Complete Short Stories by Noël Coward
My rating: 4/5 cats
who knew noel coward wrote short stories?? bill thompson knew, and he sent me this book! 630 pages of small fonted stories!! i’m not a big drama gal, so i knew very little about noel coward before reading this. (but—pssst—i think he might be gay) it’s fun going into a huge book and knowing nothing about what to expect, particularly one you haven’t selected for yourself—but i trust the canadians, so i figured he wouldn’t steer me wrong by sending this. i do not recommend this book to anyone trying to quit smoking—it will have you squirming and gnawing your knuckles like crazy. stay away. but as a non-smoker of eight months, i really enjoyed these stories—they are funny and wry and just very adept portraits of snobbish individuals with very little in the way of self-awareness and no sense of the repercussions of their actions. also—coward writes jealousy and unrequited love beautifully, as well as moral rectitude. everything is marabou trim and mauve mauve mauve, every nose is retroussé, every conversation brisk and snappy and shallow and…skimmy. that’s not a word, is it?? blame the wine and the ruffled mind i have right now. rohinsky, you can make the christmas connection all by yourself here, right?
everything about it is a little bit wilde, a little bit beerbohm, a little bit fitzgeraldy. (yes, that’s totally to the tune of cigarettes and chocolate milk) god, i love the minor key…
read my book reviews on goodreads
