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Summary: The Apple-eaters' guide to Bananafish
Review: J.D. Salinger knew us all with Catcher in the Rye. He knew our teenage mannerisms and our hypocrisy, our feelings of dejection, our moments of euphoria and the times when no one understood.In Nine Stories, Salinger travels to other areas of the urban psyche, the other phases we all pass through but don't always realize or understand from a distance. In this collection, he writes about men and women experiencing mid-life crises. He reminds us about the mental corruption to which experience inevitably leads by providing a dichotomy of innocent children. Salinger's incredible sympathy for childhood and adulthood is amazing. You'll wonder if you've been an Apple-eater most of your life, why the Bananafish seem to know more about what's important than you do, and you'll have to make a decision as to whether you can continue living your life as you always have...Salinger is that good.
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Summary: "I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters"
Review: Children are dominant images, and there is a sense of sympathy and honest respect for their ability to see, easily and honestly, that logic and reasoning and the defining of boundaries are the reason for suffering. That is the essence of Teddy. Salinger writes brilliant children brilliantly, and in these stories, he can be much more brazen with the actions and words of characters than in a novel. I would like to read Catcher in The Rye, as I know, from rumour that it also involves a love of children. I'm also curious about that new book his daughter wrote. But its not just about children, meaning young humans. For Eloise, the death of her first love (incidentally Buddy Glass's brother Walter, I believe), makes her "grow up" into a life of curtained misery. Her daughter's prescense and relation to the imaginary friend is a device that JDS uses to show how Eloise has inevitably and miserably matured. The child Lionel, in "Down at the Dinghy," is also written well, though this story seems simpler. The narrator of deDaumier-Smith's Blue Period realizes how he is seen, he is a somewhat frightening man. He is no longer a boy, though he lies and acts like one and longs for his dead mother. Death's appearance in these stories is important and related to the children notions, and they're brought together in Teddy. But basically, the end of childhood, whether we're talking pure bachelorhood (Laughing Man), the naivete of an affair, the realization of circumstances, brings a longing for death. Logical knowledge, as we know it, is a trap, and when characters see the design of the trap, (and readers too), a quite divine sadness can come about. Salinger, in Franny and Zooey, this book, and Seymour and others, often talks of the Vedanta tradition, and of Ramakrishna. Vedanta, which allows for one truth, which men call by different names, lets people explore religions fully. If you learn about it, you can much more fully understand and appreciate Salinger's religion in his books. Only Teddy mentions it in his book. But you can read about Ramakrishna in "The Gospel of SriRamakrishna" translated by Swami Nikhilananda, a dense and specific book about one man, but a major influence on JDS. Furthermore, my favorite stories in this volume are Bananafish, The Laughing Man, For Esme with Love and Squalour, Teddy. Pretty Mouth and Green Eyes is the weakest, but it's not bad. Salinger does show he's up to the task to write modern short stories.
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Summary: The Laughing Man
Review: The story, "The Laughing Man", is in this collection of short stories. "The Laughing Man" is two stories in one. The outer story is about the Comanche Club, a young man picks up 25 boys after school and drives them to Central Park to play baseball and other sports, these boys are the Comanches. The young man, the Chief, winds them down after a game by telling them a story. This story is called "The Laughing Man", the inner story in this tale, which follows the adventures of the comic book like hero who was kidnapped as a child from his missionary parents in China by bandits who, piqued about his parents refusal to pay a ransom, put his head in a vise and squeeze it into a pecan shape. To cover this he wears a pale red gossamer mask made out of poppy petals. In the story "The Laughing Man" Salinger alludes several times to Dicken's "A Tale of Two Cities", one example being that both stories have the two Dufarges in Paris as the evil enemies. Oliver Lafarge's book "Laughing Boy" was also probably an influence on this story. This story is lighthearted, humorous, and has a darker theme as well.
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Summary: One of my favorite works...
Review: This is my favorite Salinger work. Far surpasses "Catcher" if you ask me. These are (you guessed it....nine) short stories. Most are quite dark and have an excellent ability to instill the reader with brooding/uneasy feelings. Take the opener...."A perfect day for bananafish". This is what lead me to J.D. Salinger, and particularly this work. As an aside, and a piece of factoid--take it for whatever its worth--this work inspired The Cure to record the song "Bananafishbones." But, this story is kind of a creepy, weird little story with an ending that just blew me away. (No pun intended for those who have read it.) And so it goes, from that one forward. The mood has been set. One after the other, dark, rather cold, stories. But, it's all painfully good. All in all, a good collection of stories from one of the greatest American authors.
