Collected Stories

Collected Stories is a book of twenty-eight works of short fiction by award-winning Australian author, Shirley Hazzard. Eighteen have been previously published in two volumes: Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses, while eight are uncollected and two, previously unpublished.

The first ten stories are virtually devoid of any trace of joy, or any hint of humour; in fact, the first two stories, concerning older men taking advantage of young women, are particularly depressing. One young woman muses: "She reflected that in love one can only win by cheating and that the skill is to cheat first. (Having coveted neither the advantage nor the skill, however, she had no justification for disputing—as she did—the defeat that confronted her.)"

Hazzard's descriptive prose is often beautiful, and her characters are complex, but whether people really spoke that way in the late 1950s, only a reader of a certain vintage and class could comment. Some of these stories feel unfinished, rather more like the first chapter of a longer work.

Hazzard's work at the UN certainly authenticates the second collection, People In Glass Houses. These eight stories, satires on bureaucracy, feel more complete, and various characters appear in each other's stories, the whole being set mostly in Geneva at the offices of "The Organization". While there is humour in them (DALTO, the Department of Aid to the Less Technically Oriented. The work of this department— to induce backward nations to come forward, with sections like Forceful Implementation of Peace Treaties and Peaceful Uses of Atomic Weapons), by the time the reader reaches Sadie Graine, boredom and skimming may well set in.

The remaining ten stories are, except for some, pleasant enough reads, and Hazzard is skilled at portrayals of moments of crisis and understanding of the relationships between men and women. She throws her characters into situations and records their reactions, so the result is very much dialogue and inner monologue driven. As with Anne Tyler novels, not much happens, but Tyler does it better, or at least with more appeal to the common reader. A mixed bag.

This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Farrar, Straus & Giroux.