Search results for ""Author Edward Upward""

These stories (one novella-length, six shorter) testify to Edward Upward's continuing creativity into his mid-nineties. They interweave elements from every period of his work: railway accidents and Kafkaesque dreams recall his earliest; concern for the survival of humanity maintains the left-wing commitment of his middle years; and the more contemplative note of his later writing now deepens with the themes of ageing, bereavement and death. The protagonists are threatened by a malevolent state and socio-political violence, but sustained by visions of a better future and the restorative of sexual love. The precise observation and lucid dialogue that always marked Upward's fiction still make a powerful impression.

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The rediscovery of Edward Upward's work excited enthusiastic comment among reviewers and readers when in 1994 Enitharmon published "The Mortmere Stories", "An Unmentionable Man" and a revised version of "Journey to the Border". The five short stories in this new volume, all written in recent years, reconfirm what Edward Mendelson in the "Times Literary Supplement" has described as Upward's 'unique perfected style ...that gives ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary, subject to the same ethical and political judgements appropriate to the daylight world.'A dying man finds affirmation in a career to which he had unsuccessfully given his life, a retired and cautious man finally has the courage to ask the woman he loves if she will come to live with him, a dying woman's dreams of revolutionary events seem to be coming true - Upward's stories give ordinary events a hallucinatory strangeness and renders dreams as if they were entirely ordinary. These five new, carefully rendered, quiet tales retain that unique mix of art and politics so crucial to the literature of the 1930s and 1940s for which he and his circle were so famous.

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'These new stories give strong support to the claim that their author is 'one of the very few left-wing imaginative writers of literary ability who have not betrayed their principles'...Reflecting on his achievements in a very long career, one cannot help thinking that Upward presents in his work a reliable record of an extraordinary period of history. His unique blending of the past, in art as well as in politics, still has lessons for the future. We should be grateful that a devoted artist has lived so intensely through so much' - From the Introduction by Frank Kermode.The first four of these new short stories by Edward Upward, now in his 99th year, form a closely linked sequence - almost a single story - and could be described as 'realistic dreams'. They are vivid and often satirical, the product of long experience, but are neither cynical nor finally pessimistic. In certain inherited ways they resemble Upward's earlier fantasies "The Railway Accident" and "Journey to the Border", both also published by Enitharmon. Of the last two stories, "Fred and Lil" is straightforwardly realistic and humanly sympathetic, while "With Alan to the Fair" deals with love, hate and political extremism in serious and in highly comical episodes.

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