math class, but also kind of a cocktail party, and his jacket is too big, and all the students hate him??) This sort of things makes me very cranky.
But then some stories were total realism, and had interesting characters and fun things to say and cool points to make. (Ex: in "Jaws," a grocery store worker listens to and advises all his regular customers, including Natasha, who bites her husband on the back of the leg, severing a tendon, because he had an affair.) Those I loved.
I guess if I wanted to be totally pretentious, I might classify him as pre-neo-quirk (yeah, that's gross), but so it's fitting that Dave Eggers introduces this collection. (His intro is great, btw—fuck off, Eggers-haters.)
So the point is, Barthelme does a lot of the same stuff that all those "weird" writers are doing now, and sometimes it comes off as just as forced, but when it works it's really great. The best story in the collection is "Departures," which details several snapshot cases of leaving, including one where the narrator's father, a lumberjack, falls in love with a dryad who is protecting the trees he wants to cut down. Very beautiful, and very funny. So the good ones do mostly overshadow the bad.
Anyway, this was both better and worse than I expected. As a collection, it's really uneven; some stories I could only read a paragraph or two before frantically paging through to the next one, whereas others I actually re-read as soon as I finished them.
So I can't exactly endorse this book as a whole, though it certainly demonstrates good range and gives an idea of what Barthelme is capable of. I'd previously only attempted his novels now and again, and usually found them too absurd and strange to get through. And here too, some of the stories are just ridiculous, so self-consciously crazy that you can't ever get a foothold on what's even happening. (Ex: in "Sindbad," Sindbad teaches a math class, but also kind of a cocktail party, and his jacket is too big, and all the students hate him??) This sort of things makes me very cranky.
But then some stories were total realism, and had interesting characters and fun things to say and cool points to make. (Ex: in "Jaws," a grocery store worker listens to and advises all his regular customers, including Natasha, who bites her husband on the back of the leg, severing a tendon, because he had an affair.) Those I loved.
I guess if I wanted to be totally pretentious, I might classify him as pre-neo-quirk (yeah, that's gross), but so it's fitting that Dave Eggers introduces this collection. (His intro is great, btw—fuck off, Eggers-haters.)
So the point is, Barthelme does a lot of the same stuff that all those "weird" writers are doing now, and sometimes it comes off as just as forced, but when it works it's really great. The best story in the collection is "Departures," which details several snapshot cases of leaving, including one where the narrator's father, a lumberjack, falls in love with a dryad who is protecting the trees he wants to cut down. Very beautiful, and very funny. So the good ones do mostly overshadow the bad.
April 14, 2015
Estos ’40 relatos’ (Forty Stories, 1987) de Donald Barthelme, enganchan desde la primera frase. (Por ejemplo, ‘Chablis’, el primer cuento: ”Mi mujer quiere un perro, aunque ya tiene una niña. La niña tiene casi dos años. Según ella, es la niña la que quiere el perro”.) Y es que Barthelme sabe cómo llamar la atención del lector. Todos los cuentos son diferentes: algunos humorísticos, otros paródicos, otros absurdos o excéntricos, pero bajo todos ellos subyace algo más profundo, un reflejo del sinsentido de la sociedad consumista occidental. La narrativa de Barthelme es claramente experimental, en clave posmoderna, lo que Pynchon bautizó como barthelmismo, y como tantos autores de esta corriente, intenta dar sentido a cosas extrañas, cercanas, cotidianas, dotándolas de una transparencia que no habíamos apreciado hasta ahora.
Las principales armas de Barthelme son la sátira y el lenguaje, con una erudición evidente, y sus temas, la familia, la religión, la cultura popular, la política. Entre los ’40 relatos’ se encuentran algunos memorables: ‘El genio’, ‘Acerca del guardaespaldas’, ‘Tiburón’, ‘Conversaciones con Goethe’, ‘El nuevo propietario’, ‘El soldado Paul Klee’, ‘La experiencia educativa’, ‘Barba Azul’, ‘Despedidas’, ‘Visitas’, ‘Algunos de nosotros veníamos advirtiendo a nuestro amigo Colby’ (que empieza magistralmente: ”Algunos de nosotros veníamos advirtiendo a nuestro amigo Colby desde hace bastante tiempo, por su manera de comportarse, pero ya había llegado demasiado lejos, de modo que decidimos ahorcarlo”.), ‘El rayo’, ‘Rocadur’, ‘La construcción’ y ‘La niña’.
Unas veces absurdo, otras extravagante, otras genial, sin duda Barthelme no deja indiferente.
Las principales armas de Barthelme son la sátira y el lenguaje, con una erudición evidente, y sus temas, la familia, la religión, la cultura popular, la política. Entre los ’40 relatos’ se encuentran algunos memorables: ‘El genio’, ‘Acerca del guardaespaldas’, ‘Tiburón’, ‘Conversaciones con Goethe’, ‘El nuevo propietario’, ‘El soldado Paul Klee’, ‘La experiencia educativa’, ‘Barba Azul’, ‘Despedidas’, ‘Visitas’, ‘Algunos de nosotros veníamos advirtiendo a nuestro amigo Colby’ (que empieza magistralmente: ”Algunos de nosotros veníamos advirtiendo a nuestro amigo Colby desde hace bastante tiempo, por su manera de comportarse, pero ya había llegado demasiado lejos, de modo que decidimos ahorcarlo”.), ‘El rayo’, ‘Rocadur’, ‘La construcción’ y ‘La niña’.
