Product Description

Erotic, passionate, tragic or doomed, love is above all a game of allusiveness and nuance, of fabulous grotesques and intimate loathings. In this collection, Dan Rhodes takes fables and spins them into suburban romances, twists domestic cosiness into mythical combat. Love for a Vietnamese cellist drives a man to transform himself into her cello; love is found on a council refuse site between an unnamed narrator and the ghostly Maria; the love of The Artist for his female muse consumes him, the search party sent to find him, the villagers who discover his mouldering body -- all eaten by the small creatures of the forest. Against a backdrop reminiscent of Angela Carter with a sense of the emotionally horrid that would quieten even Will Self, Dan Rhodes has produced a spellbinding, haunting collection of timeless tales.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #776001 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 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

Review
'Funny and unsettling!Fairy stories written with an elegant simplicity.' Daily Telegraph 'You won't find a finer collection of short stories in the land.' Jockey Slut 'It is brave of Rhodes to buck the trend for realism!the beauty of his writing is persuasive and his themes are universal.' The Times Praise for 'Anthropology': 'They should prescribe this free on the NHS -- it's an absolute gem.' Jenny Colgan 'A hilarious exploration of the challenges faced by the fairer sex.' The Times

About the Author
Dan Rhodes is twenty-eight and this is his second book. It follows his previous collection of short stories -- Anthropology -- two of which were selected by Tibor Fisher for the Vintage collection New Writing (March 1999). His first novel will come next.

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.

"Eden with bear-traps"
Someone's already described Rhodes' idea of love as "Eden with bear-traps" and that isn't far out. He's both a cynical realist and a total romantic. Of course you can find a magician to change you into a cello, so that the girl musician who doesn't love you will hold and play you forever. But there's a catch - there always is. The message of these little fables, more or less, is "love's more trouble than it's worth but that won't stop it happening". It's like reading fairytales gone terribly wrong, and always with Rhodes' highly individual, engrossing style. Unputdownable.

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!