In a German Pension: 13 Stories by Katherine Mansfield
In a German Pension: 13 Stories by Katherine Mansfield
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I encountered Mansfield’s stories when I read The Garden Party some years back and have decided to read more. This is her first collection of stories, and they are exactly what I want to read now: clear, concise, brief, without a moment wasted. She has an exactness that always pleases me when I encounter it in a writer; she begins with a sentence that makes a moment just so, and builds on it with writing so precise it feels as if it emerges out of my own consciousness, as though I am the one sitting at a dinner table with awkward company. The English narrator is critiquing the Germans and the Germans are being boorish about the English; this is a bit queasy at moments, but this is the way people see one another, and the date of the collection is 1911, just before those tensions erupt into mass carnage. There is nothing about the stories to dislike; they simply flow through, and touch at the ending, something that makes me close the book and think for a while. It is all done so easily that one nearly doesn’t notice. The stories are small. Does that matter? Not while I am in them, because the drama of the small is so much part of my own life now. I have a feeling that the stories are young, not fully formed – but I have another feeling, that I am projecting this onto the stories because I know this is an early collection. Am happy at the prospect of reading more.