Unas veces absurdo, otras extravagante, otras genial, sin duda Barthelme no deja indiferente.
July 16, 2021
Öykü derlemelerini puanlamayı sevmiyorum. İyi olanlara gönül rahatlığıyla 4-5 verebiliyorum ama Kırk Öykü gibi tam olarak ne düşündüğümü, ne kadar beğendiğimi bilemediğim kitaplar zorluyor beni.
Donald Barthelme savaş sonrası postmodern Amerikan edebiyatının en önemli isimlerinden biri. Yazım şekli aklıma çok sevdiğim, Barthelme'nin de dönemdaşı olan iki ismi getiriyor: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ve Spencer Holst. Gelgelelim bana göre ikisi kadar da iyi bir yazar değil. Daha önce Siren'in yayınladığı Pamuk Prenses'i okumuş ve yapılmaya çalışanı anladığımı düşünsem de ortaya çıkan eserden pek memnun olmamıştım. Kırk Öykü de Barthelme'nin yaratıcılığından bir seçki sunuyor bize.
Öykülerin birkaç tanesini epey sevdim aslında. Chablis, Sabah Saat Dörtte Saray, Çene, Yeni Mal Sahibi, Aziz Anthony'i Günaha Davet ve özellikle de Bazılarımız Dostumuz Colby'i Tehdit Ediyordu yalnızca biçimsel olarak değil içerik olarak da, yani anlatılan öykünün kendisiyle de memnun etti beni. Fakat geriye kalan otuz küsur öykünün kimisinde anlatım şeklini sevmedim, kimisindeyse bir öykü anlatılıp anlatılmadığına emin dahi olamadım. Barthelme gibi dille oynamayı çok seven, biçimi içeriğin önüne koyan bir yazarda muhtemelen çeviri okuyor olmanın da kaybettirdiği çok şey vardır. Yine de kitabın Nurdan Maral tarafından yapılan çevirisi başarılıydı bence.
Sonuç olarak Barthelme tuhaf bir yazar, Kırk Öykü de ortalama bir derleme. Çok seveceğiniz ya da nefret edeceğiniz öyküler bulmak mümkün içinde. Ancak tüm bunlara rağmen yeni bir Barthelme kitabı yayınlansa koşa koşa gidip alacağımı da söylemem lazım. Barthelme'nin her öyküde farklı bir şey deniyor olması beni heyecanlandırıyor, her metne çok sevebileceğim ya da şaşırabileceğim ihtimalinin farkında olarak başlıyorum. Barthelme'nin iki bilindik derlemesi var zaten, Kırk Öykü ve Altmış Öykü. Henüz dilimize çevrilmeyen ikincisi daha iyi yorumlar alıyor, umarım onu da Türkçe görebiliriz.
Donald Barthelme savaş sonrası postmodern Amerikan edebiyatının en önemli isimlerinden biri. Yazım şekli aklıma çok sevdiğim, Barthelme'nin de dönemdaşı olan iki ismi getiriyor: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ve Spencer Holst. Gelgelelim bana göre ikisi kadar da iyi bir yazar değil. Daha önce Siren'in yayınladığı Pamuk Prenses'i okumuş ve yapılmaya çalışanı anladığımı düşünsem de ortaya çıkan eserden pek memnun olmamıştım. Kırk Öykü de Barthelme'nin yaratıcılığından bir seçki sunuyor bize.
Öykülerin birkaç tanesini epey sevdim aslında. Chablis, Sabah Saat Dörtte Saray, Çene, Yeni Mal Sahibi, Aziz Anthony'i Günaha Davet ve özellikle de Bazılarımız Dostumuz Colby'i Tehdit Ediyordu yalnızca biçimsel olarak değil içerik olarak da, yani anlatılan öykünün kendisiyle de memnun etti beni. Fakat geriye kalan otuz küsur öykünün kimisinde anlatım şeklini sevmedim, kimisindeyse bir öykü anlatılıp anlatılmadığına emin dahi olamadım. Barthelme gibi dille oynamayı çok seven, biçimi içeriğin önüne koyan bir yazarda muhtemelen çeviri okuyor olmanın da kaybettirdiği çok şey vardır. Yine de kitabın Nurdan Maral tarafından yapılan çevirisi başarılıydı bence.
Sonuç olarak Barthelme tuhaf bir yazar, Kırk Öykü de ortalama bir derleme. Çok seveceğiniz ya da nefret edeceğiniz öyküler bulmak mümkün içinde. Ancak tüm bunlara rağmen yeni bir Barthelme kitabı yayınlansa koşa koşa gidip alacağımı da söylemem lazım. Barthelme'nin her öyküde farklı bir şey deniyor olması beni heyecanlandırıyor, her metne çok sevebileceğim ya da şaşırabileceğim ihtimalinin farkında olarak başlıyorum. Barthelme'nin iki bilindik derlemesi var zaten, Kırk Öykü ve Altmış Öykü. Henüz dilimize çevrilmeyen ikincisi daha iyi yorumlar alıyor, umarım onu da Türkçe görebiliriz.
