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The Collected Stories (New Directions Paperbook)

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Was Dylan thomas the consummate craftsman? Indeed, he was; and took real delight in his gifts and his exercise of them; he was a Celtic bard in the truest sense of that role -- the lonely public/private man who carried within him the lyric history of his race, the love of his language and a very vocal sense of wonder over his role in life; that he had song, yes; that he was funny, loud, boisterous, cautious, selfish, rude, unforgettable -- all of that and more; he was the poet's poet and the singer for those who longed for lost boyhood, who raged at death and who marvelled at the all the world's words rediscovered in a dewdrop; his stories, like his poems, should be read aloud; there is an incantatory quality to them -- as if something profoundly old and grandfatherly were suddenly shared with the reader; Thomas himself was a great reader; to hear him is to savor him at his best and to feel deeply and sweetly the majesty and holy compulsion of our mother tongue; the stories, while less charged than the poems, nonetheless captivate and break into a kind of lyricism that gladdens the heart and restores the ear. If he wasn't the best of our poets, he was easily the most tuneful and spoke from a very deep place that only the purest of us can truly know.

Reading Dylan Thomas's "Collected Stories" is like eavesdropping on another person's dreams. Ethereal, mysterious, often confoundingly subjective, it's the work of a very lyrical writer who wasn't always interested in typical short-fiction concerns like plot and character.

The plus side of this is represented right away in the first story, a bewitching child-like fable out of Ray Bradbury. "After The Fair" presents a girl named Annie who creeps into a fairground at night and makes friends with one of the human sideshows. "I've always been a fat man, and now I'm the Fat Man," he tells her with a touch of pride. There's something deeply satisfying yet hard to explain about the pull of this story, of utterly different people connecting to one other in a way that seems natural to the very young and impossible to anyone else.

Three stories later, "The Enemies" presents us with another kind of off-center meeting, this between a lost and somewhat barmy Welsh minister and a couple of otherworldly pagans who view him with concealed contempt.

Conversation is elliptical, to say the least. "It is quiet here." "We have no clock."

Dylan Thomas won fame for his poetry, but during a career from the early 1930s to 1953 he also wrote fiction. For the first few years, it was in the vein of "The Enemies" and even more inscrutable offerings like "The Lemon" and "The Mouse And The Woman". Any plot seems hidden behind dense layers of descriptive, run-on verbiage. I found myself grimly turning pages with the dumb persistence of an armadillo on a desert road.

Thomas didn't stick to that style, fortunately. The middle of the book contains the text for his short-story collection "Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Dog" which is written in a more grounded way. The best of them, "The Peaches" and "One Warm Saturday", present both a lived-in feeling as well as a clear well-developed narrative and compelling central characters. Thomas still meanders, but with real purpose and a welcome infusion of humor. Not all the stories are great, yet they work together in a way that develops Thomas's fictional Wales as a place of real solidity.

I'm still not sure what to make of the last third of the book. They include the three chapters of Thomas's aborted novel "Adventures In The Skin Trade", which mix fantasy and realism yet seem to go nowhere. There's also "A Child's Christmas In Wales", Thomas's best-known story but really more of an overstuffed inventory of things Thomas remembered from his Yuletide past. It's not a story so much as a hazy reminiscence in the same way as other later efforts like "Return Journey" and "The Crumbs Of One Man's Year." I was underwhelmed.

But just as I was settling back into armadillo-reader mode, I came to "The Followers". Again, like with "After The Fair", there was something compelling in the murky storyline, in which the title characters stalk a woman with no malicious intent for reasons even they can't quite understand. The ending is either a wicked cheat or a clever nod to O. Henry, but like the similarly fantastic "One Warm Saturday", I found it worked quite well.

So I wound up reading a bunch of stories I was indifferent to and a few I couldn't stand in exchange for four or five that wove a rare kind of magic. It was the kind of bargain I'd happily make again. Alas, it's not one I can recommend unreservedly.

This collection is a necessary part of the library of every Dylan Thomas aficionado. It contains all the stories from Dylan Thomas: Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog and from Adventures in the Skin Trade as well as the miscellaneous prose pieces found in Quite Early One Morning.

By turns turgid and lucid -- sometimes morbidly surreal, at another times sunnily nostalgic -- Dylan Thomas could cast a spell on his reader or listener from the very first sentence. Perhaps his most famous prose-work, A Child's Christmas in Wales, is also included, making this collection the indispensable compendium of stories and memoirs by the Welsh master. Very highly recommended.

With significant exceptions, "The Collected Stories" chronical the life, if read in that order, of a sad and melancholy man, who was aware of but unwilling to accept the burden on consciousness of the futility of modern life. Thomas lightened his load, by and by, with increasingly frequent jokes and essays into humour. In many ways the stories are an accurate account of the everyday absurdity of Everyman; by one who lived at the time personality was displaced by the development of commercial media hype. Thomas died at age 39 in 1953. If he'd lived a few more years he might have described to us the age of common emotion and undifferentiated humanity, which breaks down only under the influence of alcohol to anything interesting and never unique; that he interpolated and prophecied from his eavesdropping into the lives of his comtemporaries. (No, I don't think that sentence is too long and I think Dylan would have approved.) He didn't spare himself from his snooping. Much of the content is autobiographical. But like a reporter, he just tells us the facts. The inferences and insights are your own. You have to read this volume! END

"Annoyingly" this page is devoted to the stories of Dylan Thomas; also"annoyingly", both the Publishers Weekly review as well as that of a disgrunted reader refer stories by Leslie Norris; Norris' book may be splendid; I don't know; I have read Dylan's stories and honor and love them (they are live things wearing incandescent prose -- believe me); perhaps Amazon could reassign the aforementioned reviews and those of us who -- on this page at least -- have (happily) written about the appropriate book will be left to bask unannoyed.