Not the End of the World por Kate Atkinson

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Not the End of the World (2002 original; edición 2003)

por Kate Atkinson (Autor)

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Título

Not the End of the World

Autor

Kate Atkinson (Author)

Etiquetas

Short stories

Colecciones

Read, Lo he leído pero no lo tengo

Valoración

Reseña

I’m always impressed with Kate Atkinson’s writing. This collection of loosely connected short stories, by turns happy and sad, is a virtuoso performance of imagination, drawing on the story-telling traditions of Ovid and the Thousand-and-One-Nights.
The opening story is based on a discrepancy. Two young urban single women, Charlene and Trudi, seem to be living in a world of luxurious consumerism against a background of earthquake, explosions, and sniper fire. The collection’s title brought to mind Skeeter Davis’s tear-jerker hit. Don’t they know?
It turns out they do know, but they are shutting the fact out by force of imagination. But that is only revealed in the last of the twelve stories. The stories in between are tales of magic realism based on antique myth. They led me to revise my original understanding of the title. For “end” means not only a conclusion but also finitude or boundary. The stories suggest that the day-to-day world we take in with our senses is not all there is.
But then, when the book title forms the final sentence, spoken by Trudi to Charlene, the original sense comes back with the full weight of irony. It’s a sentence we all use to ourselves and each other after some physical or emotional skinned knee. And it’s even true of the world at the end of the book, but not for these two starving, plague-stricken young women. A downer of a conclusion, it haunted me for hours after I finished the book.

Fecha de publicación

2003

Publicación

Black Swan (2003), 336 pages

ISBN

0552771058 / 9780552771054

Número de volúmenes

Número de copias

Páginas

336

Dimensiones

0.79921259761 x 7.7952755826 x 4.9999999949 inches