November 2, 2019
Resenha do livro para O Globo: https://oglobo.globo.com/cultura/livr...
March 2, 2011
I don't know what happened. There I was, excited to cadge a library copy of a Barthelme book, a rarity on these shores, having stored up eight months of warm feelings for Sixty Stories. But no. It all came crashing down with this insufferable series of self-ironising experiments, non sequiturs, intellectual masturbations and opaque parodies.
What happened? Well, it is entirely possible Sixty Stories exhausted the capabilities of Mr. B, so widely adored among the McSweeney's generation, serving up an inferior batch of stories. Nothing here took off in the same insanely original, witty and definitively weird way as the previous collection. There wasn't a story in here I'd want to have repeated intercourse with for months on end before lovingly slicing the warts off my cock.
And that's a shame. That is grand old shame.
What happened? Well, it is entirely possible Sixty Stories exhausted the capabilities of Mr. B, so widely adored among the McSweeney's generation, serving up an inferior batch of stories. Nothing here took off in the same insanely original, witty and definitively weird way as the previous collection. There wasn't a story in here I'd want to have repeated intercourse with for months on end before lovingly slicing the warts off my cock.
And that's a shame. That is grand old shame.
May 1, 2016
tuhaf ve zor öyküler. daha doğrusu, zorlayıcı. okuru ne diline ne içeriğine alıştırıyor barthelme. kitabı sevdiğinizi düşündükten dakikalar sonra bırakma isteği duyabilirsiniz. barthelme'nin özellikle istediği bu: çok keyif verebilirim size, beni çok sevebilirsiniz ama hayır!..devam etmek istiyorsanız zorlanın, yorulun, birlikte arayalım, sorgulayalım. sonunda bir bütüne, bir anlama ulaşmak da yok üstelik. böyle bir katılıma ikna edecek ne var derseniz: görkemli, ışıl ışıl bir zeka, yaratıcılığın gücü ve bitmek tükenmek bilmeyen ironi ve mizah.
October 28, 2018
Sixty Stories es mucho mejor. Pocos relatos de esta antología me gustaron: The Genius, The Palace at Four A.M., Visitors, At the Tolstoy Museum, The Flight of Pingeons from the Palace, The Temptation of St. Anthony, Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby y The Baby.
Barthelme era un genio, un maestro de la literatura, y lo mejor de él, en mi opinión, está en el ya mencionado Sixty Stories.
Barthelme era un genio, un maestro de la literatura, y lo mejor de él, en mi opinión, está en el ya mencionado Sixty Stories.
April 6, 2011
Donald Barthelme is an experimental and postmodern writer who employs a wide range of strange devices that helped him create emotion and feeling in the reader. In his short story collection, 40 Stories, he constructs an entire story though a question and answer session, he juxtaposes pictures with text to create greater effect, and one story is several letters to an editor. I have chosen to focus on one story in the collection in order to fully explain what is at play in Barthelme’s writing so as to give a thorough review. I must say that Barthelme is a magnificent writer with the ability to transform the uses of the written form in narratives.
The story “On the Deck” represents Barthelme’s experimental approach to point of view, both spatially and cognitively, and although the story does not easily reveal itself to the reader, a string of interconnected sights weaves together a collage that can be seen as informing the story’s last two paragraphs, which seem to be entirely separated from the story’s previous images other than as a creation in the narrator’s mind serving to reflect his distant and confused thoughts as he sits with a woman who he seems to care for. The story begins with a description of a lion in a cage, moves forward to describe a group of Christian bikers, a girl in leg braces, a red Camry, a scandalous yellow dress, and so on. What makes Barthelme’s description of these people and items fascinating is not their varied and eccentric assembly but the way they seem to line up in a row as if you are looking at the boat’s profile and seeing each image lined up exactly as if they were positioned in the same location on the boat as their mention on the pages. Each person or thing is connected to something in its proximity. The bikers look after the girl; the car’s exhaust disturbs the lion; the captain touches the hem of the girl in the yellow dress. About half-way through the story, the progressing linear structure breaks down and draws back on itself rewalking its previous steps but with a new series of people and things populating the previously straightforward assembly—clogging it and giving it the appeal of a crowd instead of a line, a newly formed three-dimensional scene. The captain’s dog is now bothered by the lion on the opposite side of him; the scene is no longer two end points joined by a line but a single point of activity and emotions. Before the final paragraphs all the people on the boat share in the reception of mail from the mail carrier and Christmas music and falling snow—they all share a mutual connection now despite their physical or mental differences: “Winter on deck. All of the above covered with snow. Christmas music.” The boat scene fades and is replaced with a spring day—“Then, spring. A weak sun, then a stronger sun”—and a pair of people. These two people may soon be lovers because they have just touched for the first time, she falling into his lap and becoming one point.
