Reviews for Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

The average rating for Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-05-29 00:00:00 Robert Harris Short stories can be like photographs, catching people at some moment in their lives and trapping the memory for ever . There they are, smiling or frowning, looking sad, happy, serious, surprised ... And behind those smiles and those frowns lie all the experience of life, the fears and delights, the hopes and the dreams. ― Katherine Mansfield Last year, I was enraptured by a collection of Katherine Mansfield's short stories, Something Childish But Very Natural so while reading Willem Elsschot's Villa des Roses, written around the same time and also set in a boarding house, Mansfield's debut collection from 1911, In a German Pension popped up from some hidden corner of the mental bookshelf. For these pension stories, Mansfield took inspiration from her own stay as a 'cure guest' in Villa Pension Müller at a Bavarian spa of Bad Wörishofen in 1909, send off there by her mother to muffle her extramarital pregnancy which would end in a miscarriage. With demonic zest Mansfield's sharp-witted and observant narrator, a young English woman, looks at the peculiarities and behaviour of the pension guests, many of them at the spa on account of their 'nerves', trenchantly depicting the gross and distasteful table manners of the German pensioners, picking teeth with a hairpin, overeating, cleaning ears with a napkin, talking about saliva, spitting cherry stones in public, repugnantly displaying the use of handkerchiefs. The narrator's bantering commentary on the boarders' preoccupancy with bodily functions and digestion and their unctuous attitudes is mirrored by the depreciatory and spiteful opinion which the German guests confide to the narrator vis-à-vis the odd manners of the English: "It is a great pity the English nation is so unmusical". 'I have never been to England', interrupted Fräulein Sonia, 'but I have many English acquaintances. They are so cold!' She shivered. 'Fish-blooded', snapped Frau Godowska, 'Without soul, without soul, without grace. But you cannot equal their dress materials.' 'England is merely an island of beef flesh swimming in a warm gulf sea of gravy'. "She was like a young tree whose branches had never been touched by the ruthless hand of man. Such delicacy! Of course it is difficult for you English to understand when you are always exposing your legs on cricket fields, and breeding dogs in your back gardens. The pity of it! Youth should be like a wild rose. For myself, I do not understand how your women ever get married at all." After all, one ought not forget WWI is hovering over some of these stories, and Mansfield astutely bares the stereotyping in the hearts and minds of her coevals, speaking their minds openly, some lines alluding to the oncoming conflict: "I suppose you are frightened of an invasion too, eh? Oh, that's good. I've been reading all about your English play in a newspaper. Did you see it?" "Yes." I sat upright. "I assure you we are not afraid." "Well then, you ought to be," said the Herr Rat. "You have got no army at all - a few little boys with their veins full of nicotine poisoning." "Don't be afraid," Herr Hoffmann said. "We don't want England. If we did we would have had her long ago. We really do not want you". "We certainly do not want Germany," I said. (Germans at Meat). Fairly light-hearted and jocular as long as the pension guests are concerned, the tone and themes of the stories gradually darken, and angst, even tragedy enter. The few stories that do not focus an on the pension guests but on the villagers convey pictures of quotidian domestic cruelty, reminding us that barbarism begins at home, touching upon the deplorable plight of womanhood, the discomfiture of childbirth, the imbalance of power in the institution of marriage and its subsequent violence and exploitation and the sexual and social oppression of women and girls. Lofty musings on conformist femininity and love are exposed as fibbing and lampooned: Whom then, asked Fräulein Elsa, looking adoringly at the Advanced Lady - "whom then do you consider the true woman?" "She is the incarnation of comprehending Love!" "But Love is not a question of lavishing", said the Advanced Lady. "It is the lamp carried in the bosom touching with serene rays all the heights and depths of - "Darkest Africa," I murmured flippantly. (The Advanced Lady) The swing of the Pendulum Nonetheless men and women alike get a good dressing-down by Mansfield's barbed pen, men are repulsively unhygienic and egocentric, women coquettish and wanton, like in the last two stories portraying the female protagonists as cold-hearted and calculative temptresses, taking umbrage at the men eventually succumbing to their frivolous games, like the allumeuse in Blaze when confronted with the consequences of displaying her ambivalent nature: I can't help seeking admiration any more than a cat can help going to people to be stroked . Depicting Germans as boorish and self-righteous, English women as silly sporty moos unlikely finding or keeping husbands and having procreation issues - in some sense reflecting her own - Mansfield's sardonic blow-up of the mutual tribal biases are far from political correct - if that anachronism would make any sense in the context of these tales - with its irresistible vitriolicism my children found me chuckling aloud. As immature Mansfield might have considered this debut herself, a work of juvenilia that she refused to have republished during her lifetime, the stories are in spurts hilarious in their hyperbolism and razor-sharp observations, stunningly precise and incisive in its details, rich in themes and worded in effervescent and sensuous prose, full of life. Some of the stories might be less subtle and slightly more predictable than what she will write later in her so brief a life, or have not the delightful open-endedness that will characterize later stories, to me this collection was sheer delight. At the head of the centre table sat the bride and bridegroom, she in a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her, who wore a suit of white clothes much too large for him and a white silk tie that rose half-way up his collar. ( Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding) The oil paintings are from the New Zealand artist Susan Wilson, who illustrated Katherine Mansfield's short stories for The Folio Society in 2000.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-22 00:00:00 Alicia Fehrman There was a time when I had lost all interest in Jane Austen, resigned to accepting the self-assured utterances of a few male acquaintances who still continue to believe that she wrote nothing other than classical 'chick-lit'. (My ignorant, younger self hadn't thought of asking them what was wrong with 'chick lit' in the first place) But a reading of A Room of One's Own and a re-reading of Pride & Prejudice later, I was tempted to literally beat some sense into those bluntheads (with a brick-sized omnibus edition of JA's works preferably) who had caused me to momentarily stray from my earlier path of fangirlish enthusiasm. A female voice with a dignified sense of humor and impeccable comic timing is a rarity in the hallowed halls of literature still; a female voice with the ability to comment on the power imbalance in gender relations and small quotidian societal injustices under the veneer of wry humor even more so. Katherine Mansfield, who put together this excellent collection of short stories nearly a century after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, reminds me of Austen in the sense that her mockery of stiff-upper-lipped high society German ladies and barons is a throwback to Austen's keen talent of zeroing in on individual character quirks and highlighting the constant need for validation through assertion of material prosperity. But this is where the parallels end. The last few short stories in this collection astonish with their thematic depth despite their brevity. Issues of rabid sexism, domestic disharmony, marital rape, thwarted attempts at sexual assault, the bodily violence of childbirth, abuse of young children employed as servants are touched on in the subtlest of ways. These grim realities were, perhaps, not unknown to JA but who, nonetheless, steered clear of them in her romantic comedies. The fact that Mansfield wrote these stories while quietly living out the ignominy of childbearing out of wedlock in a foreign country should be kept in mind while dissecting the rather no-holds-barred approach she adopts while exposing human foibles. "I suppose it's the savage pride of the female who likes to think the man to whom she has given herself must be a very great chief indeed." It's a pity of monumental proportions that the 22-year old who wrote with such insight didn't live long enough to hone her craft to absolute perfection or to leave enough of a mark on the literary landscape of her times like her much venerated contemporaries. But then there's the consolation that she wrote at all.