Pianos and flowers : brief encounters of the romantic kind / Alexander McCall Smith.

By:

McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948-

Material type: Text

TextPublisher: New York : Pantheon Books, [2020]Edition: First United States editionDescription: ix, 179 pages : illustrations ; 22 cmISBN:

9780593315750 :
0593315758

Uniform titles:

Short stories. Selections.

Contained works:

McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- I'd cry buckets
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- Sphinx
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- Maternal designs
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- Dwarf tale-teller of the Romanian Rom
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- Duty
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- Iron jelloids
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- Students
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- Zeugma
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- Urchins
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- St John's wort

Genre/Form:

Short stories.

DDC classification:

823/.914 23

Contents:

Pianos and flowers -- I'd cry buckets -- Sphinx -- Maternal designs -- The dwarf tale-teller of the Romanian Rom -- Duty -- Iron jelloids -- Students -- Zeugma -- Urchins -- St John's wort -- Blackmail -- Pogo sticks and man with bicycle -- La plage.

Summary: "In Pianos and Flowers we are invited, through the medium of sepia images, to glimpse a world long departed. In these stories, inspired by long-lost photographs, the lives of the people in the frame are imagined and then explored, layer by layer. What must have it like to be them? We hold our breath for them. Our heart beats faster for them. We look again at the photograph in a new light, and say Yes, it might have happened just like that. This journey of exploration takes us to some exotic places. We share the lives of three sisters, brought up in Penang. We read of what happened to them, and to their Chinese neighbors caught in the tides of war. We see a group of small boys in a Glasgow slum, their young lives stunted by poverty, and hear how life worked out in contrasting ways for them. We follow a young woman's search for love in the unlikely realm of Egyptian antiquities. And through all of these photographs, and all of these stories, there runs the same refrain: the possibilities of love, of friendship, of happiness lie before us. There are big stories in these simple pictures. At first glance the photographs may seem unexceptional: the mere freezing of a moment in time. But delve deeper and you will realize that these photographs speak volumes"-- Provided by publisher.

Average rating: 0.0 (0 votes)

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Shelving location	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Adult Book	Phillipsburg Free Public Library	Adult Fiction	Adult Fiction	FIC MCCALL SMITH	Available		36748002484675

Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A delightful collection of stories and photographs from the best-selling author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, imagining the lives and loves of everyday people in the twentieth century

Pictures capture moments in time, presenting the viewer with a window into another life. But a picture can go only so far. Who are the people in the image? What are their fears? What are their dreams?

The fourteen captivating tales in this collection are all inspired by photos from the Times of London archive. A young woman finds unexpected love while perusing Egyptian antiquities. A family is forever fractured when war comes to Penang, in colonial Malaysia. Iron Jelloid tablets help to reveal a young man's inner strength. And twin sisters discover that it's never too late to forge a new path--even when standing at the altar.

There are big stories behind these simple images. Though at first glance they may appear to represent small moments, these photographs in fact speak volumes, uncovering possibilities of love, friendship, and happiness. With his indomitable charm, Alexander McCall Smith takes us behind the lens to explore the hidden lives of those photographed; in so doing, he reveals the humanity in us all.