These two disparate scenes—the winter boat trip and the spring lounging—shows Barthelme’s astounding ability to create two scenes with near-identical emotions and expressing the same spatial point of view. Both scenes had two ends or two bodies and both ended with a convergence of the two. Furthermore, the two scenes seem connected by more than just a spatial point of view. It seems that the first scene’s narrator who is ostensibly third-person omniscient is also the first-person “I” in the second scene because the seamless connection of the spatial point of view seems to suggest a seamlessly cognizant narrator. Barthelme’s ability to construct a scene of postmodern ambiguity in a decipherable structure shows his ability to convey complex thoughts, such as the melding of disparate people and emotions, in the form of a puzzle. And, “On the Deck” is not alone in its puzzle like qualities. Stories such as “The Genius” and “The Explanation” require similar puzzle solving to open up. The question and answer format and the several large black boxes used throughout “The Explanation” ask the reader to look into the spaces in between the questions, and into the black boxes, to get a feeling of who the characters are and what their priorities are. Barthelme’s 40 Stories is a great read and a great start to the stranger type of experimental fiction, later postmodern writing.
The story “On the Deck” represents Barthelme’s experimental approach to point of view, both spatially and cognitively, and although the story does not easily reveal itself to the reader, a string of interconnected sights weaves together a collage that can be seen as informing the story’s last two paragraphs, which seem to be entirely separated from the story’s previous images other than as a creation in the narrator’s mind serving to reflect his distant and confused thoughts as he sits with a woman who he seems to care for. The story begins with a description of a lion in a cage, moves forward to describe a group of Christian bikers, a girl in leg braces, a red Camry, a scandalous yellow dress, and so on. What makes Barthelme’s description of these people and items fascinating is not their varied and eccentric assembly but the way they seem to line up in a row as if you are looking at the boat’s profile and seeing each image lined up exactly as if they were positioned in the same location on the boat as their mention on the pages. Each person or thing is connected to something in its proximity. The bikers look after the girl; the car’s exhaust disturbs the lion; the captain touches the hem of the girl in the yellow dress. About half-way through the story, the progressing linear structure breaks down and draws back on itself rewalking its previous steps but with a new series of people and things populating the previously straightforward assembly—clogging it and giving it the appeal of a crowd instead of a line, a newly formed three-dimensional scene. The captain’s dog is now bothered by the lion on the opposite side of him; the scene is no longer two end points joined by a line but a single point of activity and emotions. Before the final paragraphs all the people on the boat share in the reception of mail from the mail carrier and Christmas music and falling snow—they all share a mutual connection now despite their physical or mental differences: “Winter on deck. All of the above covered with snow. Christmas music.” The boat scene fades and is replaced with a spring day—“Then, spring. A weak sun, then a stronger sun”—and a pair of people. These two people may soon be lovers because they have just touched for the first time, she falling into his lap and becoming one point.
These two disparate scenes—the winter boat trip and the spring lounging—shows Barthelme’s astounding ability to create two scenes with near-identical emotions and expressing the same spatial point of view. Both scenes had two ends or two bodies and both ended with a convergence of the two. Furthermore, the two scenes seem connected by more than just a spatial point of view. It seems that the first scene’s narrator who is ostensibly third-person omniscient is also the first-person “I” in the second scene because the seamless connection of the spatial point of view seems to suggest a seamlessly cognizant narrator. Barthelme’s ability to construct a scene of postmodern ambiguity in a decipherable structure shows his ability to convey complex thoughts, such as the melding of disparate people and emotions, in the form of a puzzle. And, “On the Deck” is not alone in its puzzle like qualities. Stories such as “The Genius” and “The Explanation” require similar puzzle solving to open up. The question and answer format and the several large black boxes used throughout “The Explanation” ask the reader to look into the spaces in between the questions, and into the black boxes, to get a feeling of who the characters are and what their priorities are. Barthelme’s 40 Stories is a great read and a great start to the stranger type of experimental fiction, later postmodern writing.
July 12, 2025
I love the style of Donald Barthelme. Innovative and straight to the point, and he never lets you guess his next move. Some of my favorites in this collection include:
1. Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby: An all-time reigning favorite, and the reason I picked up his short stories in the first place. Just absurd enough, but easy to follow, and it leaves you with something to ponder at the end. Kind of subtle commentary on capital punishment, I believe. A real 5 star story. SO GOOD! (If you only ever read one story by him, please read this one!)
2. The New Owner: This one is really quite hilarious. Mildly relatable in an absurd way. Loved the image of the New Owner smuggling the heat out with him under his coat.
3. The Flight of the Pigeons From the Palace: He's trying an experimental style in this one, and it really works here. It is again absurd, but he is making order out of a bunch of random pictures, so it's satisfying. Gave me a good chuckle.
4. Baby: Interesting. I think he is making a point about something (haha) -- I'm still thinking this one over. I've read it before as well (a couple years ago). Definitely worth another read. I suspect he's poking fun at commonly accepted norms (I think he does that often).
A few of the other stories were too absurd for me to get behind. I don't like finishing a story and not being quite sure what I've read -- I like having a thread of an idea that begins to sew itself into a full picture the more I ponder it.
His writing style is always on point though. I love the way he plays with repetition, and the ways he inverts and reinvents common phrases and idioms. Even some stories that I couldn't quite hang with had some very pleasing sentences within them, making them worth the read.
I certainly enjoyed this collection, and I hope it influences my own composition in the future.
1. Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby: An all-time reigning favorite, and the reason I picked up his short stories in the first place. Just absurd enough, but easy to follow, and it leaves you with something to ponder at the end. Kind of subtle commentary on capital punishment, I believe. A real 5 star story. SO GOOD! (If you only ever read one story by him, please read this one!)
