Book description
The Camberwell Beauty
is a collection of short stories which explore the close-knit world of
antique dealers, their obsessions and suspicions, their hatred of
customers and the fantasy lives that grow out of the objects they
collect.
The Lady from Guatemala tells of a celebrated progressive who is haunted
in private by an embarrassing admirer, one of the down trodden for whom
he has spoken so eloquently in public. Other characters to be met in
these stories are Molly, "as noisy as a blowlamp, but pretty",
a women who needs two husbands at a time; an innocent young Englishman
in Paris who boasts ill-advisedly that he has no mistress, falls in to
the Seine and loses his virginity; and a famous producer who plans a
film about the twelfth century Albigenses complete with torture, incest,
rape and betrayal.
This collection of stories shows that Pritchett has a sharp and willing
eye for the irrepressible fantasies which colour human existence and an
informed curiosity about those areas where the absurd cohabits with the
rational. Victor Sawdon Pritchett (1900-1997) was born over a toyshop
in 1900 and, much to his everlasting distaste, was named after Queen
Victoria. A writer and critic, his is widely reputed to be one of the
best short story writers of all time, with the rare ability to capture
the extraordinary strangeness of everyday life. He died in 1997.
