The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton-mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two coloured windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long.<\/p>\n
The Ballad of the Sad Caf\u00e9<\/em>, Carson McCullers<\/p>\n *****<\/p>\n The odd link between this story and the one I wrote about yesterday, Anna Karenin<\/em>, is that I pulled both of them from an author’s bookshelf while she was thinking of something to dictate to me.\u00a0 The Ballad of the Sad Caf\u00e9<\/em> is sad at the beginning, sad all the way through, and sad at the end.\u00a0 But the writing had me under its spell.\u00a0 McCullers kept me turning pages with lines like:<\/p>\n ‘So do not forget this Marvin Macy, as he is to act a terrible part in the story which is yet to come.’<\/p>\n We have to remember Marvin Macy for the next fourteen pages before he reappears.\u00a0 Her storytelling is almost oral.\u00a0 I wanted to learn from her and underline phrases on every page, but I couldn’t.\u00a0 The book has to go back on my friend’s shelf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton-mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two coloured windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long. The Ballad of the Sad Caf\u00e9, Carson McCullers ***** The odd link between this story and … <\/p>\n