2. The New Owner: This one is really quite hilarious. Mildly relatable in an absurd way. Loved the image of the New Owner smuggling the heat out with him under his coat.
3. The Flight of the Pigeons From the Palace: He's trying an experimental style in this one, and it really works here. It is again absurd, but he is making order out of a bunch of random pictures, so it's satisfying. Gave me a good chuckle.
4. Baby: Interesting. I think he is making a point about something (haha) -- I'm still thinking this one over. I've read it before as well (a couple years ago). Definitely worth another read. I suspect he's poking fun at commonly accepted norms (I think he does that often).
A few of the other stories were too absurd for me to get behind. I don't like finishing a story and not being quite sure what I've read -- I like having a thread of an idea that begins to sew itself into a full picture the more I ponder it.
His writing style is always on point though. I love the way he plays with repetition, and the ways he inverts and reinvents common phrases and idioms. Even some stories that I couldn't quite hang with had some very pleasing sentences within them, making them worth the read.
I certainly enjoyed this collection, and I hope it influences my own composition in the future.
September 17, 2016
I was very intrigued with this book. I like how the stories are all short and can be read easily in one sitting. They all are so different, and yet have a similar tone. I like how they take me to a unique place every time, a world which I might have never been exposed to. I don't feel I can honestly say that I understand any of these stories, but there are some of them that definitely strike me as being more meaningful than others and some which I feel just depend on personal preference. Regardless, many of them made me want to write some stories using his techniques or thoughts I had that were sprouted from reading his work. I was about to say that this was my favorite short story collection of all time, but toward the end, I started getting tired of them. His non-sequiters became a little frustrating after awhile and I shrugged my shoulders more often. So while I liked the experience of reading most of these stories, I'm not sure about them as a whole. Each story feels a bit like it's an experiment for an experiment's sake and they don't have enough real connection to the reader or a real human kind of existence sort of thing. I guess it depends on what kind of mood you're in and how much you read at a time. Maybe a few stories scattered here and there would be better than reading a whole collection at once. But then again, that's how I feel about stories in general. Sometimes they have more power in isolation.
March 7, 2013
When I was a child, barely a teen, two of my suburban high school’s advanced-placement word nerds were fond of flashing a shared Donald Barthelme paperback that had a sexually suggestive cover illustration, perhaps featuring a woman’s bare breasts. These guys, the type of guys who could recite swatches of dialogue from 200 Motels, cornered you at lunch while you were trying to get high like a normal person and read concise sections of Barthelme, then lurked in smug silence as if they had just dropped a heavy profundity, although clearly none of us understood, from sentence to sentence, any depth of meaning the writer was likely to have intended. One day, I promised myself, I will own books with sordid cover illustrations, and I will comprehend the word of Barthelme. Over the intervening years, beginning with The Dead Father, my grasp of what Donald Barthelme is digging at has strengthened, and his stories have become pleasures of identification and illumination, rather than slightly irritating cultural requirements, similar to feeling obligated to enjoy Lumpy Gravy. The short excursions of 40 Stories expose Donald Barthelme to be nothing less than a 40-trick pony, sly, smirking, sad and celebrating our universal irritants, joys and failures in epic fictional constructs that never seem to stretch beyond six pages. The author’s most masterly revelation, saved for last, is that he is not a tricky little horse at all.
February 11, 2015
Why has it taken me so long to read Donald Barthelme? I’ve known about him for years and own several of his books. I think it’s because dipping into FORTY STORIES is like going to another country where you don’t known the language or the customs, which are familiar but just askew enough to remain foreign. There’s a sense of adventure in turning these pages, and I guess initially I’m uncomfortable. It takes me a beat to get past the shock of the new. My favorite things were usually the most despised upon first discovery. Thankfully, FORTY STORIES opens up with a winner, followed by another winner and another winner, but different. Some are funny, well, most are humorous, but then others are like using a ladle to stir a hearty stew made up of the world, and what comes up to the surface is the usual meat and potatoes but specially seasoned. Barthelme has created a wholly original way to write the short story and I’ve been so accustomed to his imitators that the pure stuff knocks me for a loop. I needed that, to shake me out of my complacency. It’s good to be confused, to lose one’s bearings, for only at that time can real expression be freed.
August 26, 2019
Never get why the Yanks are so stuck on him. I think he’s shite.
November 4, 2019
My first exposure to the works of Donald Barthelme was from the New Yorker fiction podcast, where famous authors join the show and read their favorite stories from the back volumes of the magazine.
The story that caught my attention was “Concerning the bodyguard” read by Salman Rushdie (https://bit.ly/2Ng7MWx) which describes an assassination attempt on a fictional dictator in Central America. The novel aspect is that the entire story is written as a set of questions, in the form of an interrogation but aimed at the reader. This was very different from the type of classic shorts (e.g. Poe) that I am familiar with so I decided to check out this book for more.
Overall, my impression is that every story in the book is quite exceptional, and aims to push the envelope of the literary form. In that sense it is a nice example of post modern short story writing. My only complaint however, is that Barthelme sometimes takes it too far, to the point that it reads like an academic coursework for a literature grad student.
For the average reader like myself, I would say the book is a mixed bag of some excellent reads and several other confusing ones, which leaves you scratching your head and unsatisfied. The one that I particularly enjoyed was “Conversations with Goethe”, which was brilliant and quite hilarious.
