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It's Beginning To Hurt [Paperback]

James Lasdun
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
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Book Description

1 April 2010

In sharply evoked settings that range from the wilds of Northern Greece to the beaches of Cape Cod, these intensely dramatic tales chart the metamorphoses of their characters as they fall prey to the gamut of human passions. The lives in them seethe with love, hate, desire, fear, tender corruption and cruel idealism. They rise to unexpected heights of decency, stumble into comic or tragic folly, they throw themselves open to lust, longing, paranoia - but they are always recognisably, illuminatingly, our lives.

Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award.


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Product details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage (1 April 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0099512327
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099512325
  • Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 1.7 x 19.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 252,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

"James Lasdun is probably the closest in recent years this country has come to a genuinely great practitioner of the short story" (Guardian )

"Elegant, acutely observed and utterly unflinching... Many writers aim to create work that is unsettling, or perhaps even painful - though not, usually, too painful to bear, at least during the actual reading of the tale. Few, however, do it so well as James Lasdun" (John Burnside The Times )

"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 )

"Highly intelligent, elegantly composed, darkly haunting and greatly moving, few writers could even hope to compare with Lasdun's literary brilliance" (Scotsman )

"Lasdun is a good poet; his prose here is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness" (Tom Deveson Sunday Times )

Book Description

A brilliant new collection from one of our finest story writers, also a celebrated contemporary poet.

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Customer Reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
By purpleheart TOP 500 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars "So, do you always wear your wedding ring?" 6 Mar 2011
By Eileen Shaw TOP 500 REVIEWER
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully Written & Very Moving 15 Aug 2010
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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars powerful and believable 20 Dec 2010
By Ben
Format:Paperback
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. But beyond that the stories accelerate, in a subtly deranged way, leaving you turning the pages quite furiously. Light, nature, love, food, thoughts and places are described in a beautiful, shimmering prose which leaves you nervously awaiting the next moment paranoia, humiliation, revenge and tragedy will strike.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars It's Beginning to Hurt. 16 May 2009
Format:Hardcover
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 much care when the story ends - but when they work, they're pithy little dramas that leave you either sated or else hungrily wondering what happened next.

My favourite short story writers write mini gems that draw me in fully, involve me in the participants' lives, make me empathise with or shrink from the characters involved - indifference is the only reaction that signifies failure - and spin the whole into a tiny bundle of prose that transports me into another world for the duration of the piece. Chekhov is a classical master of the form, but my favourite contemporary short story writers include Michel Faber, David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, John Updike, and James Lasdun.

James Lasdun has found success in many forms of writing. Born in London, he has published two previous books of short stories before this one, two novels - The Horned Man (which I raved about in a thread on novels on psychiatric illness in this blog) and Seven Lies, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize a few years ago, and three collections of poetry. One of his previous short stories, The Siege, was used by Bernando Bertolucci as the basis of his film Besieged, and another acted as the scaffolding for a screenplay Lasdun co-wrote for the film Sunday, whichwon two prizes at the Sundance festival in 1997 - Best Screenplay and Best Feature. Not bad for a writer who's barely begun to go grey.

Lasdun's latest collection of stories, It's Beginning to Hurt, was published by Jonathan Cape this year. As expected, they're delicious mini courses in Lasdun's taster menu of talent.
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