The TLS this week featured Katherine Mansfield, a short story, or at most, novella writer, a contemporary of the Bloomsbury crowd. So I summoned her oeuvre to attend upon me via Kindle ( I will never get over being able to do that!) and I’m reading her collected works.
I think her stories are all, exclusively, about point of view, how isolated each of us is, how we can never see through anybody else’s eyes, nor “see oursel’ as others see us” (I’ve got Burns on my mind, having just memorized“Address to a Haggis” for the Burns Supper I’m hosting next Saturday).
Reading that, I don’t think it sounds very profound nor revelatory.
But whether it is or not, whether it’s just from reading so MANY stories at a sitting where Mansfield mercilessly hammers this point home, I thought of a novel i read years ago, Joyce Carol Oates’ “My Heart Laid Bare”,
I loved it at the time, I remember it vividly.
It’s about a late 19th century con man extraordinaire and his family.
Why did Mansfield’s stories make me think of it? The relentless intensity with which we all convince ourselves that, after all, no matter how it may have seemed for a while, we were and are right, our actions…well,what else could we have done?
If you’re looking for a new novel, and you read this one (available on Kindle) please let me know.
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Amazon reviewers give this a firm 3.6 “meh”, but there’s gotta be a reason that there are over 200 breeds of horses.
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Welp, if you don’t like it, try Katherine Mansfield herself. But I’m finding her stories very sad.
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