I plan to revisit the book at a later time, when my tastes have (hopefully) evolved to the point I can appreciate these types of stories.
The story that caught my attention was “Concerning the bodyguard” read by Salman Rushdie (https://bit.ly/2Ng7MWx) which describes an assassination attempt on a fictional dictator in Central America. The novel aspect is that the entire story is written as a set of questions, in the form of an interrogation but aimed at the reader. This was very different from the type of classic shorts (e.g. Poe) that I am familiar with so I decided to check out this book for more.
Overall, my impression is that every story in the book is quite exceptional, and aims to push the envelope of the literary form. In that sense it is a nice example of post modern short story writing. My only complaint however, is that Barthelme sometimes takes it too far, to the point that it reads like an academic coursework for a literature grad student.
For the average reader like myself, I would say the book is a mixed bag of some excellent reads and several other confusing ones, which leaves you scratching your head and unsatisfied. The one that I particularly enjoyed was “Conversations with Goethe”, which was brilliant and quite hilarious.
I plan to revisit the book at a later time, when my tastes have (hopefully) evolved to the point I can appreciate these types of stories.
October 20, 2020
усе ж таки його збірка "60 оповідань" найкраща, у ній відсоток класних текстів більший. тут таких і половини немає, на жаль. Серед прекрасних - 10
Chablis
The Genius
The Explanation
Concerning the Bodyguard
Paul Klee
At the Tolstoy Museum
The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace
Sentence
Porcupines at the University
The Baby
Chablis
The Genius
The Explanation
Concerning the Bodyguard
Paul Klee
At the Tolstoy Museum
The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace
Sentence
Porcupines at the University
The Baby
August 29, 2021
lançado originalmente em 1987, "grandes dias e outras histórias" reúne quarenta ficções de donald barthelme, tão espirituosas e estranhamente engraçadas quanto díspares entre si.
digo “ficções”, pois sua prosa se distancia das narrativas convencionais de "começo-meio-fim"; na introdução do livro, dave eggers, fã declarado de barthelme, diz que ela é "mais aparentada com a poesia (em sua perfeita ambivalência em relação à narrativa)”.
os contos então são povoados por pessoas comuns, casais em crise, personagens da literatura, dramaturgos, tolstói, ogros, artistas, curadores, goethe, soldados, fadas, reitores, leões, reis, toureiros, piratas, paul klee, condutores de ouriços, marinheiros, santos, príncipes, gênios, etc etc etc, e situados em cenários igualmente inusitados.
é como se barthelme transformasse seu livro em um controle remoto e estivéssemos zapeando despreocupadamente, sem saber qual será o próximo programa.
e ao final da leitura, "grandes dias e outras histórias" nos oferece uma resposta (crítica ou elogiosa?) ao início da ultra-fragmentação do entretenimento na década de 80, com a ascensão dos videocassetes, da tv a cabo e dos consoles de videogame — e que desembocaria na contemporaneidade, na maneira primordial como consumimos narrativas a um toque na tela para os próximos stories ou para acionar o player de mais um episódio.
digo “ficções”, pois sua prosa se distancia das narrativas convencionais de "começo-meio-fim"; na introdução do livro, dave eggers, fã declarado de barthelme, diz que ela é "mais aparentada com a poesia (em sua perfeita ambivalência em relação à narrativa)”.
os contos então são povoados por pessoas comuns, casais em crise, personagens da literatura, dramaturgos, tolstói, ogros, artistas, curadores, goethe, soldados, fadas, reitores, leões, reis, toureiros, piratas, paul klee, condutores de ouriços, marinheiros, santos, príncipes, gênios, etc etc etc, e situados em cenários igualmente inusitados.
é como se barthelme transformasse seu livro em um controle remoto e estivéssemos zapeando despreocupadamente, sem saber qual será o próximo programa.
e ao final da leitura, "grandes dias e outras histórias" nos oferece uma resposta (crítica ou elogiosa?) ao início da ultra-fragmentação do entretenimento na década de 80, com a ascensão dos videocassetes, da tv a cabo e dos consoles de videogame — e que desembocaria na contemporaneidade, na maneira primordial como consumimos narrativas a um toque na tela para os próximos stories ou para acionar o player de mais um episódio.
April 12, 2015
This is the funniest book I have read in a long time. I can't remember the last book that made me laugh out loud as much as this one. Barthelme has to be one of the most underrated writers of the last century.
The stories in this collection are very short, usually 3-5 pages, and all are fairly fragmented, oblique works of art. I'd recommend Barthelme to any fan of the post-moderns or experimental fiction in general. You know you are in for a good story that opens with lines like:
"Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him."
Or:
"Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn't like things that were ineffable."
And each of these stories just gets better as you go along. I'm still laughing.
The stories in this collection are very short, usually 3-5 pages, and all are fairly fragmented, oblique works of art. I'd recommend Barthelme to any fan of the post-moderns or experimental fiction in general. You know you are in for a good story that opens with lines like:
"Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him."
Or:
"Yes, the saint was underrated quite a bit, then, mostly by people who didn't like things that were ineffable."
And each of these stories just gets better as you go along. I'm still laughing.
