Anthropology: and a hundred other stories - Softcover

Rhodes, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841151947 ISBN 13: 9781841151946

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2001

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 each story holds up a cracked mirror to the private peculiarities of human relationships. The woman who uses cider for make-up remover; the lover whose field-work with Mongolian gays inspires her to sprout a handlebar moustache; 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.

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, humorously 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

‘The funny ones are all the funnier for being brief; the sad ones, all the sadder for being sparse. Every one a twenty-second gem; just don’t read them all at once.’ Maxim

’Very funny and very sharp.’ The Times

’Misanthropic, macabre and mordant tales of doomed couplings herald the arrival of Dan Rhodes.’ i-D

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1841151947
• ISBN 13: 9781841151946
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208