Saki

May 14, 2008 | Filed Under Main |

My favorite thing about the Kuwait Airport is The Pearl. The Pearl is the first/business class lounge (and that is what I have been allowed to travel between offices). It is spacious, quiet, comfortable – with food readily available, wi-fi for your laptops and BBC World playing on the various TV screens. But what makes this place special to me is a set of book shelves located as you enter, to the right of reception. It stands about seven feet tall with six shelves filled with paperbacks. On the bottom shelves are travel books, Arabic books and self-help. And there are the occasional Steven King, Nora Roberts and the latest “in” author (Cormac McCarthy is everywhere). However, the rest of the books are classics – SERIOUS classics. You’ve got your Shaw, your Balzac, Plato, Steinbeck and various other up-n-comers. You need the Upanishads or Taoist teachings? There they are. This is a better selection of books then I have found anywhere else in my short stay in the Middle East. And they are available to just sit and read while you are waiting or purchase. So I purchase. I’ve picked up two Italo Calvino novels, Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon and even a copy of Hunter Thompson’s Generation Of Swine.

But my favorite purchase came just the other day on my way to Dubai. I found a collection of short stories by Saki. His real name was H.H. Munro and he wrote during the early 1900s. I have not seen his work since the eighth grade, when I bought a collection of stories from Scholastic Books in school. (Back then, Scholastic Books used to let young readers buy LITERATURE, as opposed to now where all you can get are Telli-Tubby books and Star Wars serializations. Imagine ordering a collection of H P Lovecraft - as I did then - from that company these days. Someone’s head would explode.) The Saki collection was – wrongly – placed with the horror and sci-fi books. But with stories about talking animals and werewolves, what else were they going to do? I remember two of these stories – Tobermory and Gabriel-Ernest – both of which appear in the new collection. The rest (if I read them) were certain to go right over my eighth grade head. However, they are great to read now, some thirty-five years later. He has a style that is witty, compact, satirical and sometimes more than a bit dark (right up my alley).

Small bio fact – Saki died at the age of 46 during WWI. The story goes that he was on the battlefield in France, hunkered down in a trench, and his last words were: “Put that bloody cigarette out!” Seconds later, he was shot through the head.

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