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Summary: Blue Period
Review: "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" is one of the nine stories in this collection. In the story Daumier-Smith has an enlightening experience and afterwards makes the statement "Everybody is a nun". I originaly thought this "Everybody is a nun" was the same type of statement we find in F&Z and Teddy about everyone being holy. I think he is saying this and more. Salinger was also saying that everyone is a unique holy person in their cloister or behind their own wall. When the shop girl in the display window starts to fall Daumier-Smith reaches out to stop her fall and his fingers hit the glass. He also realizes that she doesn't share his mind, thats why she is startled by his presence, she has a mind and life seperate from his and doesn't really know why he should be standing there looking at her. He realizes the same thing about the nun. She knows nothing of his ideas and dreams about her, she is living her own life unaware of him. In part this is a deliverance from a creeping solipsism for Daumier-Smith. The wall theme is present in "For Esme". What does one wall say to the other? Meetcha at the corner. without this meeting at the corner we are either isolated behind our own wall or just solipsisticaly assume that anothers experience is the same behind their wall as our own. I think Daumier-Smith had an experience of direct seeing of the reality of other selves, their situations and feelings, an empathic moment. He has a moment of pure empathy with the shop girl in the window and this empathy changes him, bringing him out of his self involved world and letting him see others as they are. We are never told exactly what he experiences ,except his vision of the sun hurtling towards the bridge of his nose. After the experience he becomes much more accepting of himself and others, even his hopeless art students who he had formerly snobbishly judged although accurately critiqued. There are allusions in this short story to Rilke, Rodan, Picasso, and of course the French artist Honore Daumier. This is one of Salinger's funniest stories.
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Summary: Choice Salinger
Review: The first time I read these stories I thought that they were great, sort of quirky and offbeat and marvelous. After having read them repeatedly along with Salinger's other body of work I now see that these are amazing stories, fantastic stories, and that most of them do not stand alone. If you have read Raise High, or Seymour and Introduction, or Franny and Zooey it should be obvious at least that the first story, Bananafish is the final act of Salinger's greatest character. But so many of these stories are actually snippets of people's lives that the Glass family has touched. It is quite possible that the narrator in The Laughing Man is Buddy Glass himself, and the child in Down at the Dingy is Seymour's little nephew. I think the subtlest story is Uncle Wiggly. I did not notice it until about the tenth time through, but the mother in this story was engaged to Walt (or Waker...I always get the two mixed up) Glass at one point in her life. Before his accident overseas that killed him. Upon discovering this I got the most amazing rush thinking about how this was a person who was lucky enough to have loved and been loved by a Glass, and how the child in the story with her misunderstood antics and imaginary friend might possibly also be a Glass. These are nine great stories to be taken as they are, but they are also minor chapters in Salinger's much larger (hopefully ongoing) works about the Glass family.
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Summary: Like an Old Friend from a Zen Koan
Review: In a lifetime your will find a few books like well worn tools that fit your hand and speak to you with such lucid insights(without mixed metaphores) that you read them over and over again. You will keep them in a trove of broken spines and yellowed pages in the corner of your bookshelf and every time you see them you will smile.I bought this book in the summer of '68 when I was just out of the Army and could not yet walk. I read it all three times and most of it more than that before I took up another book. My most vivid memories of that summer are of the charicters in this book. Real people who I still recall after thirty years, people who I know better than some I live with now... If you haven't read Salenger; I can't tell you what his work is like. The writing is completely unique. He is better than Steinbeck & Whelty and Heller at their best. Reading this is like seeing a color that you have never seen before. There is the feeling that the lighting is somehow different, fresher, clearer than before. Other writers can create a world that is dreamlike, but Salenger makes this world, the world we are in,seem like the dream. It goes beyond seeing with the eyes of the Characters. You are the characters. You don't just know their thoughts, you have their thoughts. It feels like watching Toby's sister drinking milk. Ok,I can't articulate this. But 97 of us are telling you what you need to know. Buy this book. Read it. Drink it. Inhale it. Give it to someone you love. Press it in the dictionary of your heart.
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Summary: If you love Catcher in the Rye, you'll love this.
Review: Simple review here. If you like Catcher, which most of you have read I assume, then you will LOVE all of Salingers work. 9 Stories is no exception.
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Summary: nine WONDERFUL stories...
Review: These nine stories were superb. I love J. D. Salinger as a writer, and i wish that he didnt bury himself deep in those Vermont woods and would come out once in a while and stop editing the stuff he has and turn it in to be published. These nine stories are some of the best ive ever read. Theyre traditional Salinger, relating to any time of history, and all the main characters dealing with problems with his common man. However, Salinger always has a way to be fresh and new with everything he writes, and this is no exception. A Perfect Day for Bananafish is of course the ending to Seymour Glass' life. In addition to that, many of the other stories (most in fact) have ties to either the Caulfield or Glass families, the families featured in all of his other full-length novels. I loved this book, and its a must for any Salinger fan or any reader who has read all of his other works, but it is a book that i would save to the end of his four-book "series"
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Summary: Absolutely delicious
Review: Still in high-school-English-analysis mode, I first was frusterated reading this collection. "What is Salinger trying to convey by this inclusion of ______?" However, as I gradually got out of that mindset, I discovered a delightful collection of little stories, each saturated with memorable characters and compelling stories. My favorite from the collection must be "The Laughing Man." It had such an effect on me that I was blabbing about it for a week to people who didn't want to hear it. :)
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Summary: Each story polished to perfection
Review: Salinger is a great writer who polished and re-wrote until his work was as perfect as is humanly possible. Characters live and breathe because of Salinger's fantastic eye for detail and the telling nuance in movement, language, thought. Not one word is wasted and there is never a single unnecessary word. The subjects of Salinger's writings: precocious kids, spiritually and emotionally fragile young women, adults who have sold their souls - are not always my favorite (I would like to strangle some of these 5 year old wise guys : ) but it is difficult to resist the magical spell that Salinger can cast on the reader. His dialogue is so perfect that the reader can feel as if he is eavesdropping. An indispensable collection.
