The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

The question of nurture versus nature. Every major character with The Ballad of the Sad Cafe has a tendency to instigate and agitate. Everyone stirs up trouble in one way or another. Did the impulse to do this come from something nefarious in childhood or were they born to rattle cages from the very beginning? Miss Amelia Evans is a person who, if she didn't completely understand a situation well enough to have an opinion about it, ignored it completely. Cousin Lymon is a southern Iago, prone to stirring things up with cruel intentions. When Marvin Macy comes to town it is like two criminals recognizing themselves in total strangers; they are kindred spirits, born to raise hell as a team.
Confessional: Everything about the story was sad. show more I think that was because you didn't really know why everyone was so uncaring and cruel. show less

The novella that gives this collection its name is short, sad, and remarkably good. It won't come as a surprise to readers that Miss Amelia's intense and wholly unforeseen relationship with Cousin Lyman ends in tragedy: she announces it several times before the plot plays out. What surprised me, though, is how clearly she articulated the pain that often comes with love and the tangled relationship between what she imagines to be the active and passive parties in a love affair. In the paragraph where she forthrightly states, " There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries," she packs more wisdom about human relationships into two paragraphs than many authors can squeeze into an entire book. This is the show more definition of impressive writing.

"The Ballad of the Sad Café" is in many ways an old kind of novel: there's less dialect here than there is in Faulkner or O'Connor, and McCullers's prose is admirably precise: its tone is often somewhat formal. But it's also an old novel because it's set in the real Old South. The story starts when a stranger comes to town, yes, but we don't hear anything about the changes that modernity has visited upon the book's setting. It comes off as the most isolated place on earth. This surprised me somewhat, as the only other McCullers I've read "The Optimist's Daughter," was an impressively insightful take on the collision between modern twentieth century America and older, more traditional ways of doing things south of the Mason-Dixon line. Also, the short stories in this collection are only tangentially connected to the American South, or, in a couple cases, aren't connected to the South at all. The range that McCullers demonstrates in a hundred and sixty pages is really impressive.

Of course, it's hard to ignore that queerness fairly radiates from a number of this novel's characters, but it's presented and evaluated in a context that's wholly specific to the town that the book's set in. The facts of Miss Amelia's habits, clothing choices, and relationships are described without additional comment, and the townspeople's opinions of them are reported matter-of-factly. This last attribute is important: "The Ballad of the Sad Café" is written in a fairly formal third-person, but its local character makes it seem as if a sort of second-person plural is also contributing to the telling. "The Ballad of the Sad Café" is, in some ways, a story told by an entire town. This has been done before -- think of the unnamed peasant narrator in "The Brothers Karamazov" -- but McCullers pulls is off with uncommon subtlety here. I was really quite impressed by the time I finished this one. I'll need to read more McCullers in the future. show less

The grotesquely human and melancholic undertones coupled with sharp, gleefully-needling imagery, like a high-definition sepia photo of an old-fashioned circus freak show in a dusty town reminiscent of Carnivale, these hallmarks - and more - of McCullers' craft are on full display here. They make you writhe, either from the discomfort of merely witnessing these seemingly gnarly and distorted versions of humanity or from the discomfort of feeling confronted by a mirror. Best read in small doses.

Favourite story: Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland.

I just finished listening to this collection that contains the novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and several other short stories by Carson McCullers, and while I was not disappointed with the stories, I was disappointed with the narration of this particular audiobook. The stories themselves are quirky and poignant and filled with heartbreak and humor. I like how McCuller's characters get under your skin. They are flawed and fully fleshed and often disturbing. Where I went wrong was in choosing the audiobook over the print version. McCuller's writing is all about language and her incredible grasp of using just the right phrasing to capture the action of the story and to describe the characters - it's language you want to immerse show more yourself in by rereading passages and sentences and letting the perfection of her similes and metaphors roll over you. One of my favorite examples is when she describes Mr. Brooks (from the Madam Zilensky story) as "pastel". Hard if not impossible to do that with an audiobook. And then there were the multiple narrators - the reader for the title novella was very good, but some of the others were inadequate to the task. I know that I will eventually revisit this, and when I do it will be with the physical book. show less

