The Thurber Carnival (original 1945; edition 1945)

The Thurber carnival is another short story collection of timeless pieces by James Thurber. It is a parade of deviance. In each story one of the characters is either eccentric, weird or totally nuts. However, in each case there is sufficient suspense to let the reader gradually discover where the screw is loose.

In "The secret life of Walter Mitty" a war veteran "has not come home" so to speak. He sees the enemy hidden behind every tree, while out shopping with his wife. It is a classic story, with an almost endearing touch. "The catbird seat" tells the story of envy and backstabbing in the office, and how to get rid of troublesome colleagues. A very humourous, and cruel story. "In "The MacBeth murder mystery" a reader get Shakespeare all wrong, or all right, depending on your perspective.

Most stories are rather short, the volume as a whole being just over 60 pages. The stories are highly original, and hardly dated, so they can be enjoyed by contemporary readers. Great stuff. ( )

This is a collection of lighthearted stories and essays by James Thurber. I picked it up after getting hooked on the former Keith Olberman segment "Fridays With Thurber". The stories are good, but I enjoyed it less than I hoped for two reasons. The first is that these shine brightest when read aloud and theatrically as Olberman performs them. Sadly, I do most of my reading on my own and am far to lazy to read aloud to myself. The second reason was unexpected. I've read a decent amount of fiction in the last year and a half that was at least 50 years old. For the most part it was fairly predictable which I found unbearably dated (The Turn of the Screw) and surprising how many felt almost contemporary (Tropic of Cancer). This collection had a way of sticking in my craw when I just wanted to be entertained. I mean, this was supposed to be my spoonful of sugar to help Gulag go down.

The thing is Thurber dates his writing. While his primary concern is humor he draws a healthy dollop of his humor from conflict between a changing world and unchanging people. And even when he isn't specifically highlighting things contemporary to his writing he very much sets a scene in the time. Cars are cranked, Freud is cutting edge, grandfather spends half his time thinking the Civil War is still on. All that is fine, it's the casual sexism and racism that got me. I'm talking about the sort of prejudice that doesn't come from malice, but from casually steeping in a world where it's just a fact that women like baubles and can't possibly understand their husbands and "colored" people invariably speak in a manner both quaint and confounding. Without ever meaning to get into racial or gender politics Thurber draws a line between men and women, black and white. And while he probably didn't even know he was doing it he outlines a world where men and women, blacks and whites are classed and divided by the perceived inability of the female and the black to engage the white male.

Certainly Thurber is not setting up the white male as a heroic figure. Thurber is quick to make light of human weakness. And yet, too often there seems to be a beastly woman in the background bringing the worst out of the man. I tried to enjoy it as much as much as possible, but I kept remembering that saying that when you don't notice the bigotry, that's because it coincides with your own bigotry. So here it is in a nutshell. I can handle reading a lot of awful things. But what bothered me about this was the awful things were clearly not a blip in Thurber's mind. They were just things. That ignorance of and indifference to how he wrote an impassable wall between the sexes and races pissed me off. ( )

Thurber could also be listed as the author of the preface and foreword, as well as the illustrator and cover artist, but that would make a long list for the top of the main page.

Thurber was being taught when I was in school, so I'd read a few of these stories before. I'm sure I'll enjoy them much more now that I don't have to worry about whether they'll be on the test. Most of my space here will be taken up with a list of the stories in this book because that's the sort of thing I like to know about collections before I buy them online:

Stories Not Collected Before in Book Form:

The Lady on 142
The Catbird Seat
Memoirs of a Drudge
The Cane in the Corridor
The Secret Life of James Thurber
Recollections of the Gas Buggy

From My World And Welcome to It:

What Do You Mean it Was Brillig?
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Here Lies Miss Groby
The Man Who Hated Moonbaum
The Macbeth Murder Mystery
A Ride With Olympy

From Let Your Mind Alone:

Destructive Forces in Life
Sex Ex Machina
The Breaking Up of the Winships
The Admiral on the Wheel
A Couple of Hamburgers
Bateman Comes Home
Doc Marlowe
The Wood Duck

From The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze:

The Departure of Emma Inch
There's an Owl in My Room
The Topaz Cufflinks Mystery
Snapshot of a Dog
Something to Say
The Curb in the Sky
The Black Magic of Barney Haller
If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox
The Remarkable Case of Mr. Bruhl
The Luck of Jad Peters
The Greatest Man in the World
The Evening's at Seven
One is a Wanderer

From My Life and Hard Times, complete:

Preface to a Life
The Night the Bed Fell
The Car We Had to Push
The Day the Dam Broke
The Night the Ghost Got In
More Alarms at Night
A Sequence of Servants
The Dog that Bit People
University Days

From

Some of the stories I heard aloud on Countdown With Keith Olbermann seemed funnier then than when I read them for myself. Some of the humor is dated, yes. I grew up on books from the first half of the 20th century (so much cheaper than new books when I was a girl, especially when my aunts just gave them to me), so I'm not shocked by the portrayal of women and ethnic 'humor'. ( )

How disappointing.

I admit, all I really knew of James Thurber was “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and a few cartoons and his reputation. But that was enough to make me really look forward to this collection. I was greatly disappointed.

I have no real explanation other than the humor must be just too dated. I know for a fact that many of the pieces definitely are. I realize these are from a certain period of time, but some hold racist (unintentional) overtones and others are particularly demeaning to women. But even the pieces that don’t suffer from such problems just don’t rise above the mundane. They are clever, a couple are humorous, one or two are downright funny. But, as a whole, the collection is depressing for how little there is that makes it worth reading. ( )

A great collection of wonderfully funny stories. I can't open it to much of any page without getting a laugh, though I'm well aware that the humor doesn't date well in the modern world. Fortunately, my retro sense of humor allows me to enjoy the dry, droll wit. ( )