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Available
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Publication
Signet Classic (1961), Mass Market Paperback, 190 pages
Description
This collection of the poet Dylan Thomas's fiction--and what an extraordinary storyteller he was!--holds special interest because it ranges from the early stories such as "The School for Witches" and "The Burning Baby," with their powerful inheritance of Welsh mythology and wild imagination, to the chapters he completed before his death of the alas unfinished novelAdventures in the Skin Trade. Adventures is the story, written in a shrewd, sly, deadpan vein of picaresque comedy, of young Samuel Bennet, who runs away from his home in Wales to seek his fortune in London.
User reviews
LibraryThing member gbill
I really wish Dylan Thomas had finished the title story to this collection, Adventures in the Skin Trade. It really shows him at his best, with elements of comedic inner dialogue (ala Joyce), absurdity (Kafka), adventurousness (Kerouac), and coming of age existentialism (Salinger), all flowing
Unfortunately in many of the other short stories here, he gets into too much religious allegory and apocalyptic visions, and his poetic, dream-like style is overdone, rendering his prose somewhat opaque.
4.5 stars to Adventures in the Skin Trade which starts the collection.
4.5 stars to The Followers which ends the collection, though I had read this before separately.
4 stars each to After the Fair and The True Story, which are the second and second to last stories.
Yikes on the other 17 stories, all generally 5-10 pages long.
Quotes; just this one on memory:
“Polly bent over Samuel’s hand and he saw down her dress. She knew that he was looking, but she did not start back or spread her hand across the neck of her dress; she raised her head and stared at his eyes. I shall always remember this, he said to himself. In 1933 a girl was pulling at a bottle on the little finger of my left hand while I looked down her dress. It will last longer than all my poems and troubles.
‘I can’t get it off,’ she said.
‘Take him up to the bathroom then and put some soap on it,’ said Mrs. Dacey, in her dry, neat voice. ‘And mind it’s only his bottle.’”
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effortlessly. He started it before WWII and never got back to it afterwards, but it was enjoyable despite that.Unfortunately in many of the other short stories here, he gets into too much religious allegory and apocalyptic visions, and his poetic, dream-like style is overdone, rendering his prose somewhat opaque.
4.5 stars to Adventures in the Skin Trade which starts the collection.
4.5 stars to The Followers which ends the collection, though I had read this before separately.
4 stars each to After the Fair and The True Story, which are the second and second to last stories.
Yikes on the other 17 stories, all generally 5-10 pages long.
Quotes; just this one on memory:
“Polly bent over Samuel’s hand and he saw down her dress. She knew that he was looking, but she did not start back or spread her hand across the neck of her dress; she raised her head and stared at his eyes. I shall always remember this, he said to himself. In 1933 a girl was pulling at a bottle on the little finger of my left hand while I looked down her dress. It will last longer than all my poems and troubles.
‘I can’t get it off,’ she said.
‘Take him up to the bathroom then and put some soap on it,’ said Mrs. Dacey, in her dry, neat voice. ‘And mind it’s only his bottle.’”
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LibraryThing member JonArnold
Proof that great poets don't always make great writers.
Unfinished works are always going to be unsatisfying, this proves the rule and not by being an exception. It's an apparently autobiographical bildungsroman, but such a story is unsatisfactory without the final coming of age. As it stands it's a
Unfinished works are always going to be unsatisfying, this proves the rule and not by being an exception. It's an apparently autobiographical bildungsroman, but such a story is unsatisfactory without the final coming of age. As it stands it's a
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fairly standard tale about a small town boy coming to London and having his expectations shattered on the first night . Thomas does have the occasional sharp turn of phrase you'd expect and retains his poetic ability to find the comically bizarre in the mundane but there's not really enough there to sustain what's there as anything else but an interesting footnote to Thomas's poetry which, as the introduction in my version noted, he seemingly took far more care over than his prose. If this is semi-autobiographical it was a hell of a lot more fun to live than to read. Show Less
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