The garden party and other stories by Katherine Mansfield

Book set in Wellington, New Zealand. Reviewed on 2019/03: https://www.instagram.com/p/BuwSGJaHfpH/

I can’t believe I spent all these years without having read #katherinemansfield ! I was simply captured by her sense of doom, anxiety, frustration and disaster which #mansfieldadorns with an intricate and beautiful prose. In my opinion any collection of #shortstories inevitably has a few great stories which overshadow the other not so great stories. I feel that #thegardenpartydoes that here and I have no idea whether Mansfield intended that or not. But I wish she would have left the best one for later in the book. Because The Garden Party is indeed quite the achievement. Is it a social critique? An absurd tale? Or even a coming of age story? One thing is clear: you have to read what a sharp writer can achieve in a handful of pages. Another great example that you do not have to read a book of over 500 pages to read amazing literature. Mansfield feels like the #victorian version of #stefanzweig and the resemblance feels stronger when talking about a topic so present in their short stories: #death . I don’t know the rest of Mansfield’s works, but here there’s a strong sense of living with the dead, talking to dead people, expecting death, accommodating death in your daily lives and all described in the most quaint and sophisticated way possible, almost like a painting. #highlyrecommended#thegardenpartyandotherstories#penguinclassics #wellington #newzealand#newzealandliterature #nzliterature#socialcritique #england #bloomsbury#theverybest #virginiawoolf#thedaughtersofthelatecolonel