Word: sakis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...good as Harvard, and every year Harvard proves nothing by winning, regardless of the score. But this was not every year. The Jumbos lumbered into Hemenway under the uncharacteristic weight of a 12-3 record which included a win over Yale-killing Williams, and an undefeated number one-Saki Khan-to match up with Dave Boyum in a possible precursor to the Intercollegiate finals...
There were three results. The first was brilliant: The Unbearable Bassington, published in 1912, so Saki could demonstrate that he could write a novel and at the same time pour ashes upon the society he had long been part of. Says Langguth: "It could be the cry of an outsider whose thin lips ache from 40 years of smiling." The second result was his second (and last) novel, When William Came, an unsuccessful but percipient fantasy written in early 1913, about what England would be like under German occupation, and how a flabby society full of jokesters, hucksters and aesthetes...
Langguth wastes little time trying to decide whether Saki was a literary butterfly who finally tried to stamp or some kind of shrike with a sense of humor. The book notes the Waugh-like gift for comic names (Loona Bimberton, Septimus Brope), the Wildean wit, the Wodehousean way with the featherheaded fauna of the West End and the country house party, the surprise endings self-consciously borrowed from O'Henry...
...best Saki is matchless, a storyteller, as Langguth justly puts it, with "flawless sentences on almost every page that could have been the work of no other English writer." That is why even the stories with surprise endings, like The Open Window, can be read again and again. "The humor came less from his jokes than from the . . . absolute rightness to his language." It is like watching a champion diver do a perfect half gainer. You know how it comes out, but seeing it done is still astonishing...
...Saki, aloof and condescending to his own times, turns out to be one of us. But embracing him is easier than establishing his place in English letters. An unbeliever, he did not concern himself with the relationship of man to God, and critics have often used that theme to test an author's seriousness. Then, by shunning love in all of its disguises, he banished another of the four characters of Western literature's primal cast. God was gone, Eve was gone, and Hector had left himself with only Adam and the snake. Yet, rejoicing in that narrow...