Reviews for The Alibi Cafe: And Other Stories

The average rating for The Alibi Cafe: And Other Stories based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-16 00:00:00 Kevin Richmond This book is shocking. Its publication was a major error on the part of Kipling's publisher at the time, who must, for one reason or another, have felt unable to tell Kipling the truth about the book. The stories in this book are not only below the level the writer had established for himself before WWI but very, very much below that level. To the point of being embarassing. What a conflict for the publisher. This is garbage. Real garbage. The word "garbage" here is not hyperbole. Read the stories. They're available for free from Gutenberg Australia and nowhere else because of Australia's pleasantly strange copyright law that sets the cut-off date not at 1923 (as in the U.S.), but sometime later. Of course, we know that Kipling was truly blown away by the death of his son during the war. I hadn't suspected, though, that his misery and mental disability lasted at least until 1926, which is the year in which this volume was published, though I assume that the stories were written over the prior several years. But it appears to have been so. To experience the (temporary) eclipse of a highly professional writer (that much has to be granted by anyone), this book is almost the only exemplar, the only way. I would imagine that if any other writer's product had deteriorated this much their publisher would have told them straight out that the work would not see print. Perhaps in the early twenties Kipling occupied such an exalted place in Britain that it was felt he could not be refused. So publication of this book not only illustrates a horrendous decline in capacity but also an inability on his part to notice that incapacity. It's also possible that his publishers just felt sorry for him. He seemed to have recovered a few years later, however, when he published his next story collection, "Limits and Renewals," also available for free from Gutenberg Australia. It's not up to the standard of his classics, but it's a real step up from "Debits and Credits." There's something particularly sad about the decline of a figure like Kipling, who was a master craftsman if nothing else. I can't offhand recall other writers of his stature who lost it in this way. Or, at least, their publishers refused to publish their true trash. Thinking, thinking. Well, there's later Sinclair Lewis. Wells didn't decline, he wasn't there in the first place. Bennett, Hardy? No, not really. Can't think of any more. Poor Kipling. An imperialist jerk, to be sure. A writer whose biggest gimmick (and sales promotion) was a degree of social and cultural superiority no one today would put up with for five minutes. Though it's of course interesting to be able to use the reading of Kipling to call up images of what would sell to the really (mentally) crass element of the British population to whom he pandered and who created and sustained his success. But it's almost impossible to actually read through all the words of "Credits and Debits." It's that bad.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-14 00:00:00 Yasuaki Yamazaki This ...book/collection... mess... has not a single redeeming factor. It's largely incomprehensible to me... I've tried to pick it up several times from my Grandfathers old collection, but never make it further than a dozen or so pages into each story. The only person who should have read this thing was the man's psychiatrist and certainly not the reading public. Not the biggest fan of Kipling in any case, but he could at least string a series of comprehensible sentences together in his earlier work. This represented the low point of his career and is poor by anyone's standards... never mind his own.