Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance | Matthew Kneale

Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance | Matthew Kneale | Very nicely done

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Small Crimes in an...

	Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance Matthew Kneale Anchor, 2006 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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A well-intentioned English family unwittingly becomes complicit in state violence while traveling through China. A ploddingly respectable London lawyer chances upon a stash of cocaine and realizes it offers the wealth and status he's always hungered for. A salesman in Africa gets caught up in a riot, and a Palestinian suicide bomber has a moment of self-doubt. Kneale transports readers across continents in a nanosecond, reaching to the heart of faraway societies with rare perceptiveness. With wry humor and razor-sharp satire, these twelve thought-provoking stories illuminate the moral uncertainty of our time.

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Brilliantly executed

Kneale captures average people with the dark sides of their souls exposed, caught in atavistic moments of primal impulse, stripped of everyday deceits and civilized behavior. Or maybe it is the inherent adaptability of human nature, that frail connection we all enjoy, our little secrets whispered in the dark. In any case, Kneale attacks these stories with impeccable charm, surrounding his characters with the world of mediocrity, lives lived down the middle of the road, until tearing off in a jagged pattern, control thrown to the wind.

With each story, the tension of the collection ratchets higher as cultures clash, softly, in small explosions, to the inevitable outcome. The author makes subtle, significant observations, driving them home with fearless precision. This is a moral book of fictional tales, richly layered humanity at its best and worst, a collage of missed opportunities. The titles are singular: "Stone", "Powder", "Weight", "Metal", "Sunlight" and the shocking "White". There is a particular message in each small gem, a couple buying a villa while challenging each other's boundaries, a vacationing English family, smug in their pretensions until faced with the brutality of survival, an upwardly-mobile couple who believe evil can be controlled in small doses.

There are no geographic or emotional boundaries, the human exploits covering the planet, from London to South America and the Middle East to your own back yard. The stories are remarkable, revelatory, making one think that the author has spent a great deal of time staring into people's souls, the haves and the have-not's, the greedy, the impoverished, the petty urgencies of acquisition that lap at the heels of civilization. Stripped of pretensions, there is such a hunger for connection, for quiet in an unquiet time that it is painful to realize how quickly we sell our souls on the common market.

I have read many novels that I could not put aside until I had finished, but this is the first book of stories that has so captured my imagination and so brilliantly portrayed the heartbreak of a world gone mad with greed, exploitation and abandonment that I am absolutely enthralled. I highly recommend this extraordinary collection, an experience not to be missed. Luan Gaines/2005.

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Very nicely done

I don't usually read short stories, so I was a bit disappointed when I heard this was the format of the followup to the fabulous English Passengers. I shouldnt have been, since my bias against short stories is probably silly: collections by Julian Barnes, Ha Jin, not to mention Dubliners are easily among my best lifetime reads ever.

Anyway, I found Small Crimes captivating. In nearly every story, I was left with some strong type of feeling or other, ranging from deep pity to disgust. Knealle's trip into the minds of the muslim bomber, of the overweight guy who marries the beautiful girl, of the nerdy scientist who can't relate to his wife as her brother dies... are as perfectly descrided as the multiple geographic surroundings. And the simple language makes for easy reading, without loss in depth of theme. I look forward to Kneale's next book, whether novel or short story.

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Abundantly entertaining

Having read English Passengers I was impatient to get my hands on this one, and it didn't disappoint. Whilst it's not as weighty a tome as English Passengers, it shares a common theme of trespass. The stories of people who go where they shouldn't (either figuratively or physically) zip by and the book was over too quickly.

Most of Kneales work is wonderful

...but this isn't. The stories are solidly written but driven by a feeble theme relating to the injustice and and lack of understanding the first world has for the third. It may be OK for some poncey Oxford dinner parties but most of us want a little more insight and entertainment. The characters are mostly odious posh poms who the reader has a vested interest in seeing die from page one. It's almost as emetic as watching Bob 'pretentous wanker' Geldorf talking about Africa.

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