Customer Reviews

All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories

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This, like the Bible, is a book of two halves: one long and relatively weighty, the other short and attractively simple.
The first part is Maxwell's collected stories, chosen to represent a period of time stretching from the thirties to the nineties. These all, to varying degrees follow the trademark Maxwell approach of hovering on the edges of fiction and biography. Some (The Man in the Moon, Billie Dyer) appear to be straight non-fiction, while in others the elements of fiction are stronger. All, however, are powerful evocations of the human landscape of Maxwell's childhood, or of the experiences of later life.
The second part of the work is a collection of what Maxwell calls "improvisations": fables or fairy stories which contrast strikingly with his more familiar naturalistic pieces. The connecting thread is his moving clarity of vision. Most of these stories are only a few pages long, but they combine humour and humanity in a way which makes them a permanent part of the reader's mind.
All the Days and Nights is a wonderful book, which for those familiar with Maxwell's longer works offers, in the best sense, more of the same. Or, for those new to the author, the improvisations in particular are an enticing and accessible introduction to one of America's best 20th century writers.

These short stories are best read slowly. They contained lovingly detailed characters, characters that require you to spend the time to get to know them. Maxwell examines some rather ordinary people in their ordinary life struggles. But he does so insightfully and lovingly. The "improvisations" at the end of the book are rather unique, and their genesis (improvised bedtime stories to his wife) mesh perfectly with the themes of the rest of the stories.

I've read this book at University as I'm doing a Master on Translation. My teacher is the "official translator" of this book in Spain, so she asked us to translate a couple of short stories: "The Sound of Waves" and "All the Days and Nights". I have to say that I've liked it very much. It's amazing how Maxwell can make us see those images he has in his mind by words in a very clear way. I'm reading now the rest of the stories, but I can tell I have discovered one of my favourite authors!!!

Maxwell's prose is beautiful and evocative, but his approach is meticulous and his viewpoint almost clinical. What fascinates him most is that, unlike the big events recorded in newspapers and histories, the stories of ordinary people are recorded mainly in the memories of living persons. Those memories are not only ephemeral, but mutable and prone to mistakes, editing and embellishment. Great family deeds are magnified; misdeeds are forgotten and their perpetrators and their histories (good and bad) shunned. For me, the most poignant moment comes in Man in the Moon when the narrator, who had known his black sheep uncle mainly through the disparaging comments of his family, decides to visit him, and comes to see in him a core of goodness and dignity. No this is not Hollywood, it is cinema verite.

I feel like I missed something by never meeting or corresponding with William Maxwell. Unlike the case with Shakespeare or Fitzgerald, it could have happened. He only died a decade or so ago, at 91 I think, and he was active through much of my fiction-reading life. After reading several of his novels, I savored this superb collection of short stories over several months. Wherever I move in the years left to me, All the Days and Nights will accompany me.

Some stories here are set in New York City, where I now live. Others draw on, it's never clear how much, Maxwell's growing up in small town midwest of the early 20th century. A few take place in Europe in the era when it was still exotic to the relatively few Americans who traveled there. Some are fables, or, as Maxwell calls them, "improvisations." Wherever set, they all share a quiet authority; an understanding of the complex connections that draw us together and the small hurts that can forever alter a friendship or relationship; and a respect for all the characters in them as they make their way through life.

The best way to read All the Days and Nights is at night, one story or improvisation at a time, in the last hour before sleep. It is the hour that invites reflection, as these stories do. My personal favorite may be The Thistles in Sweden, where a man recalls in elaborate and exact detail the people, the street scenes, and the apartment where he and his wife lived early in their marriage. It concludes with a long final paragraph that reprises in a few words each of those memories, with these final lines, "the musical instrument...played in the dark, over our sleeping bodies, while the children flew their kites, and I think if it true we are all in the hands of God, what a capacious hand it must be." And then there is this brilliant passage from The Man in the Moon, "The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters."

Such nuggets are embedded in almost every piece here, including the improvisations, which in their weaker moments have a thrown-off quality about them. But even they carry a couple of classics, "The blue finch of Arabia" and "The sound of waves."

Summing up -- I don't expect to read anything better this year.

Having been familiar with some of the writings of Maxwell's counterparts at The New Yorker (i.e. Cheever, Updike, Salinger) I was expecting to be periodically impressed while I read this anthology. I did enjoy most of the stories (though not most of the short improvisations). They are best read slowly, by a sensitive reader who likes to look at everyday life. Regretfully, nothing in this book made me whisper "wow."