Customer Reviews

Chronicles of Clovis

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It is Saki so of course the stories are marvelous. My one star is for the Kindle Edition. Every other line only contains two words so it is not a smooth block of text for the eye to follow.

I love Saki. These are some of the best, most biting, hilarious gems ever written in the English language. However, the Kindle edition is so hard to read, that I must subtract two stars for the formatting.

The Kindle edition is very hard to read because of the awkward line breaks and kerning. I believe the digitization of this book to have been untouched by human hands, with no proofreading at all. Some lines have four words evenly spaced out to each margin. In other instances, a hyphenated word will have an additional hyphen inserted midway to make a line break. Other pages have "widows or orphans", a solitary word on one page. Each time I encounter one of these, the eye and the brain go "Ker-thunk!" an it spoils the sense and rhythm of the story.

Not worth even the low Kindle price; too many aggravations.

These short stories constitute some of the best in the English language. They have quite a range in tone, from the extreamely humorous Unrest Cure to the mystery of Sredni Vashtar. Only The Easter Egg diappoints. Written in an Edwardian prose that never disappoints, read it like it was one of life's little luxuries.

black comedy at its best. not for everyone. read only one story at any given sitting, or the flavor and the impact goes away. One of the Best short storie collections ever printed.

This is the third collection of short stories by Saki, which was originally published in 1911. This collection includes 28 short stories which are very loosely centered on Clovis Sangrail (a somewhat mischievous upper-class youth), although there are several stories in the collection which are not linked at all to that character. Many of the stories are fable-like, but the mood of the stories varies greatly. Whatever dark, satirical, cynical, or just plain bizarre, each is a treat for the reader.

All these stories are worthwhile, but some of my favorites are "Tobermory", "Sredni Vashtar", "The Music on the Hill", and "The Unrest-Cure" to name a few. The quality of the stories is high throughout the collection. This book appears to currently be out of print; however there are many free versions now available on the web. This is fortunate for everyone who wants to read his stories.

Saki (the name came from the cupbearer in "The Rubayat" of Omar Khayyam) is the pseudonym of H. H. Munro (Dec. 18, 1870 - Nov. 13, 1916) a subject of the British Empire who was born in Burma the son of a Scottish military policeman. Sadly, Munro was killed in France while serving during World War I by a sniper.