Customer Reviews

The Short Story Library: The Garden Party (Creative Short Stories)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you've never read her short stories (she never wrote anything else), please do, and then read her journal. There is really something incredible that's underneath the surface of her short stories. If you just looked at the surface you might think they were cutesy or affected (little girls figure largely), but you would be completely missing the point. It's hard to explain what's so moving about them. When she describes some lazy afternoon, she just gets it so right that all the vast range of human experience seems to be contained in this afternoon (whereas in any Great American Novel-esque tomes you read only a fraction of that experience is ever expressed). But at the same time, it was just this cute little vignette that had very satisfying descriptions of flowers and little girls playing. The journal will help you understand her sadness as it's expressed in her work. You know when you are very, very upset, and you see something so beautiful or even funny, you're likely to become on the verge of tears? That's how Mansfield sounds in her stories - the stories are that beautiful thing that she sees.

She is most often compared to Chekhov, and it's not difficult to see why. I truly believe that Mansfield innovated and practically invented the English (language) short story.

Mansfield was in competition with Virigina Wolf during her short life - the one female writer who could compete with the proverbial literary giantess of the pre-war era (as Wolf herself admitted - she respected the former's talent). I think Mansfield ranks as true literary bloom of the first quarter of the 20th century as a generality, hobnobbing with Irish talent like Joyce and fitting into that stage that also held T. E. Lawrence and John Buchan - the male writers always dominating. Mansfield represents the rank outsider, not male, not "English" but breaking through into recognition while she lived.

Her writing is distinctly impressionist in flavour. Sentences broken and stories only half complete. But she writes beautifully, often echoing her impending death from TB. An outsider with her sexuality in how she experimented including a brief pretence of motherhood and her spirituality. She attended Gurdjieff's centre and was obviously fond of the pragmatism of certain Eastern traditions compared to the prevailing cult.

But she only reveals so much in her writing. So much remaining unsaid. Happy stories like "Bliss" and funny stories like "The school mistress". So many details from life at the time like ships, parties, schools, courtship, and the lives of ordinary people from the well bred elites to the downtrodden poor. Mansfield frequently displays a sympathy for the underdog and cries out about the transience of things and the lack of stability in pleasure - vaguely Buddhist even ... But her stories are yet so English with glimpses of her native New Zealand from which she was divorced. She write well about the dazzle of things like summer or flowers, children, sounds and people - everything highlighted. She is so good with colloquial speech and represents it well ... conversations that bring out sentiments of characters and in the reader.

You can't get enough of this genre. The only genre she knew. Little cartoons of short stories, almost always making a point, sometimes sharp but not overtly moralistic. Everything is so precise, a melody from the heart. This like any other collection of her work is worth attention, to read or as a gift.

The introduction is good and Mansfield will probably for ever remain not too well known but a gem to those who find her.

I came across K.M. as she liked to be refered, 60 years after her death. Very late,but better late then never. And especially for K.M. In a german Pension indrigued me first,a review told me, she could have made a lot of money, to publish it again, during the WWI.she declined. She had lost her Brother at the somme, but could not bring herself to more war mongering.
Then I read The Garden Party, and new nearly instandly what kind of person she might have been.
She disliked being priviliged, down the Street, kids her age where starving. The Garden Party gave her an opportunity to disclose Society as what it was. The gap between the Have and Have not.And this in the early 20th century in New Zealand.
And the Garden Party is on of the few stories at the backdrop of New Zealand scenery.
Her Stories make still a highly interesting read, very modern issues with an unbelievable talent for drama, as well as a very dry Sense of humor, like in 'A german Pension'
One or two stories of her are always my companion.

A great book of short stories by a great New Zealander author who is widely unknown. Her short stories will touch your life! Reading closely, I could find the nature of human being. I was almost overwhelmed. Her expressing skill is very outstanding. Specifically, I recommend "The Garden Party" and "The Doll's House" to you.

The Garden Party and Other Stories is a 1922 collection of short stories by respected author Katherine Mansfield.

The Table of Contents is poorly done here, and often only part of the TOC is readable. But don't let that stop you from enjoying these stories from an eminent writer.

Here are the stories, with the Kindle location, so you can jump right to any story in the book.

1. At the Bay (Location: 47)

2. The Garden Party (Location: 764)

3. The Daughters of the Late Colonel (Location: 1074)

4. Mr. and Mrs. Dove (Location: 1501)

5. The Young Girl (Location: 1657)

6. Life of Ma Parker (Location: 1789)

7. Marriage À La Mode (Location: 1921)

8. The Voyage (Location: 2137)

9. Miss Brill (Location: 2299)

10. Her First Ball (Location: 2385)

11. The Singing Lesson (Location: 2511)

12. The Stranger (Location: 2612)

13. Bank Holiday (Location: 2872)

14. An Ideal Family (Location: 2934)

15. The Lady's Maid (Location: 3063)

Katherine Mansfield is one of those writers you come across that make you notice their writing. In "The Garden Party" she not only turns your attention to her style, but maintains it. Her writing is near perfect in form. While I find other writers who wrote during her time to be obstruse, she strikes me as clear and honest. She is not forceful, she is not powerful, but somethings in life require finesse. Mansfield takes finesse to the next level and turns it from an art into a science--though she would probably prefer her work described as an excercise in art. She is worth the read. Pity she didn't have enought time on this world to grace us with more of what I call real literature.

