Product Description

Saki is perhaps the most graceful spokesman for England's 'Golden Afternoon' - the slow and peaceful years before the First World War. Although, like so many of his generation, he died tragically young, in action on the Western Front, his reputation as a writer continued to grow long after his death. The stories are humorous, satiric, supernatural, and macabre, highly individual, full of eccentric wit and unconventional situations. With his great gift as a social satirist of his contemporaryupper-class Edwardian world, Saki is one of the few undisputed English masters of the short story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16358 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

About the Author
Born H H Munro in Burma in 1870, Saki was educated in England and returned to Burma to join the police force in 1893. Returning to London in 1896, he worked for the Westminster Gazette and was Balkans correspondent for the Morning Post from 1902. He was killed on the Western Front during World War 1, having volunteered for active service despite being over 40.

Customer Reviews

AN INSIDIOUS ADDICTION
The stories of H.H.Munro - better known by his pen-name of Saki - have scarcely been out of print since they were first published around a hundred years ago. Yet it often seems that their particular delights are reserved for the private pleasures of his coterie of admirers.

It has to be admitted that a taste for Saki is something of an addiction. And, like all addictions, once acquired it is hard to give up. In the years since his tragic early death in the trenches of World War I at the hands of a German sniper, fellow addicts have included Graham Greene, Noel Coward and Tom Sharpe. All of us take a slightly wicked satisfaction from his biting wit and the subversive way in which he undermines the staid Edwardian society he purports to merely observe.

But, to a much greater extent than his near-contemporaries, Wilde and Kipling, there is something dark and menacing at the heart of Saki's writing. Behind the refined tinkle of teacups on an Edwardian lawn can be heard the distant howling of a wolf. Hidden among the shrubbery in a carefully manicured garden lurk all kinds of Beasts and Superbeasts, ready to wreak Nature's revenge on an uncaring mankind with its arrogant belief in materialism, progress and the innate respectability of middle-class values. Where Kipling's Jungle Book menagerie tends to simple analogies of human types, Saki's animals can rise up with the full power of Pan himself.

This is not to ignore Saki's ability to turn an aphorism with all the facility and wit of the divine Oscar at his best. Nor does it forget his ability to prick the inflated egos of louche young men with too much time and money on their hands or deliciously dotty aunts and duchesses with their minds firmly fixed on Empire and their Imperial responsibilities.

It would be easy to argue that Munro foresaw the imminent collapse of this society into the cataclysm of the Great War. With his experience as a political journalist in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, he was probably more aware than most of the storm that was about to break over Europe.

But essentially he was an observer of his fellow man. And it is for the humour of his observations, for the dazzling twists and turns his tales take and for the fact that he makes us laugh inordinately that he is to be treasured and why we addicts are prepared to share our secret vice with those who have yet to acquire the habit.

clever and very very funny
Saki's short stories have to be some of the best around. Most of them are funny and all of them are clever, having the added attraction of not becoming boring after one read. Some of the stories in this volume are in the form of monologues, especially on the part of Reginald, a character around whom Saki's earliest volume of stories were based. Another character who had much ink lavished upon him was Clovis Sangrail, whose poem, the Durbar Recessional, is surely unforgettable to those who have read it.
Saki's short stories are as brilliant as when they were first published, even if the Edwardian society they satirized has long since vanished into the past.

Hypnotic reading.
Saki's work is addictive. Once you begin to explore his cruelly observant writing, and to savour the menace, moral or supernatural, beneath its surface no other English writer will really do.