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Reviews
After the Dance: Selected Stories of Iain Crichton Smith by Alan Warner, Iain Crichton Smith
casparb's review
4.0
A beautiful collection! And beyond a poem or two, my first Iain. So I wasn't too sure what to expect but I was absolutely loving this within ten minutes. 4.5. Candidly, incredible - all I think fulfil the criterion I tend to apply to a short story: is it a palpable dream?
Sebald came to mind. Part of the literary-practical talent at work here is the way ICS weaves parallelisms into the stories, the awareness of multiple levels of figurative-literal schemes that resembles more a cinematic logic than a literary.
It seems to me that the selection here is ordered in such a way that the first half hits harder than the second. The Play, The Telegram, The Mess of Pottage, The Painter being particular favourites of mine which all land early - my primary criticism here would seem to be directed at the editor then. I enjoyed some of the laters, such as An American Sky, The Maze, The Wedding, but others felt a little redundant in a collection which has this absolute brilliance. I want to see The Telegram performed onstage. I want to live The Play. I want to see an entire series with noir film adaptations birthed from Pottage. But stories like The Bridge and The Hermit felt content to pass by.
I leave eager for more. There is genius at work here, despite my gripe at the editor. And somehow Iain feels an approachable soul which may be a quality rarer than brilliance. WSG has it. Gertrude Stein perhaps, maybe Gogol... it's a rare quality in a writer. I look for more.
Sebald came to mind. Part of the literary-practical talent at work here is the way ICS weaves parallelisms into the stories, the awareness of multiple levels of figurative-literal schemes that resembles more a cinematic logic than a literary.
It seems to me that the selection here is ordered in such a way that the first half hits harder than the second. The Play, The Telegram, The Mess of Pottage, The Painter being particular favourites of mine which all land early - my primary criticism here would seem to be directed at the editor then. I enjoyed some of the laters, such as An American Sky, The Maze, The Wedding, but others felt a little redundant in a collection which has this absolute brilliance. I want to see The Telegram performed onstage. I want to live The Play. I want to see an entire series with noir film adaptations birthed from Pottage. But stories like The Bridge and The Hermit felt content to pass by.
I leave eager for more. There is genius at work here, despite my gripe at the editor. And somehow Iain feels an approachable soul which may be a quality rarer than brilliance. WSG has it. Gertrude Stein perhaps, maybe Gogol... it's a rare quality in a writer. I look for more.
neiljung78's review against another edition
4.0
I didn’t really connect with the first few poems but when it came into focus for me I really liked them a lot.
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