Resumo de Fragile Things

When a prose writer turns to poetry, I fear severe intestinal discomfort. When a fantasy writer tries it, you will hear my distant cry: ?Run away! Run away!? Before reading the poems in Neil Gaiman?s collection of stories and verses, I therefore donned my patent Tike? trainers, running shorts and a rather fetching Yorkshire-blue singlet, and put my feet on the blocks and my arse in the air.There was no need. Gaiman?s poems show a remarkable facility in all the forms he chooses here. From the measured couplets of ?The Fairy Reel? with its haunting ending, via the sprung rhythms of ?Going Wodwo?, to the mesmeric repetition of ?The Day the Saucers Came?, Gaiman scarcely puts a metrical foot wrong. Actually, I quite liked them.And the stories: in ?A Study in Emerald?, the worlds of Sherlock Holmes and H P Lovecraft become entangled, after colliding messily with the world of David Icke! In ?How to Talk to Girls at Parties? we find that the men are from East Croydon and the women are from somewhere only Mr Gaiman could imagine. (But almost certainly not Venus.) The story with the longest title (the longest ever?) is about a writer who can?t take his work seriously, persistently putting in witty and self-mocking asides; not like anyone we know, eh? The last story, ?Monarch of the glen?, reunites a character from the first story with a character from Gaiman?s novel ?American Gods? in an apocalyptic battle in the Scottish highlands.There are other pleasures too: members of the Epicurean Club try to repeat a meal from their past, unaccountably lost in the archives; the months of the year tell a story; Scheherazade reveals her secret (and that of all writers); fugitives, zombies, cannibals and aliens all turn out to be just a little different from our expectations. The creator of Sandman shows his expertise in a variety of literary styles, showing us Susan?s view of Narnia, a new take on the classic M R James ghost story, and an interpretation of the songs of Tori Amos.In his introduction (which rambles off easily into an extra story), Gaiman explains the book?s title: people break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts. If Stephen King had written those words we would hear hard-bitten toughness; if Ramsey Campbell, a wide-eyed glee. Neil Gaiman writes them with a sad and delicate sensibility, although toughness is there too, and sheer delight in the use of words.Twenty-seven poems and stories from the prolific imagination of one of the most original and thought-provoking fantasy writers around. Delete ?fantasy?.

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