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The Stories of Ronald Blythe: Wonderful Stories of People and Their Landscape
Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso
250 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2002
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About the author
Ronald Blythe
93 books38 followersRonald Blythe CBE was one of the UK's greatest living writers. His work, which won countless awards, includes Akenfield (a Penguin 20th-Century Classic and a feature film), Private Words, Field Work, Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends and numerous other titles. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded their prestigious Benson Medal in 2006. In 2017, he was appointed CBE for services to literature
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November 26, 2023
From the flyleaf of this book:
"The short story has always had a very special appeal for Ronald Blythe and here he has brought together a score of his own from the many he has written since his mid-twenties...A few of them belong to a sequence of Suffolk tales which he drew from the old farming life in which his grandparents were involved. All the stories reveal a penetrating knowledge of the rural world, its habits, fantasies, hard facts, passions and quirks...As so often with isolated individuals, people are odder then...(you) would care to think...The young are...wide-eyed witnesses or dupes who are becoming...undupped...these short stories...(have lyricism, wit and darkness..."
and if I may add an unsparing honesty with regards to the cruel brutal hardness of country life and the exploitation of the mass ordinary farm folk and workers. Do not come to these stories if you are trapped in some rose cottage illusion of country life. In fact that very all pervasive cliche of England's green and pleasant land kept me from reading Ronald Blythe for forty. I have always loathed the whole suffocating middle class edifice of writing about the English countryside - I put this down to my being a city person but it didn't stop me from reading stories in everywhere the shtetles of Solomon Aleichem, through the lyric landscape of Russia via Tolstoy and Gorki and countless other landscapes in Lombardy, Sicily, Normandy, Prussia, Finland and my own Ireland I have found no handicap in my city origins in finding voices that I can fall in love with. Only England's green and pleasant land caused me to physically recoil - I hated it because so much of it was false, or at least only a partial picture. Maybe because so many who wrote about it were without any real experience of the soil, though it is not simply a question of class.
Ronald Blythe is, sorry was - he died in 2023 at age 100, a most extraordinary man (I do suggest you go online and read the many obituaries) whose sympathy was always with the common man. His writing in these stories is superlative - some of the finest, some best stories I have read. He is a great author who should, and I hope will be read long after most of the rubbish that fills literary magazines is long forgotten. He is the writer aspiring writers should read. The only reason this is not shelved as 'book without which I cannot live' is because I will give that accolade to his collected short stories as soon as I have read it.
We are nearly at the end 2023 - it took me forty years of having known of his existence to get around to reading him - don't deprive yourself - read him in 2024.
Please note I have shelved Blythe as of queer interest because he was unapologetically, when he could be, homosexual or queer - and there are stories in this collection suffused in homo-eroticism and queer sensibility, but clearly not what many 21st century readers would consider 'gay' but then I am not calling them gay.
"The short story has always had a very special appeal for Ronald Blythe and here he has brought together a score of his own from the many he has written since his mid-twenties...A few of them belong to a sequence of Suffolk tales which he drew from the old farming life in which his grandparents were involved. All the stories reveal a penetrating knowledge of the rural world, its habits, fantasies, hard facts, passions and quirks...As so often with isolated individuals, people are odder then...(you) would care to think...The young are...wide-eyed witnesses or dupes who are becoming...undupped...these short stories...(have lyricism, wit and darkness..."
and if I may add an unsparing honesty with regards to the cruel brutal hardness of country life and the exploitation of the mass ordinary farm folk and workers. Do not come to these stories if you are trapped in some rose cottage illusion of country life. In fact that very all pervasive cliche of England's green and pleasant land kept me from reading Ronald Blythe for forty. I have always loathed the whole suffocating middle class edifice of writing about the English countryside - I put this down to my being a city person but it didn't stop me from reading stories in everywhere the shtetles of Solomon Aleichem, through the lyric landscape of Russia via Tolstoy and Gorki and countless other landscapes in Lombardy, Sicily, Normandy, Prussia, Finland and my own Ireland I have found no handicap in my city origins in finding voices that I can fall in love with. Only England's green and pleasant land caused me to physically recoil - I hated it because so much of it was false, or at least only a partial picture. Maybe because so many who wrote about it were without any real experience of the soil, though it is not simply a question of class.
Ronald Blythe is, sorry was - he died in 2023 at age 100, a most extraordinary man (I do suggest you go online and read the many obituaries) whose sympathy was always with the common man. His writing in these stories is superlative - some of the finest, some best stories I have read. He is a great author who should, and I hope will be read long after most of the rubbish that fills literary magazines is long forgotten. He is the writer aspiring writers should read. The only reason this is not shelved as 'book without which I cannot live' is because I will give that accolade to his collected short stories as soon as I have read it.
We are nearly at the end 2023 - it took me forty years of having known of his existence to get around to reading him - don't deprive yourself - read him in 2024.
Please note I have shelved Blythe as of queer interest because he was unapologetically, when he could be, homosexual or queer - and there are stories in this collection suffused in homo-eroticism and queer sensibility, but clearly not what many 21st century readers would consider 'gay' but then I am not calling them gay.
Displaying 1 of 1 review