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Summary: jewelry
Review: Especially people who've read and enjoyed Franny and Zooey should read these stories since they provide some background to other members of the Glass family. These stories are delicate and subtle, sometimes very funny, sometimes very sad, always containing a slightly disturbing element. What strikes me the most when reading Salinger is the way the characters talk. It's all so natural, realistic and yet still poetic and beautiful in a way. (And I must say, how DOES Salinger get his male characters to sound so damn sexy!) I know no writer who writes with more love for his characters than Salinger. Nine pieces of warm jewelry.
Rating:
Summary: Above-Average
Review: Solid collection of stories that I appreciate more in retrospective of than during reading. The highlights are "The Laughing Man," "For Esme, With Love and Squalor," and "Teddy." Should appeal to both Salinger and short story fans.
Rating:
Summary: a few out of nine
Review: i like salinger, really. the catcher in the rye was nothing short of a masterpiece. but i think he had trouble living up to his first novel. most of the stories were touching, but could have gone further with their plots, for they all had mostly bland cliffhanger endings. my personal favorite was teddy, but there were other good ones as well. my response to this novel, in short, is that since there are nine stories written by a very original author in this one book, you'll at least find one to be enjoyable.
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Summary: -
Review: Short stories that cannot be beat. Salinger beats Faulkner's fictional county tales by only writing stories peripheral to his family. "Down in the Dinghy" is one of my favorites.
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Summary: Classic Salinger
Review: J.D. Salinger has rightfully been one of the most highly praised authors of the 20th century. Although best known for his coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger also wrote brilliant short stories of great complexity. This is quite an accomplishment when one considers the fact that the short story poses problems the novel easily overcomes. Salinger's skillful use of language is what distinguishes him most from his contemporaries. There is never a dull moment in a Salinger short story as this expert author intertwines detail and dialogue to convey emotion to the reader. Although the short story leaves little room for character development, Salinger's superb style and careful use of language allow us to get to know his characters intimately in a very short period of time. The stories included in Salinger's dazzling collection, Nine Stories, were published between 1948 and 1953 in The New Yorker. They exhibit a unified tone and theme, something not usually found in short story collections. They are classic Salinger and classic stories; each one contributes to the volume as a whole and each is therefore enriched in its relation to the others. Although people disagree on which story is best, each contains elements of the relationship between children and adults, one of Salinger's signature themes. Two of the stories, A Perfect Day for Bananafish and For Esmé--With Love and Squalor, both feature protagonists (Seymour and Sargent X) who, as veterans of WWII, have sacrificed their psychological well-being and are no longer the men they once thought they were. Both feel alienated from life and, more importantly, from those they love. Both protagonists are searching for new forms of comfort and security in the respective characters of Sybil and Esmé. Here, however, the similarities end. For Sybil lacks Esmé's insight and the final outcome for Seymour is very different than that of Sargent X and perhaps different than what it could have been. In A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Seymour's wife, Muriel, goes to great lengths to reassure her mother regarding Seymour's soundness of mind, although Salinger carefully lets us, the reader, glimpse Seymour's paranoia. Searching for the non-judgmental understanding of a child (but the love of an adult), Seymour befriends young Sybil, a child he's met on the beach. After realizing the impossibility of his desires and his own isolation, Seymour is driven to one last, desperate act, an act that makes some question his sanity while others will see him as finally regaining the control he had lost. In For Esmé--With Love and Squalor, Sargent X also has a relationship with a child, but it is one that is quite different from that of Seymour and Sybil. An intelligent and vivacious girl, Esmé lost her own father in North Africa and is quite aware of the horrors of war. When she approaches Sargent X in an English tearoom, she senses his isolation and resultant alienation and offers to write him, something Sargent X immediately agrees to. Thirty minutes after their meeting, Esmé takes her leave of Sargent X with the words, "I hope you return with all your faculties intact." Had it not been for Esmé, however, and the letter she writes, Sargent X would not have returned with all his faculties intact. Esmé's letter provides the one certain connection to reality and the constancy of day-to-day life that Sargent X needs. It both comforts him and reassures him that there is still some happiness out there to be found. At a time when the war has left him with nothing else to relate to, Esmé provides the needed link. In this extraordinary collection of stories we find different people in different situations, yet a common thread of life runs through all, linking the stories to one another and to readers everywhere. This is only a small part of the genius that typifies J.D. Salinger. Read this book and I guarantee, like millions of readers before, you'll come back for more!
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: If you liked Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories is for you. Salinger's other books get a bit more complex and less accessible to the average reader, but this collection of stories is magnificent--simple, beautiful language, poignant insights into human nature. "For Esme, With Love and Squalor" and "A Pefect Day for Bananafish" are especially good.
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