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    The Chronicles of Clovis
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    The Chronicles of Clovis
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    The Chronicles of Clovis
    Ebook205 pages3 hours

    The Chronicles of Clovis

    By Saki

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    About this ebook

    Renowned for his witty dialogue and macabre humor, Saki skewered the pretensions and follies of the Edwardian age. This 1911 collection of well-plotted, acerbic short stories showcases his mastery of comic repartee. The tales recount the escapades of an irreverent socialite, Clovis Sangrail—a forerunner to the aristocratic Bertie Wooster of Jeeves fame.
    Saki's satires remain remarkably contemporary, offering paradoxical combinations of good-natured irony and cheerful cruelty. This compact anthology features some of his most popular stories, including "Sredni Vashtar," "Tobermory," "Esmé," and "Mrs. Packletide's Tiger."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Classics
    Release dateDec 1, 2013
    ISBN9781627939126
    Author

    Saki

    Saki (1870-1916) was the pen name of British novelist and short story writer Hector Hugh Munro. Born in British Burma, Munro was the son of Inspector General Charles Augustus Munro of the Indian Imperial Police and his wife Mary Frances Mercer. Following his mother’s death from a tragic accident in 1872, Munro was sent to live in England with his paternal grandmother. In 1893, he returned to Burma to work for the Indian Imperial Police but was forced to resign in just over a year due to serious illness. He moved to London in 1896 to pursue a career as a writer. He found some success as a journalist and soon published The Rise of the Russian Empire (1900), a work of history. Emboldened, he began writing stories and novels, earning praise for Reginald (1904), a short story collection, and When William Came (1913), an invasion novel. Known for his keen wit and satirical outlook on Edwardian life, Munro was considered a master literary craftsman in his time. A gay man, he was forced to conceal his sexual identity in order to avoid criminal prosecution. At 43 years of age, he enlisted in the British cavalry and went to France to fight in the Great War. He was killed by a German sniper at the Battle of the Ancre.

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    Reviews for The Chronicles of Clovis

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    • 4/5
      Deliciously bitter comic little stories of the upper class, five or ten pages long, icy, acidic, unsparing. Not a drop of kindness anywhere. Something like Maupassant triple-distilled. It only hurts when you laugh.This is a wonderful genre to which Saki alone belongs.
    • 4/5
      Munro's mind runs on rest-cures and unrest-cures, but it's mostly the latter if Clovis Sangrail is around (or even if he's not: sometimes he is a mere listener or inactive participant, sometimes he makes one comment, and sometimes, as in “Hermann the Irascible,” “Sredni Vashtar,””The Chaplet,””Mowsle Barton,” and other stories, he's not there at all). Clovis's England is one where most of the inhabitants are the idle rich, where the god Pan holds sway in some rural quarters and witchcraft in others, where prominent men of politics and business can be suddenly replaced by angels, and where Clovis struggles, usually successfully, for control in townhouses and country houses with the Baronesses and Lady Bastables. For example, when the Baroness wants to jolly everyone up after a divisive local election, she lights on the idea of a play, and Clovis suggests Agamemnon with predictably disastrous results. Lady Bastable's fear of social upheaval enables Clovis to stampede her with a shout of “the jacquerie!” Here, as in some of the dialogue, we can hear traces of Wilde: “All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's. A few gifted individuals manage to do both.” Elsewhere in the same story (“The Match-maker”): “brevity is the soul of widowhood.” One of my favorite remarks is the Baroness's to Constance Broddle in Esme: “You're looking nicer than usual . . . but that's so easy for you.”A strain of offhand cruelty runs through the stories. Although the wicked are punished in “Sredni Vashtar,” the gypsy child eaten by the hyena in “Esme” seems innocent enough, and there is no poetic justice in the suicide of the humorless Eleanor Stringham―though there might be in the murder of the orchestra leader b y the chef in “The Chaplet.” People come to sticky ends in “The Easter Egg” and “The Hounds of Fate.”We are apt to forget, looking back at the stories, that Clovis is still in his teens at their beginning. But the themes of the stories are often those of adolescent fantasy and wish-fulfillment. My mother is about to leave me with Lady Bastable for a week, but what if I could prevent it? What if the pets around me could talk or assume enough fierceness to punish my aunt-tormentor? What if I could control the Baroness that everyone finds so formidable? What if all the venal politicians could be turned into animals and replaced by beings who intended nothing but good? Isn't there an odd resemblance between people and their pets? Suppose it extended to behavior?