Anthropology: and a hundred other stories - Hardcover

Rhodes, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841151939 ISBN 13: 9781841151939

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2000

Synopsis

101 short stories, all 101 words in length. Romance collides head-on with the comic and surreal in Dan Rhodes’s uniquely entertaining first publication.

An ingenious series of perfect miniatures of doomed love.

With incredible economy – 101 words exactly – each story, complete in itself, holds up a cracked mirror to the private peculiarities of human relationships. Meet the woman who uses cider for make-up remover; admire the lover whose field-work with Mongolian gays inspires her to sprout a handlebar moustache; wonder at the caring mother who binds her baby’s feet under the misapprehension that he’s a girl. Comic monologue meets the discipline of the sonnet writer, filtered by an imagination to rival Lewis Carroll.

Sometimes violent, often hilarious, and always surprising, you will not read a more original book this year.

About this title

Review

Dan Rhodes' first book Anthropology consists of 101 stories, each around 120 words in length, and all working highly surreal variations around a single theme: relationships. A simple enough idea which is superlatively executed--the range and inventiveness of the texts within the strict format reveal a writer of formidable imaginative powers, able to move with ease from wit to farcical comedy to genuinely heartfelt evocations of loss and love. Each story is almost like a condensed novel, a distilled narrative that focuses on a particular moment, gesture, or conversation, humourously unravelling the fragile structures and barely disguised inequalities that characterise the détente between the sexes.

If the stories are individually quirky, bizarre and amusing, paradoxically the incremental effect is one that is surprisingly revealing of the deep, tectonic instabilities in our relationships with partners and lovers.

If the touchstone of Anthropology is, in the end, a kind of disbelieving laughter, it is emphatically not observational humour, nor the bittersweet angst of wry comedy that dominates much contemporary fiction: Rhodes highlights the essential absurdity of heterosexual relationships, the fundamental incomprehension and misunderstandings that divide men and women. The wayward commandments of desire, the desperate mismatches of affection, the hilarious disjunctions of perception, the disequilibria of power, all are scrutinised in turn by the author's cool, deadpan prose; and the superficial equivalence of form mimics the fact that, while relationships may seem similar on the surface, each is uniquely odd, perverse, or disfunctional.

The structure of the book is reminiscent of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, its tone occasionally recalls Donald Barthelme's elegant postmodern short fiction, but Anthropology nevertheless mines a seam distinctly its own: quirky, surreal, often wildly funny, and cumulatively profound. --Burhan Tufail

Review

“...a book you’ll want to hurl from rooftops at passers-by to spread the word.” -- Uncut:

“...a hilarious explanation of the challenges faced by the fairer sex... it will entertain any woman who can laugh at her own foibles.” -- The Times:

“...touching and insightful... you’ll want to devour every one.” -- Heat:

“Effortless to read, amusing, and yet coloured by a deep sadness about the passing of things.” -- The Independent:

“Tiny flights of absurdist fancy... exquisitely funny.” -- The Guardian:

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1841151939
• ISBN 13: 9781841151939
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208