"In Pianos and Flowers we are invited, through the medium of sepia images, to glimpse a world long departed. In these stories, inspired by long-lost photographs, the lives of the people in the frame are imagined and then explored, layer by layer. What must have it like to be them? We hold our breath for them. Our heart beats faster for them. We look again at the photograph in a new light, and say Yes, it might have happened just like that. This journey of exploration takes us to some exotic places. We share the lives of three sisters, brought up in Penang. We read of what happened to them, and to their Chinese neighbors caught in the tides of war. We see a group of small boys in a Glasgow slum, their young lives stunted by poverty, and hear how life worked out in contrasting ways for them. We follow a young woman's search for love in the unlikely realm of Egyptian antiquities. And through all of these photographs, and all of these stories, there runs the same refrain: the possibilities of love, of friendship, of happiness lie before us. There are big stories in these simple pictures. At first glance the photographs may seem unexceptional: the mere freezing of a moment in time. But delve deeper and you will realize that these photographs speak volumes"-- Provided by publisher.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Pianos and Flowers Look at the man and woman in the foreground of this photograph. They are walking past the unusual topiary without much more than a glance, seemingly indifferent to whatever it was that the topiarist was striving to portray. The man had muttered "Kandinsky" under his breath, a reference to the apparent similarity of the hedge to the figures seen in the artist's painting; the woman had simply sighed and said nothing. Then the two of them pass out of the photograph, and into the rest of their lives. Further back are three sisters, standing shoulder to shoulder, with their brother on their right. The other man, standing on his own, on their left (our right) is nothing to do with them and had avoided making eye contact. He was simply there, quite coincidentally, waiting for his wife, who had gone inside the house to retrieve her sun hat. When she returned a few minutes after this photograph was taken, they made their way into the rose garden, which cannot be seen here, but which lay off to the right, hidden by the high yew hedge behind the small groups of strollers. We do not know who that couple was, although one of the sisters later remarked, "That man in the garden was Dutch, I think. I may be wrong, but I think he looked Dutch." Another said, "How can you tell?" To which the reply came, "I don't know. There are some things that you just feel to be the case. You can't be sure, but you think it. It's hard to explain, actually." And the third said, "Intuition. That's the word you're looking for. Intuition." As it happened, he was not Dutch, but Belgian--the director of a company that imported rubber from what was then known as the Belgian Congo. His grandchildren would say of this involvement, "Don't look at us, we had nothing to do with it," although what they had read about the Congo and Leopold's doings there made them shudder with embarrassment and regret. The three women remained, as did the man accompanying them. They stood there for at least twenty minutes, and then, as if discouraged, they went back inside the house and had tea there rather than in the garden, like most of the guests. Who were they? Why did they stand in a straight line? What did they expect, or want? Are they still alive? Each of these questions can be answered, but the last one, the question that an old photograph so often raises, might be answered first. The age of the photograph, usually revealed by the clothing, may settle the survival issue. We may guess at a decade: skirt length, hats, the presence or absence of gloves--these may be clues enough. And, the question of survival having been settled, we may turn our thoughts to how the people in the photograph met their end. In this case, one of the women was killed in a traffic accident in Bristol. Another died in 1956, of rapidly progressing septicaemia. The third lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall. The man died at sixty-two, having fallen overboard in a yachting accident on the Solent; a spinnaker, badly handled, had folded in upon itself, wrapping him in its embrace and eventually pushing him off the deck into the sea. He was a strong swimmer, but it is thought that cold-water shock took its toll. None of these siblings did anything out of the ordinary with their lives. People may be remembered by the things they made, or the things they made happen, perhaps by their sayings, their acts of creation, however modest. None of these four left anything much behind them. Obscurity is quick, and tactful; it keeps a straight face if it overhears our hopes of being remembered, but it knows better. So, in a sense, it was as if these four had never existed. Some lives are like that--they leave little trace, as unrecorded as were those countless lives led before writing and photography gave some degree of permanence to our human experience. Excerpted from Pianos and Flowers: Brief Encounters of the Romantic Kind by Alexander McCall Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Smith (the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series) returns with a placid collection inspired by photographs from the London Sunday Times archive. The photos appear alongside each story, their subjects generally imagined to possess lonely souls. In the heartbreaking "I'd Cry Buckets," the feelings between two teenage boys in Scotland go unsaid, leading to decades of missed opportunities for love. The comical "St. John's Wort" features a crafty Scottish wife who concocts an herbal remedy for her frazzled husband who is obsessed with the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the misery-filled title story, WWII uproots a wealthy British rubber company executive and his family. In "Students," a fuming landlord learns the pitfalls of renting to university students. Smith's polished descriptions enliven the photos' time capsule qualities and convincingly explore the societal conventions of their eras, but none of the characters is very distinctive and some may as well be interchangeable, typified by the passive 26-year-old Scottish woman who moves to London in "Sphinx": "She had drifted into something... without any conscious assertion of will, any firm choices, because it was easy." Still, Smith's expert handling of conflict and rich imagination make this one his fans will enjoy. (Jan.)