It's Beginning To Hurt
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Review
'Elegant, acutely observed and utterly unflinching' --John Burnside, The Times
'Striking' --Sunday Times
'A marvellous, masterful collection' --LA Times
'James Lasdun is probably the closest in recent years this country has come to a genuinely great practitioner of the short story' --Guardian
'James Lasdun seems to me to be one of the secret gardens of English writing...when we read him we know what language is for'
--James Wood
`Lasdun's prose is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness'
--Sunday Times
Lasdun identifies a profoundly anti-human aspect to environmental moralising to provide a study in embarrassment that made this reader wince
--Guardian
superb... punchy, exhilarating collection
--FT
`Deft precise language, strong narratives and great emotional insight' -- The Irish Times
`Create(s) a world (that is) rich, recognisable and yet elusive, marked by the thoughtful, and humane exactness of (Lasdun's) prose'.
--The Sunday Times
'Striking' --Sunday Times
'A marvellous, masterful collection' --LA Times
'James Lasdun is probably the closest in recent years this country has come to a genuinely great practitioner of the short story' --Guardian
'James Lasdun seems to me to be one of the secret gardens of English writing...when we read him we know what language is for'
--James Wood
`Lasdun's prose is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness'
--Sunday Times
Lasdun identifies a profoundly anti-human aspect to environmental moralising to provide a study in embarrassment that made this reader wince
--Guardian
superb... punchy, exhilarating collection
--FT
`Deft precise language, strong narratives and great emotional insight' -- The Irish Times
`Create(s) a world (that is) rich, recognisable and yet elusive, marked by the thoughtful, and humane exactness of (Lasdun's) prose'.
--The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times
`Lasdun is a good poet; his prose here is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness.'
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
`Joseph Nagel slumped forward, head in hands'
The first line of An Anxious Man, the first story in James Lasdun's collection It's Beginning to Hurt, describes the state of angst which investing a sizeable sum in the stock market can induce. This story won Lasdun the first National Short Story Award in 2006 and it is a gem, perfectly describing `how wearying, how humiliating it was to have so little faith in anything, to be so abjectly at the mercy of every tremor of fear in one's mind'.
This is a brilliant collection of short stories; intelligent, enlightening, and well written. I was impressed with Seven Lies, his last novel, which had a brilliant opening. In this collection Lasdun dazzles with his endings. It is also remarkable just how quickly he can conjure up a recognisable world: a man worries about a tumour and his worsening relationship with his sister, another man starts to question his own fidelity whilst wondering at his colleague's promiscuity, a neighbour witnesses a family breakdown. The title story on the end of an affair is just two perfect pages long.
These short stories leave you with lasting visual images - an abundance of blossom on a tree, writhing caterpillars, fine jewellery on a woman's neck as well as great turns of phrase - `Here was Broadway; billboards and scaffolding and more billboards over the scaffolding'. Lasdun is great on titles also - from Totty to The Natural Order to The Incalculable Life Gesture. I've enjoyed everything by Lasdun so far and I'm looking forward to reading the next book as he just gets better.
The first line of An Anxious Man, the first story in James Lasdun's collection It's Beginning to Hurt, describes the state of angst which investing a sizeable sum in the stock market can induce. This story won Lasdun the first National Short Story Award in 2006 and it is a gem, perfectly describing `how wearying, how humiliating it was to have so little faith in anything, to be so abjectly at the mercy of every tremor of fear in one's mind'.
This is a brilliant collection of short stories; intelligent, enlightening, and well written. I was impressed with Seven Lies, his last novel, which had a brilliant opening. In this collection Lasdun dazzles with his endings. It is also remarkable just how quickly he can conjure up a recognisable world: a man worries about a tumour and his worsening relationship with his sister, another man starts to question his own fidelity whilst wondering at his colleague's promiscuity, a neighbour witnesses a family breakdown. The title story on the end of an affair is just two perfect pages long.
