The Leaning Tower and Other Stories

I first heard of Porter from the blurb of Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises and it turns out she was a huge influence on Carson McCullers and O'Connor (among others I'm sure). From this collection, I can certainly see why and how.

There is a true feeling of craft behind each story. Like every great artist, Porter makes it look effortless and natural on the surface but rest assured that she is fully in control of every word and every phrase.

What I admired the most is how she managed to capture the complexities of a person through their interactions and relationships. And there is definitely something to be said about her astuteness in correctly assessing the European atmosphere of the early 30s in the title story. Porter is show more essentially like a human camera with a real eye for reading the room/gauging a person/capturing the zeitgeist.

My favourite story overall was The Old Order, which is the best of the connected stories in the collection (with some outstanding standalone stories too). It did the most amazing thing of making the Grandmother this fully-realised person of contradictions with her own ideas whilst still remaining a product of her time.

As she writes with such details and insights on her characters, I look forward to reading her character-driven novel that I also got recently, Ship of Fools. show less

Katherine Anne Porter demonstrates both her uncommon mastery of the short story form, and the idiom in which Americans speak, in this collection. This group was first published in 1944; the stories are at that date timely, topical, thought-provoking, and deep. She tackles childhood physical and psychological trauma, family dynamics, and international relations in crisis. Additionally she covers race issues in America, Depression-era political corruption, and rampant xenophobia in 1930s Europe.

This is truly a wide-ranging collection, and it benefits from Porter’s wise and all-encompassing treatment of the issues involved. Two stories stand out in this sampling. The title story features a bootless young American man who has traveled show more from the U.S. to interbellum Berlin on an ill-advised search for culture, or maybe a muse to move him. He finds a small group of men his age, but each individual signifies the frozen, even ossified, position of European countries caught in the grip of the prior war’s waste and economic ruin.

Another story, “Holiday,” has a full and vivid description of a close-knit Texas farming family from the viewpoint of a visiting woman on holiday. It cites the patriarch’s worldview, strongly influenced by Das Kapital, and his decision to lend out money at less than market rates, so that young people can get started with a farm of their own. But principally, the visitor watches the family from up close; the climactic drama, with its outsider’s charity and its reverberant observations, is worth the price of admission by itself.

This brief five-story collection shows great depth and vivid storytelling. Highly recommended.

https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-leaning-tower-and-other-stories-... show less

3.5 The parts I enjoyed (e.g. Holiday) I really enjoyed a lot, though it was an admittedly uneven collection. I don't know where she was going with the title story, and was a little frustrated while reading it, though I have to admit something about the ending is staying with me. She's a good writer and I look forward to moving onto "Pale Hore, Pale Rider," (part of my ongoing pursuit of "flu fiction").

5 STARS for "The Source," " The Witness," and "The Old Order" - 2 stars for the rest with
really slow plots and no characters to connect with.

The book begins by displaying a stereotypical narrative of lazy and watermelon eating negroes,
then quickly advances to the opposite with the tales of Grandmother and Aunt Nannie.

Nannie originally was gifted to Grandmother as a slave, then emancipated.
Their friendship and sewing were a joy to read, as was Nannie's eventual freedom to live alone and happy.