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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a wonderful Saroyan day-trip,
By Brian pinsker (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Man with the Heart in the Highlands: And Other Stories (New Directions Classics) (Paperback)
This little book released by New Directions is bright-eyed and youthful, with hardly any of the rancor contained in Saroyan's other tales. Written all before 1940, these short pieces pick you up quickly, drop you in the middle of a bunch of scrappy kids in Fresno/San Fransisco in the depression era, and then take you back home with hardly any jet-lag. Saroyan goes back in time effortlessly, describing a game of leap-frog (remember that game, where a line of kids crouch on the ground and one kid hops over the whole line and crouches in the front, and then the last kid gets up and hops over the whole line, to infinity...) where a tough boy and a tough girl compete brutally, leaping and crouching, all the way out into the country and to the next town, ending in a bloody brawl. And in "The Messenger", a young boy gets hilariously distracted from his extremely important mission to send a message to the town doctor. Most of the stories are light, funny and non-ironic, but at times the customary Saroyan bile simmers to the top. Like in "The Living and the Dead", where a reluctant young Communist writer, is walking down the road to town, whistling happily, and suddenly "...the whole world, caught in time and space, seemed to me an absurdity, and insanity, and instead of being amused, which would have been philosophical, I was miserable and began to ridicule all the tragic straining of man, living and dead." Like I said, MOST of the stories are light and funny... What I like most about these is the sense of respect and compassion Saroyan shows his characters, no matter how young, simple or strange they are. He describes their lives like he was there experiencing the same bittersweet mini-tragedies and absurdities simultaneously, right along with them. He uses the vernacular of the day to write the most endearing dialogue ever, bringing these superbly-drawn characters to luminous life. Saroyan's early stories here reflect the same kind of innocent humor and subtlety as the brief output of another American master, Nathaniel West. If you liked "The Day of the Locust" or "Balso Snell", then these little classics will bring you a similarly delightful reading experience. I strongly believe Raymond Carver to be a literary son, or at least nephew, to William Saroyan here in his best form, the short story.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a brief description,
By A Customer
This review is from: Man with the Heart in the Highlands: And Other Stories (New Directions Classics) (Paperback)
this saroyan collection gathers together some of the stories he wrote while living in san francisco.
besides the fact that they are beautiful short stories (one of my favorites: "the mother"), they are all set in san francisco.
for a sense of place circa 1930s, a great book.
also, the herb caen introduction is a nice addition. makes it a piece of SF literature worth holding onto, i think.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Honest Wisdom and Wit of Saroyan Shines,
By
This review is from: Man with the Heart in the Highlands: And Other Stories (New Directions Classics) (Paperback)
Armenian-American inhabitant William Saroyan, whose heday was between 1934-1940 in San Francisco, is a great America writer of human short stories. He is gifted in characterization, in his ability to capture emotions and interpersonal subtleties; he is also overflowing with a sort of honest wisdom from whose cup it is a pleasure, via reading his stories to drink. There are several great stories in this collection; Secrets of Alexandria is about two isolated moviegoers with movie stars and hoping to hook up but thwarted by events; The Brothers and Sisters tells of the disillusionment of a buff young guy in lust with an innocent hooker, who is accompanied to the mysterious site of his jealousy by a religious member of a family of wine merchants; The Living and the Dead hilariously recounts the commentary of an Armenian grandmother, whose dead husband, a horse-riding drunk who terrorized and was never seen to cry, spouted incomparable oratory. Many of the best stories focus on the invisible fulcrum of passing time, the moment when an individual realizes, in the face of inexorable events, that things will not be the same. Relatedly, the stories perfectly capture the loss, the missingness, as it were, of the beloved. Dear Baby captures a boxer on the way out, fighting against odds for his dead sweetheart. The wonderful The Great Leapfrog Contest, perhaps my favorite, tells of a new neighborhood girl, Rosie Mahoney, the youngest of a big Irish family who moves into a non-Irish neighborhood where she proves her superiority to all the neighborhood boys-even the new, strong, instinctually cool and filmic-but not Rosie-quality-guy who moves in from Texas and refuses to engage in fisticuffs with a female. Many Miles Per Hour tells of young boys ogling a car souped up to go over fifty (!) miles per hour. Many of the stories feature, or have young male characters; because the stories take place in the first half of the 20th century, they contain a wonderful historical quality. Sweetheart, Sweetheart, Sweetheart details the angst of a teen desired by a married neighbor whose mother and sister realize what's going on before he does, and laugh when she takes a grown lover, never again to play the story's eponymous song which, she had said, was devoted to him.
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