Reviews for The Complete Saki

The average rating for The Complete Saki based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-12-05 00:00:00 Gregory Costello If someone thinks old books are boring, reads a few stories out of this, and still thinks so, i can only conclude they are crazy person. This is ridiculously funny literature; I love Saki!

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-14 00:00:00 Nir Dayan Saki is like fois gras; in a small plate after careful selection and preparation by the chef, it is absolutely divine, in large doses, one rather feels like the goose undergoing gavage instead. As the above proves, it's quite hard to be epigrammatic. Saki is the master of the epigrammatic short story. What I find rather interesting is how relatively obscure he is compared with Wilde, Coward and Wodehouse, all writers who satirized the aristocratic and upper middle classes of England. I chalk it up to him having a wickedly cruel edge to his wit, and an unnervingly misanthropic and morbid cast of character underneath the effete dandyism for a wide readership. Also as an added sin, he is far too socially conservative and nationalistic for the liberal readership of our era, and far far too aesthetically gay and disdainful of Christianity to be embraced by modern conservatives like Waugh was. The one mistake I made with this book was reading it all the way through. Keep this by your bedside and read a couple short stories before sleep (unless weird horror keeps you up, as some of his tales have that edge). What's rather sad is that he seems to have died before his literary gifts were in full bloom. His later novels and especially his short stories written at the front show a widening of perspective and emotion, far beyond the cruel children, selfish gossipy women and beautiful witty young men that make up most of his earlier body of work. The Unbearable Bassington takes what is usually his set piece for a cynical comedy of manners and then at the very end, reverses it into emotional realism as the real-life consequences of being a materialistic and status driven woman and a charming and witty yet dissipated and directionless young man come to fore in a morose ways other than to make a punchline. Even the last Clovis story has a bit of a wistfulness to go along with the jibing. Unlike many writers (most of them, I would venture), Saki put his money where his political and philosophical mouth was. He chose to go fight as a private in the trenches of the Western Front despite the fact that his age, fame and social class would all have allowed him far less deadly wartime service. Like a large portion of the young men he spent his time with there, telling stories to keep their morale up, he died senselessly. Like a character in one of his stories, he died in a most ironic way. Shot in the head by a sniper after telling a new recruit to put out his cigarette before their position was given away.