I admit when I started this book, I did not expect much. The first story, "At the Bay," was told through the point of view of so many characters, and in such a stream of conscious style, that I had no idea what the plot was (I am unconvinced that there was one) or how all the characters were related to each other. I think there were perhaps twice as many characters as there were pages in the story, and I didn't much care for the style. But I got over that when I read the second story, and the one for which the collection is named, "The Garden Party." It was so sweetly told, and captured such a perfect moment in time through the eyes of a young girl. The story touched on such themes as the end of childhood, death, innocence, the class system and family relationships. It was beautiful, and I relaxed, knowing that I was in the hands of a skilled storyteller.

I didn't love all the stories in this collection, but so many of them touched me very deeply. For me, short stories are so, so dependent on the characters and the author's language. There aren't enough pages for a strong plot to develop, and so the most capable storytellers (in my opinion) focus on providing us a vivid portrait of their characters. I soon came to realize that this is a very melancholy set of stories. Many of the characters are older women. Several have lived their lives in the service of others and now realize that they are alone and terribly lonely. Others center on a couple, and the terrible moment that can arrive, unexpectedly, that makes you realize how little you know the other person. Some are about young girls, on the cusp of adulthood, and realizing that it is very bittersweet. Only a few are told from a man's point of view, but they are devastating in their emotional impact.

And that's what clinched this book as such a winner for me. Katherine Mansfield grabbed tight onto my heart, and just kept pulling at it and then she gave me the sniffles, and made my eyes well up with tears and my whole body just ache, and I loved her for it. This collection was so heart-rending in all the right ways, I can't even tell you. But here are a few moments that did me in: an old woman, walking home alone after a long day of work mourns the death of her beloved grandson but can't think of anywhere she can go to just let go and cry because she doesn't want to make a scene; a man, desperately in love with his wife, who realizes that she nursed another man to health even though she barely ever touches him; a wealthy old man, exhausted, thinks that he is invisible to his family; two sisters come to terms with the death of their tyrannical father, only it's too late for either of them to venture out on a new life for herself. Just small glimpses into the minds of people we might otherwise pass on the street without a second glance. Glimpses that make you realize just how beautiful and horrible and beautiful and ugly life can be for every day, normal people, and the devastating effects of decisions that each of us must come to terms with.

This theme is communicated to readers in such beautiful, descriptive prose, too. I loved the following lines:

"Her laugh was like a spoon tinkling against a medicine-glass."

"She was only at the beginning of everything. It seemed to her that she had never known what the night was like before. Up til now it had been dark, silent, beautiful very often- oh yes- but mournful somehow. Solemn. And now it would never be like that again- it had opened dazzling bright."

Oh, I fell completely in love with Katherine Mansfield, and I hope you will give her a chance, too.

There's nothing fancy about a Katherine Mansfield short story. No overly clever play on words, no outrageous situations that only fictional characters find themselves in, no groundbreaking techniques that leave a wake of influence behind them- nothing of the sort is found in this collection of stories, yet somehow, these 15 tales leave an impression on the reader that won't fade away any time soon. Take the title story for instance. A well-to-do family throws a garden party and every detail of this joyous occasion is captured so perfectly by Mansfield that the reader feels the anticipation and excitement of the event. All is going well until a single piece of bad news- nothing intimately affecting those in attendance- casts an entirely different light on the whole affair.

Each story proceeds in similar fashion. Life's simple pleasures are described with eloquence, only to be undercut by a single spoken phrase or slighty dramatic turn of events. And vice-versa- all is sad and horrible until the tiniest of actions reminds the characters of life's greatest pleasures. Mansfield observations on life's ups and downs and how those are constantly in flux imbue each story with an immediacy and poignancy rare in stories that, on the surface, appear so simple.

Haunting in their effective simplicity, these stories are.

If Virginia Woolf once described Katherine Mansfield as "of the cat kind, alien, composed, always solitary & observant," I would go even further and say that she is quite simply the best short story writer of the 20th Century, ...bar Kipling maybe... If she had lived longer she would surely have eclipsed him as a stylist and attention to detail decscribed in ways that defy explanation.

I was only guided to Mansfield, by my friend,a Cambridge-educated mountaineer who swore by her prose...

This compilation of stories varies from those she wrote in her pre-consumptive days in New Zealand to those analysing the corrosive influence of ideas that should have long been dead... colonialism, subtle racism, and the dominiance of the male sex. All written in such a way that ellicits pathos with no cry for help... the pathos lies in the condition, not the individual situation. It is this capability to allude to the universal indirectly from the particular that stands out.

Some of the stories range from ones with a classical shocking turn of ending... and others that just sort of trail off into the ether and we are left with some sort of satisfying feeling and a supposed deeper understanding of something ineffable...

I think about the wonderful later stories of Kipling such as "The Gardener" and I am struck by the emotional female empathy, the shock left unsaid (and sometimes unknown), and unrequited longing for a lost world and for a new one.

It is this ability to describe things that Mansfield really excels in, and the volume really makes one yearn that she had lived to produce more...

That pretty much says it all. Ok, it's free. But it doesn't even tell you what's in there. Don't bother; other collections just aren't that expensive to make this worth it.