4.5/5

McCullers is one I come to for a reckoning, much as I do with Faulkner and O'Connor. One may bundle them up and slot them neatly under the label of Southern Gothic, but that is not a guaranteed invocation of cathedrals crazed by fecundity of both soil and symptom, an American way of the crooked cross where faith is a matter of lust and amputation. While Faulkner plunges in chiaroscuro and O'Connor sears in holy fire, McCullers sings in the twilight of a human soul, casting back on its years in search and always, always, coming up short. She is calmer than her two compatriots, but peace does not entail redemption.

These stories are short, and I am not surprised that my favorite, Wunderkind, was composed at the age of seventeen. It's show more a common thing, the vicarious living of the parent through the child, the sapling broken before it even began along lines of another's making, for intelligence and art and college and any number of reasons but the one encompassing what it is the child actually wants, or dreams, or needs. When the body ripens and the mind begins to wander beyond the closed circuit court of parental promises of wealth and fame and glory, it's no wonder that the machine begins to break. But the child does not know that. What a child does know is their failure is made purely out internal system of self, and one way or another, breaking out or breaking down, they will escape. This is a tale that the median of youth and maturity knows, especially when one is Carson McCullers at seventeen.

While that was my favorite, the rest are well worth it. All are a matter of living with those insanities we humans willingly inflict, for living is a must what with self-killing labeled as one of the more wicked sins. In the midst of souls and the relationships they wield as pitchforks, the damnation they deal is matched only by the bounty they reap, much as the sick sloth of Southern swamp and all its dead can only be graced by golden sunsets, etched into art by sprawling trees and more precious to the earth than all of humanity. The world bears us much as we bear our woes, a day by day of nearing and furthering reconciliation with too long a past to hope that sudden extinction would lead to instantaneous peace. Some moments are of utmost beauty, some are fit to kill, and one adapts accordingly.

The world may grant us sanctuary, but it does not understand us, and will not miss us when we are gone. McCullers has no concrete structure for us to dwell in forevermore; what she does for us is feel. show less

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is another of the stories I first encountered while listening to A Day's Read (and I cannot recommend that course enough.) It was my intention to read the other stories in the volume, but time got away from me and I had to return the book to the library. No matter, it's Ballad that I'm concerned with here, not McCullers' work in general, and it's the primary, and longest work in this volume.

It's a strange story about Miss Amelia, who seems to be the town spinster. She's 6' 2", has crossed eyes, makes moonshine, and spends her free time suing people. Everyone seems a bit afraid of her, and probably for good reason. And then one day a hunchback arrives in town claiming to be Amelia's cousin.

Almost overnight, show more Amelia becomes a different woman. She's softer, kinder, more sociable. She dotes on Cousin Lymon and it's clear she loves him. And it's then that we learn that Amelia had been married years earlier to the town ne'er-do-well, a man named Marvin Macy, who fell so deeply in love with Amelia that he reformed himself and became an upstanding man. He proposed, she accepted, and then came the wedding night.

They were married for ten days, and after the separation, Marvin went back to his old ways and ended up in prison. But one day, after Cousin Lymon has been living with Amelia for about six years, Marvin reappears. Amelia is horrified and Lymon falls in love with Marvin.

It's this crazy triangle that propels this story of unrequited love and longing. We understand, through the actions of the three members of this triangle, that we are all prisoners of something we can never wholly understand, something that drives everything we do. There's no escape for any of them.

The story is beautiful, and cruel, hilarious and sad. If you read no other McCullers, read this. show less

I love southern stories and nobody tells them better than Carson McCullers. I have read THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER several times with great joy. I now reread THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE and continue to be touched by it. A southern woman caught in a triangle. One of the men was a dwarf or at least sadly deformed and was her cousin. She became his protector until he betrayed her. The cafe is where the action takes place. While it started as a cafe it attracted many locals such that she turned it into a nightclub of sorts. Against this background the drama takes place and drama it is. I highly recommend this novella to all.