Collected short Stories   by Aldous Huxley

Spring, 2007.     From a second hand bookstore in Lüneburg, which I found when searching for an engagement ring.

I read these in the "Spring..." or something like that. I think I started in February, and finished just now; in June. It was a good form for a book at the time; I had many other things to do, and other books that I had a greater desire to read. This is was I was glad to have short stories, that I could finish, and then lay the book aside for a week, or a month.

BUT, I didn't find the stories very exciting. Or intriguing. Or even very interesting. Thinking of Huxley's Brave New World, I was waiting and expecting to be astounded with profound theories, and amused yet chilled by his scathing yet accurate remarks on Society. Instead I got strange little portraits of characters. Not doing much of anything. Not thinking deeply. Not even unknowingly at the center of a revolution.

On deeper reflection, the themes DO touch on human nature. But so much more lightly, and circumvently than in Brave New World. -I'd quite missed it in a number of the stories. (And in some others thought it too little to be of consequence.) I think the stories nearly all have to do with... a certain cruelty which is latent in people. Often it is not at all intentional; The man who thinks he's giving the best possible life to his lover, while in fact boring and stifling her. The Child and his friends who unwittingly depress the father to a point of suicide. The successful businessman who made other's lives seem meaningless in comparison.

I was becoming more in tune with the recurring theme in the last three stories of the book. I began to be more drawn into the action, and the thoughts which were being developed.

At the end, I found it a fair, or even a decently good book. -But not at all up to the emotional level of Brave New World.