These short stories leave you with lasting visual images - an abundance of blossom on a tree, writhing caterpillars, fine jewellery on a woman's neck as well as great turns of phrase - `Here was Broadway; billboards and scaffolding and more billboards over the scaffolding'. Lasdun is great on titles also - from Totty to The Natural Order to The Incalculable Life Gesture. I've enjoyed everything by Lasdun so far and I'm looking forward to reading the next book as he just gets better.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A marvellous collection of short stories by James Lasdun, this is increasingly compulsive as you read on, from one finely judged story to the next. Lasdun's stories can span decades, as with 'A Bourgeois Story', where a man receives a letter from a friend he knew in the 1970s when his politics were very different from what they are now. Meeting again the fiery revolutionary, Dimitri, the narrator discovers he must live with the guilt he irrationally(?) feels and is punished when his friend's defiance erupts in a terrible simile:
"I read a book about ants recently," he said. "Made me think of you. There's a species called Honey Pot ants who feed off honey-dew. They have a whole class called `repletes' - compulsive eaters who've evolved this pouchy gullet that can be distended to gigantic proportions. The workers hoist them up and hang them upside down from the roof by their back claws, and in the dry season just tap them for a snifter whenever they're thirsty, by stroking their heads. Easy as shoving a tumbler up an optic." (Nb. Narrative shortened for review purposes)
Gloriously right-on although this story is, the fierce Marxist Dimitri has equally few humane qualities, still living in a squat, selling pamphlets with his pride vauntingly intact. Yet the simile haunts. Bankers/Politicians - put forward your own favourites for the `repletes' of the current crisis.
These stories are deeply, often brilliantly perceptive of their subjects and the writing is superb. Never lavish with descriptive moments, when they do come in a story, you pay attention - as here from 'Totty': "His hands were very large; the long, angular fingers each with a glint of gold hair below the knuckle, the upper joints bending a little backwards, as in the hands of angels in old paintings, as he pressed and twisted the lemon halves on the ridged glass cone of the squeezer."
You do not get too much, with James Lasdun in this collection. What you get is exactly the right amount of everything.
"I read a book about ants recently," he said. "Made me think of you. There's a species called Honey Pot ants who feed off honey-dew. They have a whole class called `repletes' - compulsive eaters who've evolved this pouchy gullet that can be distended to gigantic proportions. The workers hoist them up and hang them upside down from the roof by their back claws, and in the dry season just tap them for a snifter whenever they're thirsty, by stroking their heads. Easy as shoving a tumbler up an optic." (Nb. Narrative shortened for review purposes)
Gloriously right-on although this story is, the fierce Marxist Dimitri has equally few humane qualities, still living in a squat, selling pamphlets with his pride vauntingly intact. Yet the simile haunts. Bankers/Politicians - put forward your own favourites for the `repletes' of the current crisis.
These stories are deeply, often brilliantly perceptive of their subjects and the writing is superb. Never lavish with descriptive moments, when they do come in a story, you pay attention - as here from 'Totty': "His hands were very large; the long, angular fingers each with a glint of gold hair below the knuckle, the upper joints bending a little backwards, as in the hands of angels in old paintings, as he pressed and twisted the lemon halves on the ridged glass cone of the squeezer."
You do not get too much, with James Lasdun in this collection. What you get is exactly the right amount of everything.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderful collection of short stories. I finished them all in a matter of days in awe at what a great writer Lasdun is. I liked the stories so much I find myself going back to them over and over again.
Each story is brilliantly plotted with some utterly jaw dropping scenes - the descriptions of the caterpillars in the final story will leave you breathless. In a sentence Lasdun can usually say more than most good writers in a whole chapter - he is one hell of a prose writer!
Don't listen to the reviewer below - all short stories are short (doh!) and therefore cannot deal with everything, but their focus is what what makes them lyrical.
This is a collection to savour over and over again.
Each story is brilliantly plotted with some utterly jaw dropping scenes - the descriptions of the caterpillars in the final story will leave you breathless. In a sentence Lasdun can usually say more than most good writers in a whole chapter - he is one hell of a prose writer!
Don't listen to the reviewer below - all short stories are short (doh!) and therefore cannot deal with everything, but their focus is what what makes them lyrical.
This is a collection to savour over and over again.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
powerful and believable
James Lasdun is an English writer to savour. This is, firstly, realism of the highest order - characters whose psychologies and auras really come into being. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Ben
Nothing for me here.
I bought this book, admittedly as I liked the cover, I like the name, it summed up a very complex situation I was in and I wanted to read something that may give my brain something... Read more
Published 22 months ago by J. L. Wilson Bradley
It's Beginning to Hurt.
Good short stories are a joy to be savoured. They're a difficult form of fiction to get right - many writers leave you disengaged with the characters and events, so that you don't... Read more
Published on 16 May 2009 by Leyla Sanai
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