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Summary: A must read
Review: These stories are a must read if you're a fan of J. D. Salinger. Each story is exceptionally well written, and each of them leave you thinking.
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Summary: Interpreting the first of the Nine Stories, "Bananafish"
Review: These are short stories by perhaps the all-time master of the short-story genre. I still wish Salinger would publish a complete volume of his 36 stories, so that it doesn't become impossible to find his earlier stories. I, for one, will do my best to keep them all alive, if only because the ones he is less proud of serve to reinforce the themes and ideas of his truly great stories, one of which I will now discuss. The structure of Salinger's 20th story, the first of the "Nine Stories," "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," seems bizarre at first. It is divided into two sections. The first deals with a discussion between Seymour's wife and his mother-in-law. The second half describes a discussion, on a beach, between Seymour and a little girl named Sybil, then follows Seymour to his room where he commits suicide. The reader is surprised by the ending, and is left with two major questions: why does Seymour kill himself, and what is the significance of Seymour's Parable of the Bananafish? Many analyses have been published which purport to give the answer to these two primary questions. Most of them, are (alas!) wrong! Most of them answer the first question correctly, in part; anyone who has read The Catcher in the Rye knows that Salinger creates protagonists who are brilliant, inspiring, wise people, surrounded by a culture that produces and glorifies shallow, materialistic people and values. Seymour, like Holden, is destroyed by the world around him; this much, at least, is beyond question. These analyses usually have, at best, a weak answer to the second question. Because both the Bananafish and Seymour die, it is easy to work backward logic and conclude that Seymour has stuffed himself with intellectualism as the bananafish stuff themselves with bananas, and that his death is as a result of his intellectual greed. That is NOT the correct interpretation of the story, and let no one tell you otherwise. The bananafish are those people like Muriel and her mother - superficial, judgmental, ignorant. They glut themselves with superficial, material things and ideas. This is why half the story is spent describing Muriel as a "girl," never a woman, obsessed with her own appearance and the appearances of others, completely devoid of any understanding of art, beauty, or higher thought. She is cruel (the woman in the "awful dinner dress"), she ignores Seymour's attempts to teach her to love poetry or music, and she respects nothing. Thus, the point of Seymour's parable is that such shallow people kill themselves-- not literally, as he does, but spiritually. Consider how Salinger treats spiritual versus literal death throughout these Nine Stories, especially "Teddy." Now, about Sybil. She is the key to the whole story, as children often are in Salinger's stories (think of the children in "Catcher.") Consider her name alone: she bears the name of the undying seer-witch of ancient legends, who desires only to be allowed to die. Seymour speaks to her, hoping to find in her the innocence of childhood, desperately hoping she has not yet been corrupted by culture. At first she seems to be what he is looking for (and the sexual tension is only due to Sybil's similarity to Muriel!), but through subtle hints, he slowly realizes that it is too late; she is corrupt. She, like Muriel, is cruel (she pokes a dog with a stick), jealous (she shoves another girl off a piano bench), and vain (among other clues, she is wearing a bikini, not a swimsuit, despite being about seven or eight years old). He tells her the parable of the bananafish, hoping to save her (just as he tried to save his wife by sending her Rilke's poems), but his story is completely beyond her comprehension. Seymour now realizes that there is no hope; even children are at the mercy of our mindless culture. This is why he kills himself. As proof, I offer this: if Seymour was a bananafish, the title would be: "A Perfect Day for A Bananafish," since Seymour would be fulfilling his destiny as a bananafish on this day. However, since "Bananafish" is plural, it can only refer to the shallow, ignorant masses who have succeeded this day in destroying one of the few humans with the intelligence to reject them. This story was not intended, when first written, to be the first of what have become known as the "Glass Series." In one of these later stories, Salinger (hiding, thinly, behind his narrator) says that he has come to regret writing this story, since Seymour's character had to be altered significantly in order to fit into the later stories. These stories are (for those who wish to find out more about Seymour): Franny Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters Zooey Seymour--an Introduction Hapworth 16, 1924 If you want more detail on this interpretation, read Eberhard Alsen's book on the Glass Stories. These ideas were his before they were mine, and I am VERY grateful.
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Summary: Esme's compassion
Review: The story "For Esme with Love and Squalor" is one of the nine stories in this collection. I remember a critic who wrote that "Esme", the story, was a gloss on the Dostoevski quote Sergeant X writes down. I bought into this at first. With closer reading I find I disagree with this. The quote Sergeant X writes is a way of reaching out and communicating to the Nazi lady,(Salinger actually married a Nazi lady he had arrested after the war, divorce soon followed.), and combating her idea that life is hell with the idea from Dostoevski that hell is the suffering of being unable to love. This latter idea, no matter how true, will not save the Nazi lady. For one thing she will never read it. Also ideas do not save people. Sergeant X realizes this failed attempt when he looks down and the quote is illegible and his own misery is very mich intact. When he reads the letter from Esme, who we remember has been training herself to be more compassionate, this person to person compassion is redemptive for him. Esme has trained herself to surmount her own wall long enough to meet others at the corner where compassion is possible. In the christian story, for example, it is not ideas or doctrine that save people. It takes a person to save a person, as Esme in a very real way saves Sergeant X with her compassion. Salinger participated in five of the major campaigns in WW2 Europe. This story gives you a glimpse of the toll that can take on a man. Thankyou to Salinger and all the others who fought for their country during the war.
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