Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

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Ottavo racconto: Un’altra coppia sull’orlo di una crisi di nervi. Sposati, senza figli, ormai trentenni. Lei petulante, lui frustrato. Due solitudini che non si fanno nessuna compagnia. The B.A.R. Man is about nostalgia for the comradeship and adventures of youth. John Fallon is a succesful clerk in a big insurance company, but he is not happy in his childless mariage. His despair is drowned in alcohol and pathetic attempts to recapture the thrills of his past years carrying a Browning Automatic Rifle in the war. FOR A LITTLE while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance,”

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness Quotes by Richard Yates - Goodreads Eleven Kinds of Loneliness Quotes by Richard Yates - Goodreads

I’ve tried and tried but I can’t stomach most of what’s being called ‘The Post-Realistic Fiction’ . . . I know it’s all very fashionable stuff and I know it provides an endless supply of witty little intellectual puzzles and puns and fun and games for graduate students to play with, but it’s emotionally empty. It isn’t felt. Queste undici storie sono l’esordio letterario di Richard Yates perché, anche se pubblicate dopo “Revolutionary Road” (anzi, proprio sull’onda di quel primo e travolgente successo), furono scritte in precedenza. A fanatical martinet of Jody Rolled the Bones, a consumptive husband and his unfaithful wife of No Pain Whatsoever, an incompetent and cowardly clerk of A Glutton for Punishment… What is distinctive about Yates in Revolutionary Road–and throughout his work–is not merely the bleakness of his vision, but how that vision adheres not to war or some other horror but to the aspirations of everyday Americans. We share the dreams and fears of his people–love and success balanced by loneliness and failure–and more often than not, life, as defined by the shining paradigms of advertising and popular song, is less than kind to us. Yates proves this with absolutely plausible drama, then demands that his characters–and we, as readers, perhaps the country as a whole–admit the simple, painful truth. Fun With a Stranger is a return to the classroom, but this time for a look at Miss Snell, a teacher who seems unable to relate to children and to relax in their company, preferring instead to rely on the rigid authority of her position. For me she is another delusional person who has either forgotten what she was like as a child or who was rejected early in life by everybody, like the boy from the opening story.Pookie is similar to Alice Prentice, moving easily from pleasant self-delusion to screechy denial, and Emily, like Bob Prentice, comes to dread and despise every word that comes from her mouth. Like Bob and Mr. Givings, who turns his hearing aid off at the end of Revolutionary Road, she just wishes her mother would shut up. Pookie drinks and rarely works, so the family is short of money; still she believes they’re special, and that her two girls will turn out to be something. A callous and pedantic spinster of a teacher, a fake and stupid patriot, rich and hypocritical idlers, a sad Christmas in the tuberculosis wards, a failed ghostwriter and a courageous fighter for justice who turned out to be just a fool fighting shadows…

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness - Macmillan

racconti bellissimi, li hanno commentati egregiamente in tanti, non ho parole nuove per lodarli come meritano. So che probabilmente sto commettendo un’ingiustizia: ci ho provato, giuro che ci ho provato a dare le cinque stelle a questo libro, ma non ci riesco, è più forte di me. Qui abbiamo un campionario di undici esistenze paradigmatiche nella loro solitudine. Un campionario di disadattati, delle loro nevrosi, manie, fallimenti.Yates lived the kind of life he might have written about - indeed, he wrote about little else. By the time he died, of emphysema, in 1982, all his work was out of print. It is even possible that a part of him would have relished history's treatment of him. In "A Glutton for Punishment" he describes, with startling acuity, the inner processes of a man with a flair for, and warped appreciation of, his own failure. But this was his genius: the precise dissection of people's unhappiness. "I'm grateful that I know a little more now about honesty in the use of words," says the narrator of "Builders". For all that the narrator may be at that point not quite as honest as he avers, this honest use of language is Yates's central concern, and the reason his stories are so fulfilling, so rich, even as they delineate their characters' internal poverty. I have perhaps not made these stories seem enticing, but I assure you they are: you may groan with second-hand despair as you read, but they are still the kind of stories you sneak off to read when you should be doing something else. That's how good they are. New York (duh), the Army (duh), the newspaper business (duh), Paris (duh), TB (X2), restless domesticity (duh), and lots of alcohol (duh), with a surprising amount of the stories set on or around Christmas.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness - Richard Yates - Google Books

