Word: pritchett
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...Sailor, Sense of Humour and Other Stories, by V. S. Pritchett. Saints, scoundrels and scapegoats put nimbly through the short-story hoop by a top critic (TIME...
...SAILOR, SENSE OF HUMOUR & OTHER STORIES (369 pp.)-V. S. Pritchett-Knopf...
This flea circus, a hilarious yarn, sets the tone for this whole collection of 25 short stories by V. S. (for Victor Sawdon) Pritchett. At 55, Pritchett is perhaps the best literary critic now writing in English. He is also a subtle interpreter of national character and environment (The Spanish Temper) and an occasional but brilliant dabbler in fiction. He calls his short stories "the only kind of writing that has given me pleasure [and] always elated me." The elation is shared by the reader...
...Pritchett criticism resembles an elaborately woven square of cloth which, held up at one end, hangs together all of a piece. The Pritchett short story is just the opposite. It exists (as modern life does, in Pritchett's view) "in fragments rather than as solid mass," and exults in bursts of fire, sharp changes of tempo, explosions of mood. And it is usually extremely cheerful, regardless of what it is about-as if the characters, like their author, were glad to escape from the stiffer world of Pritchett criticism...
...Saint, one of the best stories in the collection, starts with the words: "When I was seventeen years old, I lost my religious faith." Such a loss would weigh heavily on Pritchett in his critical capacity, but in one of his short stories, it is a sure sign of gusto to follow. Ten pages after the loss has been reported, the bereaved youth is floating disconsolately downstream in a punt, while the evangelist who has come to restore his faith is clinging hopelessly to the branch of a willow tree and slowly sinking, like "a declining dogma," into the cold...