Due to this challenge, I made yet another attempt at reading a collection of short stories. Not since Kipling's "Just So Stories" which is akin to Aesop's Fables, have I enjoyed a short story collection. Maybe I need to stick to children's short stories rather than adult ones!
I made an attempt a number of years ago with Karen Russell's "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" as I heard great things about it, but I was sadly disappointed with the collection (see review June 16, 2012).
Again with "Elementals", I found that frequently the stories were obscure or felt unfinished. There was quite a variety: from a story of life and death, a princess fairy tale, a Faustian tale, a weird story that was more like a dream/nightmare inside a shopping mall and Biblical tales of morality.
The author's descriptive writing is amazing in "Cold" in describing the ice world of the princess and the glass-blowing of the prince and in "A Lamia in the Cevennes" the artist and his obsession with colors (i.e. the various shades of blue).
Even with the beauty of Byatt's writing, I can appreciate the short story writing, yet I'm not compelled to want to read more.
Quotes: "There was excess of pleasure in the simplicity: stars, flames, water, the scent of cedars and burned fennel, the salt of olives, the juicy flakes of the fish, the gold wine, the sweet berries, the sharp chocolate, the warm air"
"I think perhaps you did the best you could -
I did not tell you this sorry story in order to hear you say that...I told it to hear it told aloud"
"...your past life is mapped two ways, with significant things that of course you remember, births, marriages, deaths, journeys, successes and failures, and then the other sort, the curiously bright-coloured, detailed pointless moments that won't go away."
"You must learn now, that the important lesson...is that the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning."
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