The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories by SakiNew York Review of Books, 2013

These twenty-six stories by H.H. Munro, who wrote under the pen-name of Saki, are selections from five volumes that were originally published between 1904 and 1919. They’re all fairly funny, though I found the first few stories the weakest. In those early stories, like “Reginald at the Carlton” or “Reginald on Besetting Things,” we’re reading about a recognizable realistic world: Reginald dines out with a Duchess, and they gossip and opine and say clever things; Reginald tells a story about a woman who has the misfortune to fall into the habit of telling the truth, as opposed to the socially accepted white lies life is normally fully of. “Reginald’s Drama,” in which Reginald thinks about what kind of play he’d like to someday write, is funnier because it’s got a bit more of the absurd: Reginald talks about how his play “would commence with wolves worrying something on a lonely waste—you wouldn’t see them, of course; but you would hear them snarling and scrunching, and I should arrange to have a wolfy fragrance suggested across the footlights” (12). Things pick up even more with “The Strategist,” which is the first of many stories in this book that center around young people behaving mischievously in various very funny ways. “The Strategist” is one of my favorite stories in the book; another is “Tobermory,” which features a houseguest telling his hosts he’s taught their pet cat to speak English—and the horrified reactions of everyone when it turns out to be true, and when they think of all the things in the household that the cat’s been hitherto silently watching. Edward Gorey’s illustrations are well-suited to the Edwardian high society setting of the stories, and to their sometimes dark humor: the combination of Gorey’s art and Saki’s writing makes this book particularly satisfying to read.