Sredni Vashtar and Other Stories

by Saki

Book Overview

Born in Burma in 1870, Scottish writer H. H. Munro adopted the pseudonym Saki to satirize the social conventions, cruelty, and foolishness of the Edwardian era. His highly readable blend of flippant humor and outrageous inventiveness is often overlaid with a mood of horror. After Munro's untimely death in action during World War I, Christopher Morley wrote: the empty glass we turn down for him is the fragile, hollow-stemmed goblet meant for the finest...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0486285219
• ISBN13: 9780486285214
• Release Date: October 2015
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.2" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Sadistic Humor

This is a book that you will love or hate. Saki writes with a sadistic flair that both enthralls you and horrifies you. This book is not one story but many written about the so called rich upper class who went around England during the time Saki lived. Saki seems to take pleasure in putting the prideful and boastful rich in their places and making them squirm a little. There are other stories that show Saki's dark and sinister side. As an example I will give you a short run down of Srendi Vashtar. A sickly boy is living with his cousin and she is extremely cruel to him. She takes pleasure in depriving him of even the slightest happiness. The boy hides the few things that bring him happiness away from his cousin. These things consist of a chicken and a ferret in a cage. The boy hates his cousin so much that he even rejects her religion and makes up one of his own basing it on the ferret. He prays to the ferret for deliverance from his cousin, which he finally gets. I will not ruin the ending for you, but I will tell you it has a bloody and shocking ending. Saki also has stories with a twisted humor that is actually funny and pleasing to read. Overall I enjoyed this book and recommend it

How Do You Look At Life?

This was a very good book. The stories were all eye catching and made your mind wonder. At first when I started to read the book, was was a little lost. The stories all have some kind of catch to them, and it takes a little while to figure out what Saki is trying to say. The way he embraces the plots of these stories makes you wonder where he is coming from. Personally, I started to wonder if Saki was trying to tell some of his life within these stories. To me, some of the stories resemble society and how people act towards each other. Saki makes fun of society and that really interested me. I liked how he used metaphores on the stories. These excititng twists made the stories even more enjoyable to read. Some of the stories made fun of the characters or at least one character, but it was not in a very subtle was, he made it kind of a secret. THe unique thing about these stories was the way that Saki put them together. He really made you look deeper into the stories to get the real meaning of them. I would definately suggest this book if you enjoy stories with twists and deep meanings.

Laughing at Society

This is a very good book. I enjoyed the way that Saki uses animals to deface the way he feels about society. In many cases the animals use trickery to fool the people around them. In my opinion this story is a parallel to Saki's life. The animals represent how he felt and what he wanted to do in some instances, but society would not allow it. From a ferret god to a talking cat this book will make you think of how you feel about society and what you could do if society allowed it. The stories are exciting and I would recommend this book to anyone who is frustrated with the way society is.

Wonderful Satire

I enjoyed the majority of Saki's stories. My favorite tales were The Unrest Cure and The She-Wolf. I laughed and laughed at the jokes played by the character, Clovis. His characterization in such a limited number of words in each story was brilliant. However, I did not like The Easter Egg in the least. This is probably because it involved the injury of an innocent child. Sredni Vashtar also involved a child, but Saki narrated that story from the child's perspective in such a manner as to make you feel as the boy did. I almost rejoiced in the conclusion. Saki has an incredibly clever way of describing the outrageous, snobbish acts of his main characters. He fills his stories with such a subtle humor that I missed it at first glance. The tales reminded me of things I would never do in reality but have often wanted to do when frustrated with some government agency. He employs a child-like imagination of a fairy-tale world not all that different from reality. However, his world has a Edgar Allan Poe feel to it, and the simpleton or evil spinster always gets his or her just desserts in the end. He crafts these unwitting or evil creatures so well that I cheered or laughed at the final situations he came up with for them. Saki accentuates the stories by using a large vocabulary with only a few well placed, unfamiliar words, making himself as snobbish as his characters. When I took the time to learn the definition of these words, I was amazed at the clever symbolism he employed. He seemed to hide many secret messages and made that which was socially taboo into something resembling acceptable. As a whole, these stories are imaginative satires of the Edwardian society.

Saki & the impoliteness of manners!

For those of you who love animals with strong, individual personalities and characters who are seen as either eccentric or plain crazy, depending on their socio/economic heritage, this is the collection of short stories for you. From Sredni Vashtar, "the great ferret", to naughty Nicholas in The Lumber Room, each of the well developed short story texts is a minimalists masterpiece, and in each of the individual short stories the reader is given more than an ample serving of Saki's skill of simultaneous character and plot development that invariably lead to absurdly histerical, yet wildly believable conclusions.The only negative critisism that I would make of this group of short stories is that; although most of the stories are incredibly entertaining and some of them either leave you laughing so hard, or weeping so pathetically, that you are forced to stop reading for a few moments; the formaltion of somewhat stock English characters Saki employs to construct the majority of the stories, combined with the kinds of social and linguistic ambiguities that he exploits to obtain his goals, do become somewhat predictable after a while.