Each story in this collection, despite some of their datedness (a few take place in TB wards, for example), draws you in with lovely spare writing, and sensitively drawn characters who intrigue, even if they aren't particularly likeable. Each story also features a clever title. The Prentices are a blueprint for the families in Yates’s later work, and one which could be construed as autobiographical: a flighty, divorced mother with artistic leanings, no common sense, and a drinking problem, and an insecure boy who can see through her pretensions but is powerless to change the situation. Here Robert Prentice has escaped to the Army and to Europe where he can make a fresh start and put his inept stabs at normality behind him. In short, he hopes to become a man, if not a hero. He greatly loved my sister–I think that must have been the main reason for his generosity to us–but he and I, after I was eleven or so, seemed always bewildered by each other. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement between us that, in the dividing process of the divorce, I had been given over to my mother. The danger Yates courts is combining the conflicted character with the average or unexceptional person–with a talent I can only aspire to. A sympathetic, exceptional character will always earn our interest as readers (Stephen Daedalus), as will, to a lesser extent or for a shorter time, a sympathetic but average character (say, Lily Briscoe), and even an unsympathetic character can command our attention if they’re exceptional (Richard III, Hannibal Lecter), but it’s rare if not unheard of to find a reader following an unsympathetic, unexceptional person. We only follow Jason Compson because of his connection to the rest of the family. With the exception of the madman John Wilder, Yates’s narrating characters are never fully unsympathetic, though some of his supporting characters are. Rather than cruel, more often they’re frail. At their worst, his people are a mirror of our weaknesses: passive, uncertain, self-pitying, and foolish. To show us his vision of the world–populated as it is by mostly unexceptional, imperfect people–Yates takes us as close to the line as we can go (and, Lowry Pei would say, over it). Sesto racconto: Un lattoniere grafomane abbandona il posto ben retribuito che occupa, per entrare nella redazione di un giornale e accetta di essere sottopagato

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This short story collection is astonishingly good. It's up there with J.D. Salinger's short fiction, with Raymond Carver's, John Updike's too. Strangely, Mr. Yates didn't see great appreciation for his work during his own lifetime. He only ever had one story published in The New Yorker (for shame!), and even that was a posthumous honour.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (album) - Wikipedia Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (album) - Wikipedia

Despite this, in A Good Schoolthe residents of Dorset Academy, like William Grove, find a way to learn their lessons on their own, and to rely on themselves. By the close of the novel–the matching half of the present day first person frame–the characters actually have matured. But all of that, William Grove reminds us, is in the past, and all gone, as is his chance to thank his father and seek his love. The difficulty of where the author’s and reader’s sympathy and empathy lies never comes into play here. Whether Yates has affection or scorn for Wilder is moot because from the beginning the reader sees his desires not as personal and common (as with Frank Wheeler and Bob and Alice Prentice) but as animal and overbearing. His self-pity and self-regard are monstrous, his judgment unsound.A victim of his illness, Wilder is hopelessly lost and temperamentally incapable of doing anything to save himself, though he knows better. As Gene Lyons said in hisNew York Timesreview: “The author himself need not believe that his characters can alter their fate, but it helps if they do.” Toward his more limited, ignorant characters Yates can be pitiless, even vindictive; but toward those who make an effort, however primitive, to retain their dignity–an English prostitute, a secretary who aspires to write radio plays–he is generous. They’re not to blame, he implies; life in general is a shabby affair. Hakkındaki övgüleri sonuna kadar hak eden bir yazar ve öyküleri. Yates gösterişsiz ama etkileyici karakterler yaratmış. The question of what the reader is supposed to do with his or her sympathy and empathy is complex in Revolutionary Road, and also in the later work. As Greek tragedy turns around its characters’ fatal flaws, so does Yates’s fiction. The depth and breadth of characterization is much fuller, of course, but the end result is the same: the characters earn their downfall, seem fated to it. It’s this merciless limning of his people that makes Yates unique and the process of reading his work so affecting (some would say terrifying). We recognize the disappointments and miscalculations his characters suffer from our own less-than-heroic lives. And Yates refuses to spoon-feed us the usual redeeming, life-affirming plot twist that makes everything better. No comedy dilutes the humiliation. When it’s time to face the worst, there’s no evasion whatsoever, no softening of the blows. The opening story, “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired,” is the gem of the collection, but the others are strong as well, and deal with typical Yates characters and situations. The title story features colloquial dialogue and deadpan stage direction that could easily be mistaken for Carver’s, but is of a piece with what Yates was writing in the early ’50s.