Flappers and Philosophers - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The collected short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald


Enjoying reading the collected and previously uncollected stories. Reminds me a little bit of Katherine Mansfield. Three stories deep. 

There's a starkness, a world-inside-ness to the stories. Reminds me again why I love reading short stories. It has always felt like a gallery of many sketches by an artist, where a novel seems like one finished painting. Exploring the sketches has its own kind of joy. And each exploring a different subject.

And his particular style is that os sharp lines, a crystal clear gaze and seeing and then language. While you read them you are nowhere else. And although you wish to note down something every few sentences, the story carries you forward too swiftly for a stop. So I don't have much to note here as excerpts, just marking the joy.

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I have been reading modern short stories as well by relatively contemporary people, but somehow they feel incomplete, episode like. They perhaps need to be called slices of life rather than short stories. There's some wholeness, resolution to stories of older times. Be it Katherine Mansfield, be it Doris Lessing, be it Chekov or Pushkin, or be it the old masters of short stories. 

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Later - some of his stories are full of life like 'The Great Gatsby'. Some of them are sad, like 'The beautiful and the damned'. Perhaps it is the reflection of a reader in the read, but as happiness is transient, so is sadness. One needs energy and momentum in life to keep moving forward and discover the terrain of this country called life, sometimes happy, sometimes sad. Knowing that each passes, what is joyful, content or perhaps sacred is life itself, the energy that propels us forward. 

Somehow, my note against the fourth story. Life is strange, and it is just a story, but still, a writer has to redeem the world and humanity, somehow, implicitly, that is the great task, and then that is a truly great writer. I feel.

A great writer redeems the world and its humanity from whatever fate or circumstance or reality the world and life and humanity finds itself in. That is the gift of the Word. That is the gift of Language. And that is life and truth.

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