Product Description

This is a collection of short stories in which Dan Rhodes takes fables, spins them into suburban romances and twists domestic cosiness into mythical combat. "Love for a Vietnamese" cellist drives a man to transform himself into her cello. In another, love is found on a council refuse site.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #241319 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
With this new collection of short stories, Dan Rhodes keeps as his subject the intricacies and deficiencies of desire, but his methods have changed. At some junctures he appears to be aiming for the mythopoetic tone and ominous symbolism of fairy tale--more than one of these pieces, for instance, is set in a dark, foreboding, Hansel-and-Gretel type forest. An example is the story "Painting", where an artist creates a portrait of a lady so beautiful it slays with love all who see it (uncannily like Monty Python's "funniest joke in the world", which kills with laughter all who hear it). Other stories come across as mainstream, but turn out equally pixilated: "Violoncello" evolves from a family saga in modern Vietnam to a weird fable about a boy becoming a musical instrument; "Landfill" has a prosaic face but the undertone is magical realist. Yet one of the very best stories, "The Carolingian Period", is set squarely in a very real world: academia. It tells the melancholy story of an old architecture professor in too much of a hurry, and it shows quite how moving Rhodes can be especially when he isn't turning post-modern literary tricks.

Rhodes's first collection, Anthropology, was a quiver of literary arrows: an ensemble of pointed pithy and often very poignant short stories focusing principally on the anguish and lunacy of love. As such it won much praise and attention, despite, or because of, its peculiarities of style. Don't Tell Me The Truth About Love is no less intriguing. --Sean Thomas

Synopsis
A chance encounter prompts an ageing professor to regret a lifetime of wasted opportunities; a beautiful wife tests her husband by making herself hideous; for the love of a girl, a boy turns himself into a violoncello... In these seven short stories Dan Rhodes lays bare the pain and enchantment of love.

About the Author
Dan Rhodes is the author of Anthropology, described in the Independent as 'funny, fantastic and strangely profound'. In 1999 he wrote an average of seven words a day. He lives in London

Customer Reviews

An masterpiece of bitterness and unrequited love
This is a collection of dark allegories about unrequited love, the kind of longing that obliterates your identity, drives you to despair and forces you to contemplate the random horror that life sometimes is.

This is a collection of stories that dwells on the dark side of love, a side that exists but is not portrayed in fiction enough. We all know about the story about a boy meeting a girl and falling in love and everybody living happily ever after. But what about the reality 90% of the time? What about the aching longing, the desperate realisation that you just don’t measure up to the dreams of the girl of your dreams? The story Violoncello in this collection is the closest approximation to the sense of hideous realisation you get when you realise that no matter what you do, no matter how you try to change yourself, you will never, ever enter into the thoughts of that girl you like, except as a slight irritant, an annoying distraction from the bigger picture of the story that is her life.

People often complain that characters in Dan Rhodes stories are not likeable, as if you should only read a story about a character you find yourself liking. On that logic, there would be no satire, no black comedy, no horror stories, no Alan Partridge, no League of Gentlemen… The characters in this collection are pathetic, they’re fools wasting away because they can’t get their head round the idea that that girl they’re obsessed with just doesn’t care who they are, but what’s wrong with that? So in Violoncello the main character turns himself into a cello in a desperate, doomed attempt to be near the girl who is not interested in him. In the beautiful Carolingian Period the professor looks on the beautiful young woman and marvels at her beauty, but he can never go near her.

In most of these stories, the main character is usurped by others in his vain attempts to gain the affection of the girl of his dreams. In a story that will be depressingly familiar to all who have nursed a teenage crush on a classmate, the girl, sometimes bafflingly, inexplicably, chooses someone else to be the object of her affections. The main character is left as a bitter piece of flotsam, dreaming his bitter dreams and impotently raging. I have never come across such an accurate depiction of the sheer pain of rejection and unrequited love.

I recently read an interview with Dan Rhodes and in it he suggested that a sense of anger often drives him to write. And this collection should be approached with anger. It’s a catharsis, to cleanse you of the anger of modern life, the sense of injustice at a world in which everything seems wrong, and love never seems possible. It’s a great thing that the collection ends on a positive note with the story Beautiful Consuela, that suggests that true love is possible. With this story, the catharsis is complete, and you can get back to your life, secure in the knowledge that somebody somewhere understands the things you’ve been through and can express it beautifully.

This is pure gold – no question.

Just wonderful
Moving up from very short- 'Anthropology''s stories are only 101 words long- to just quite short, Rhodes manages to cast the same spell of opening up a private universe in the space of a few paragraphs. These stories are lovely, funny, sad, and often surprising. I was particularly fond of 'Beautiful Consuela', but each one is a little gem. Buy this immediately and put some quality back into your reading life!

Genius
If you only ever read one book in your lifetime, make it this one. Dan writes with more emotion in a few lines than many more recognised authors manage in 100 pages.