Lorene F F itibaren 670 40 Strand, İsveç itibaren 670 40 Strand, İsveç

I read this book because I read somewhere Avram Davidson was similar in style and subject matter to R.A. Lafferty, but I did not find this to be the case. Davidson's writing is whimsical and wacky, true, but it seems to work on only one level- as entertainment. His stories follow a predictable punchline-zing! format. They do not take place on another level, even if it is a level I do not understand, like Lafferty's stories do (don't believe me? Google the story Nine Hundred Grandmothers and see for yourself). I sped-read through half of this book, but then slogged through "Manatee Gal Won't You Come Out Tonight" and "Sources of the Nile." Davidson has the truly, truly loathsome and obnoxious trait of using "dialect." This is okay and almost cute when the characters say "Om" instead of "I'm," but it becomes the most annoying thing of all space and time when a story like "Manatee" takes place in a fictional Jamaican island. Witness but a sample passage: "'Een de w'ol' days,' the voice from the back said, 'every good 'oman, she di know which bush yerb good fah wyes, fah kid-ney, which bush yerd good fah heart, which bush yerb good fah fever. But ahl of dem good w'ol' o'men, noew, dey dead, you see. Yes mon. Ahl poss ahway. No-body know bush medicine nowadays. Only bush-doc-tor.And dey very few, sah, very few.'" (107) I find "dialect" writing to be annoying, unnecessary, ineffective, cheap, and useless. Too bad Davidson doesn't feel the same way: if these stories are any clue, dialect writing is his trademark. It's too bad a lot of this crap got published. Most of it is annoying, and what isn't annoying is usually just "eh." Davidson must've got grandfathered into The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (?) with two killer stories and opted to send them nothing but turgid sloppy crap thereafter. Still, I had a hard time deciding what to rate this book. Sometimes the stories were funny and clever, but overall I didn't enjoy reading them and I didn't find the stories all that funny or clever. So I guess I'll settle on a 2.

By the end of the book I had a much better appreciation/ understanding of an autistic person's perspective.