May 17, 2012
I am so glad that I came to Donald Barthelme by way of Charles Baxter. And after reading Barthelme's short fiction, I understand more fully why Dave Eggers felt like a thief after reading Barthelme following the publication of his fiction. He's an original, a genre defining giant, and his writing just doesn't give a shit whether or not you get it (admittedly several stories, I didn't) - he's plowing forward without you.
"Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby" (found here for free http://www.jessamyn.com/barth/colby.html) is genius. The opening line to "Bluebeard" is so great - I don't want to ruin it by typing it here. I agree with other people that Barthelme isn't for everyone; but if you are a fan of the short fiction genre, and you want to experience one of the godfathers of the craft in the late 20th century, I highly recommend this book.
"Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby" (found here for free http://www.jessamyn.com/barth/colby.html) is genius. The opening line to "Bluebeard" is so great - I don't want to ruin it by typing it here. I agree with other people that Barthelme isn't for everyone; but if you are a fan of the short fiction genre, and you want to experience one of the godfathers of the craft in the late 20th century, I highly recommend this book.
January 22, 2009
I havn't written any reviews on this thing yet, but this book was really what I've been looking for in fiction for a long time. Ecstatic language that goes on sprawling tangents with wonderful imagery that is woven together into very concise endings. It's also extremely witty and hilarious. All of these qualities make it a very enjoyable read but at the same time it's also intelligent and academic. Barthelme definitely knows exactly what he's doing.
February 25, 2015
Where do I start? The stories are one dimensional, with paper thin characters composing uninteresting snippets of lives of the above mentioned characters. I couldn't even finish the whole book because it was just aweful. No real sense of togetherness (which is usually an underlying theme in a collection of work), no real direction, either. The stories are trite, boring, and worse, poorly structured.
August 19, 2021
love this fucking guy holy shit. Dave Eggers did the intro (:///) but a fantastic writer with stories that made me howl laughing and stories that made me really sad. Every story is like 3 or 4 pages and so delightful, you can feel Barthelme find a word and just savor it like a caramel. So eminently readable but so opaque in meaning, if not the meaning being the pleasure of reading itself. Fantastic can't wait to read more.
December 18, 2016
Just delightful. Highlights:
Chablis
Concerning the Bodyguard
Jaws
The New Owner
Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshoffen and Cambrai, March 1916
Bluebeard
Departures
Visitors
The Wound
At the Tolstoy Museum
The Temptation of St. Anthony
Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
Sakrete
Most of the others have lovely redeeming features too.
Chablis
Concerning the Bodyguard
Jaws
The New Owner
Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshoffen and Cambrai, March 1916
Bluebeard
Departures
Visitors
The Wound
At the Tolstoy Museum
The Temptation of St. Anthony
Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
Sakrete
Most of the others have lovely redeeming features too.
Read
August 30, 2008After each story, look at the way the light hits your window, and feel remarkably empty, yet not unhappy.
November 20, 2016
Temiz, güzel bir çeviri ile Barthélme öykülerini bize ulaştıran Monokl yayınlarına teşekkürler. ...
Çarpıcı, irkiltici, keyifli, mizahi, ...
Her biri farklı, okunmaya değer öyküler. ..
Çarpıcı, irkiltici, keyifli, mizahi, ...
Her biri farklı, okunmaya değer öyküler. ..
Read
May 30, 2018Read for a writing friend who told me “[Barthelme’s] stories are so funny you can read them aloud at parties,” and then refused to invite me to the kinds of parties where people read Barthelme out loud; he later covered by saying something about how he’d only said you can read them aloud at parties but that didn’t mean he actually went to parties where people read Barthelme out loud. After having read forty of Barthelme’s stories now, I think that willfully fixating on this syntactical misconstruction is an appropriate authorial tribute. I want Barthelme read out loud at social functions and I feel robbed!
With less Barthelme-themed-petulance: this book had also just popped up on another friend’s syllabus for a flash fiction class he was teaching, in the same pile as Atwood’s The Tent and Saunder’s Tenth of December , the kind of company that recommends any book, in my opinion.
I couldn’t read too many of these stories in a row without feeling worn out--Barthelme is exhausting as only the rambunctiously intelligent can be (the urge to get the author a Labrador so he’ll stop writing and run around outside is as strong as it is to read his stories out loud at parties). Still. My favorites were “Chablis” (“My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.”) and “Jaws,” about a wife who bites her husband when conflict arises. From “Jaws”:
Barthelme has the ability to nail humor, absurdity, and truthfulness in one go. It’s like he’s just waiting for these three things to line up in a row like an eclipse, and then BAM, he’s got another killer flash fictions.
Other favorites: “Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces and Aircraft Between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916,” “Bluebeard,” “Sakrete,” and “The Baby.”
With less Barthelme-themed-petulance: this book had also just popped up on another friend’s syllabus for a flash fiction class he was teaching, in the same pile as Atwood’s The Tent and Saunder’s Tenth of December , the kind of company that recommends any book, in my opinion.
