Novel set in COPENHAGEN at Christmas
Short stories set in Depression era NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
7th November 2024
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan, short stories set in Depression era Northern California.
This collection of stories, penned in the 1930s but set in the 1920s, has a wonderful introduction by Stephen Fry, who eulogises about the quality of William Saroyan’s writing. The concise use of words, the evocation of the times, the poverty and the real sense of the world’s diaspora congregated in Northern California.
The stories compared to a typical short story today are really quite short, offering a brief glimpse of lives lived on the edge of society. So many people suffering such dire circumstances, brought about largely by the financial collapse, He incisively gets to the heart of his characters, many of whom have a drive to become writers. Take A Cold Day in which someone is writing a letter, describing how unbearably cold he is. Can he hatch a plan to get warmth in a bathtub by burning some of his books – after all he has 500 available. But he cannot bring himself to set fire to anything, even a bumper sized 1000 page of anatomy in German. And despite his suffering he feels “if you have any respect for the mere idea of books, what they stand for in life, if you believe in paper and print, you cannot burn any page of any book. Even if you are freezing.” Imagine what was to come just a few years later in Nazi Germany.
And how about the curiously titled Aspirin is a member of the N.R.A? Someone reminiscing about living in a tiny apartment in Manhattan and how to laugh out loud was a particular thing. How the environment conspired to shut him down and how pain was ubiquitous – but people could rely on Aspirin to counter the ailment, to counter living life itself. And of course there is the curious story which forms the title of the collection – The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze.
There are, I think, 26 stories spread over 220+ pages that really get to the heart of time and place. It is also a very nicely produced book with French flaps. An interesting read, although I cannot imagine the book have a terrifically wide appeal.
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