William Saroyan (1908–1981)

“If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.”

I had heard of Saroyan, but in a vague way. So I was very pleased to see a new edition of his short stories on NetGalley.

The setting is the Great Depression. Saroyan is very male-centric in his stories – considering my “usual” reads, I thought it was almost refreshing. A change in perspective is one of the many reasons to love reading, I suppose. I did make sure to go through only a few stories a day, so that I show more wouldn’t overdose on young men.

Saroyan handles words with such dexterity! Everything is so simple, yet poetic. The writing is quietly explosive, warm, humane, whimsical, incredibly sad. The stories are all very short, they are fragments, vignettes. They are virtually plotless. Some of them are mesmerizing streams of consciousness. There are snapshots of tramps, beggars, prostitutes, flower peddlers, gamblers, struggling young writers. But ultimately, all the stories are about the miracle of being alive.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to review 26 stories, so let me just mention a few.

“The Daring Young Men on the Flying Trapeze” - a young man is starving to death. He is looking for work, but there is no work. “If the truth were known, he was half starved and yet still there was no end of books he ought to read before he died.”

“Seventy Thousand Assyrians” - an aspiring writer goes to get a haircut, watches people and thinks about many things. “I hadn’t had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work.”

“Love, Death, Sacrifice and so forth” – this one tells the plot of a Hollywood movie (probably a well-known one, unseen by me). It is satirical, funny and sad all at once. “All I know is this: that suicide is not an orderly occurrence with symphonic music.”

“A Curved Line” - a guy goes to an evening art class. Another mixture of whimsical and sad things. (The story is also rather “male-gazey”. Oh well). “The thing that worries me is that my great-grand-children are going to have to listen to “The Blue Danube Waltz” too.”

“A Cold Day” - a young author is freezing by his typewriter. “The man you write of need not perform some heroic or monstrous deed in order to make your prose great.”

Reading these gave me a feeling akin to happiness, despite so much heartbreak. As I looked up from the book after each story, everything and everyone grew sharper, more colourful, more here.

Thanks a lot to NetGalley and the publisher for the free e-book! show less

It took me a few chapters to appreciate this series of boyhood vignettes. The tone is rosy almost poetic-like and seems to cast a romantic veil on what must have been a harsh upbringing. Inspired by his own youth, Saroyan shows us the carefree, joyous stories of a boy growing up in a poor Armenian family as a first generation American. Ultimately they are tales of generosity, discovery of the world, through both the Armenian and American lenses, and mischievousness.
If one is willing to show more overlook the beatings, dire poverty, and precarious living conditions, then this book is full of charm and rambunctious adventures. show less

Si en esta historia buscas, como reza el título, la risa, no la vas a encontrar por ningún lado. La trama empieza con la familia de Evan Nazarenus llegando a Clovis, California, para pasar unos días en el viñedo del hermano de Evan. Al poco de llegar, Swan, la mujer de Evan, le revela un secreto con el que no puede más, y es entonces cuando todo cambia. La tragedia sobrevuela toda la novela. La historia va dando tumbos hasta un final inesperado que no me ha gustado nada. Como tampoco me show more han gustado muchos de los pasajes de la novela, de vergüenza ajena hasta el sonrojo.

Pero las páginas finales, sobre todo, son lo peor. Parece como si Saroyan, con ese final con moraleja, quisiera aleccionarte para que te conformes con las cartas que te ha repartido la vida y hagas frente al destino, porque como intentes cambiarlo, estás jodido.

Sin duda, prefiero 'La comedia humana' a esta otra novela. show less

This was Saroyan's own novelisation of a screenplay he'd written for MGM, which perhaps accounts for its almost unbearably decent, optimistic, American-Dream-celebrating tone.

It's 1943, and the small town of Ithaca in California's San Joaquin Valley is a place where the locals are happy to lecture you on profound truths of human nature at a moment's notice at any time of day or night, whilst ev'ry prospect pleases and only sports teachers are vile. The young men are away fighting a distant show more and seemingly endless war (it's not called Ithaca by accident, evidently), and child-labour is a lesser evil than the unspeakable thought that women and girls might be forced to go out to work, so fourteen-year-old Homer (!) is working nights delivering telegrams whilst his even younger friend August sells newspapers on street corners. Long live the free market!

There are a lot of lovely little scenes in this book — the raid on the unripe apricot tree, the scene where Homer's little brother Ulysses (!!) gets caught in a patent trap and no-one knows how to release him, and best of all Homer's impromptu lecture on noses in Ancient History. But it's not really enough to defeat the unrelenting niceness and the dead hand of narrative inevitability: we know from the start that there's only one way a story about a telegram boy whose brother is away in the war can end. show less