I couldn’t read too many of these stories in a row without feeling worn out--Barthelme is exhausting as only the rambunctiously intelligent can be (the urge to get the author a Labrador so he’ll stop writing and run around outside is as strong as it is to read his stories out loud at parties). Still. My favorites were “Chablis” (“My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.”) and “Jaws,” about a wife who bites her husband when conflict arises. From “Jaws”:
“Verbal presentations, with William and Natasha, are no good. So many terrible sentences drift in the poisoned air between them, sentences about who is right and sentences about who works hardest and sentences about money and even sentences about physical appearance--the most ghastly of known sentences. That’s why Natasha bites, I’m convinced of it. She’s trying to say something. She opens her mouth, then closes it (futility) on William’s arm (sudden eloquence). I like them both, so they both tell me about these incidences and I rationalize it and say, well, that’s not so terrible, maybe she’s under stress, or maybe he’s under stress. I neglect to mention that most people in New York are under some degree of stress and few of them, to my knowledge, bite each other."
Barthelme has the ability to nail humor, absurdity, and truthfulness in one go. It’s like he’s just waiting for these three things to line up in a row like an eclipse, and then BAM, he’s got another killer flash fictions.
Other favorites: “Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces and Aircraft Between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916,” “Bluebeard,” “Sakrete,” and “The Baby.”
September 17, 2024
Had my eyes on 'Sixty Stories' as the place to start with Barthelme, but found this in a used bookstore. Same concept. Released a few years apart. Surely there can't be that big a difference in quality between the two?
Well, seemingly, from what I can gather, this is the lesser of the two collections. Out of a total of 100 stories, were the 60 best ones in the other collection?
That thought occurred to me while reading this.
I have quite a bit of experience reading the "Pomo Yanks", and this represents the part of their style that I like the least; more obnoxious than clever, more eye-roll-inducing than funny, no real humans in sight; people are mostly vehicles for absurd ideas and "witty" entendres.
It is almost like every story in here is an inside joke, between the author and.... the author. The punchline is not mentioned, hidden in an invisible parenthesis. Or maybe it is the other way around?
Maybe reading this is like being a last-minute guest at a dinner party for retired humanist professors who *only* tell the punchline of jokes, laughing in unison way over your head, as you sit there nervously cracking a half-smile, pretending you know what is going on.
A few select readers might "get" Barthelmes's ultra-narrow conceits, which would open the stories up, and make them possibly funny or insightful. But god damn, the key to reading these stories is hidden from the reader, and not in that engaging way that entices you to find the key, but hidden in annoyingly trite or excluding references, or something like the split definition of a particular word. I could invest myself into finding the angle of reading for some of the stories, but with 40 of them, of which almost every single one has a "hook" you need to latch on to for you to enjoy it, it became more than tiresome.
Still, there were a few highlights.
- I liked the paradox of a "self-concious genius" in 'The Genius'. Is he still a genius if he constantly thinks about whether he is a genius or not?
- Goethe being an idiot savant in 'Conversations with Goethe' is kind of funny.
- 'The New Owner' is the only story tackling an actual issue in the world, exploitative landlord, in a more realistic style, and it suits Barthelme to drop the pomo veneer for a brief moment.
- 'Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft Between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916' is a strange story. The title tells exactly what happens. I did not quite understand it, but that intrigued me nonetheless. One of those I could read again and probably find more depth and nuance in. This is probably the style that Barthelme does best in my opinion.
- 'Visitors' in which there is an actual human connection between a father and his grown-up daughter. You can do this Donald?? Where was this empathy for the 39 other stories...?
Well, seemingly, from what I can gather, this is the lesser of the two collections. Out of a total of 100 stories, were the 60 best ones in the other collection?
That thought occurred to me while reading this.
I have quite a bit of experience reading the "Pomo Yanks", and this represents the part of their style that I like the least; more obnoxious than clever, more eye-roll-inducing than funny, no real humans in sight; people are mostly vehicles for absurd ideas and "witty" entendres.
It is almost like every story in here is an inside joke, between the author and.... the author. The punchline is not mentioned, hidden in an invisible parenthesis. Or maybe it is the other way around?
Maybe reading this is like being a last-minute guest at a dinner party for retired humanist professors who *only* tell the punchline of jokes, laughing in unison way over your head, as you sit there nervously cracking a half-smile, pretending you know what is going on.
A few select readers might "get" Barthelmes's ultra-narrow conceits, which would open the stories up, and make them possibly funny or insightful. But god damn, the key to reading these stories is hidden from the reader, and not in that engaging way that entices you to find the key, but hidden in annoyingly trite or excluding references, or something like the split definition of a particular word. I could invest myself into finding the angle of reading for some of the stories, but with 40 of them, of which almost every single one has a "hook" you need to latch on to for you to enjoy it, it became more than tiresome.
Still, there were a few highlights.
- I liked the paradox of a "self-concious genius" in 'The Genius'. Is he still a genius if he constantly thinks about whether he is a genius or not?
- Goethe being an idiot savant in 'Conversations with Goethe' is kind of funny.
- 'The New Owner' is the only story tackling an actual issue in the world, exploitative landlord, in a more realistic style, and it suits Barthelme to drop the pomo veneer for a brief moment.
- 'Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft Between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916' is a strange story. The title tells exactly what happens. I did not quite understand it, but that intrigued me nonetheless. One of those I could read again and probably find more depth and nuance in. This is probably the style that Barthelme does best in my opinion.
- 'Visitors' in which there is an actual human connection between a father and his grown-up daughter. You can do this Donald?? Where was this empathy for the 39 other stories...?
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