The Golden Apples

American classic

This is a very tedious book! I am reading it for a class and I can hardly get through it. Also, the Kindle has a disgraceful amount of typos in it. I expect more for something I pay money for.

The Golden Apples is a series of related short stories about a fictional town in the South and its residents. Miss Welty's style is unique. With that in mind, I feel these stories are somewhat similar in format to "Winesburg, Ohio" and "Dubliners", composed in Miss Welty's unique southern style. By the time Miss Welty had authored "The Golden Apples" she is a very mature and developed author who writes with a complicated style and a lot of symbolism that I struggle to grasp and do not really enjoy.I found in studying Miss Welty's biography that many of her works have an autobiographical aspect to them. This knowledge did somewhat increase my enjoyment of her work. If anyone is interested in her biography, an extremely detailed biography was written by Suzanne Marrs.I have now read three series of short story collections authored by Miss Welty. I read them in chronological order. The issue for me is that my personal taste is fairly basic. As Miss Welty matures and becomes more developed and modern in her writing, the less I enjoy it. I have encountered the same issue with other great authors. As an example, I prefer Virginia Woolf's earlier, somewhat forgotten work, to her later, more celebrated work. I have the same issue with poetry.With the above in mind, thus far my personal favorite collection of short stories of Miss Welty is "A Curtain of Green". This collection, "The Golden Apples" is my second favorite. Her second collection, "The Wide Net" is my least favorite. The Wide Net is very experimental and full of symbolism that eludes me. "A Curtain of Green" is an enjoyable, straight forward series of stories that I enjoyed very much. Thank You...

In The Golden Apples, Welty offers a cycle of subtle, complex and often hilarious stories/myths from the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi. Told from a variety of perspectives and voices, the cycle uses southern imagery, greek mythology (sometimes via the poetry of Yeats) and musings on art and music to narrate the history of a cast of characters either absorbed by or isolated from Morgana and the surrounding world. The reader, in assembling meaning from the flood of rich narrative becomes more than a casual observer, but a participant in the ongoing mythology of Morgana.Like Winesberg or Yoknapatawpha or even Middle Earth, Welty creates a world so complete and convincing that we can't help but immerse ourselves. And what lies in the gaps between the stories and known chronology becomes just as captivating as the story we're given.Golden Apples, in its complexity, can be a lot of work. But the payoff is huge.

good book

Hippomenes (with apologies to Ogden Nash)Behold the great Hippomenes!Who spies his quarry through the trees,Though prospect of his loss was grim,Venus will look after him.Race, race thou grand Hippomenes!Throw apples at Atlanta's knees,Win her love with one last tryThe glint of gold will catch her eye.Eudora's Sour ApplesWhile conceiving what direction to take this review, this writer had many choices. We could have traversed the stratosphere with the highbrow intellect of the King's English of Oxford University. Or, we could have writ this down like the class of lower aptitude that pervades the book at hand. A handbook, indeed. However, we of the committees of good taste and proclivity have decided to stick with the traditional method of the rant.It has come to this writer's attention that there is a new book that is making the rounds of all the traditional literati: Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples. It is an interesting tome that takes place in little ole Harrisburg, Mississippi. As if we didn't already have enough on Mississippi from our fellow Yoknapatawphanian and bourbon connoisseur, Mr. Faulkner. (By the way, Yoknapatawphan means muddy shoed drunk in the Choctaw language). Unlike our friend Mr. Hemingway, both Ms. Welty and Mr. Faulkner do not appear to want themselves or their characters to step out into the cold dark world. It is quite evident to this reviewer they are quite safe in "the land of cotton." Look away, I say, look away! In Apples, Ms. Welty does not want her characters to step into the woods. God forbid they return from the forest primeval laden with child by a shadowy figure or an initiation of a band of horny twins. There are, Ms. Welty, scarier things in the world than what rattles around in the jungle.The story has been told that Ms. Welty was a photographer in her prior vocation. I would like to suggest she take back up her brownie and return post haste to the world of the daguerreotype. I do not find her writing or typing (if I may borrow from Mr. Capote) either enriching or entertaining. I will get into that in more specifics in a moment.During a recent lark, I myself ventured into the wilderness, not for the traditional forty days mind you, but to see what I could see. I also carried with me my brownie and took a photo or so. My favorite picture was the one of the rundown farmhouse. It conveyed what it was, what it is and what it will become. At one time, I'm sure, it was a flourishing home with children and grandchildren running about. It is now in ruin and decay and in the future, it will be razed for some purpose. This sounds somewhat like what Miss Eckhart in June Recital was up to, razing the past for an unknown future.The book is laid out with a short to long story rotation. (Not unlike the of all the young ladies who attended the NC State promenade being laid end to end, and no one being surprised in the least.) Just when you think she has run out of things to say, she hits you with stories that are 78, 45, and 58 pages long respectfully. This is a triumph of the will . . . will you read this, or will you not. Personally, I could only get through, with woe and boredom, the first three stories Shower of Gold, June Recital and Sir Rabbit (which consequently, I wished I had hippity, hoppity, hopped down the bunny trail) without scouring the medicine cabinet for arsenic or razor blades.In Shower, we meet a fine hardworking lady named Snowdie who just happens to be an albino. Her life has not been too terribly hard. That is until she meets King MacLain. She and King meet, marry and then he up and leaves. However, one day, Snowdie gets a message to meet him in Morgan's Woods (from here on to be referred to as the woods of conception/fornication). Nine months after their tryst in the underbrush, Snowdie produces twins. After numerous global sightings of King, he finally returns to Morgana only to be scared away by his own children.In June, we meet a voyeuristic malaria sufferer. Loch has taken to bed with what can be assumed is malaria (quinine was the hint). He is using his father's telescope to peer into the dilapidated house next door where he notices some interesting goings on -- most notably, a romantic tryst between a sailor (anchors aweigh!) and Virgie Rainey. I do confess that one of my most favorite lines in the book is from this vignette. "Her name was Virgie Rainey. She had been in Cassie's room all the way through school, so that made her sixteen; she would ruin any nice idea." I have heard of home wreckers, but idea wreckers. Indeed. This piece is also a flashback to when a family actually used to live in that house. (I would like a flashback so that I can remember what it was like to have my faculties before I started this review.)Finally, in Rabbit, we meet the spawn of King MacLain lurking around in the woods of conception/fornication. Mattie Will, with hoe (garden implement) in hand, is permissively abused by King MacLain's sons. Mattie says that she allowed this because their mother was an albino. What does this sexual charity teach us?The apples in this book have been at least a distraction, nothing more. I'm sure if Hippomenes had rolled these apples in front of Atlanta, she would have never stopped to them up. I would like to hope that in future trysts with the typewriter, Ms. Welty's trees never bear fruit and if they should it falls far from the tree and the seeds never sprout.

Not always easy to read for an English-English, but well worth it. The idiom is part of the fabric of the tales. By the end of the book you feel you have lived your whole life in this time, in this place, seen the age-sets evolve and mesh through the generations: know them like your neighbours. In reading you feel yourself an internal member of the community not a distant observer, looking in from the outside.I am English. I had not heard of her. I came across Eudora Welty in a little Penguins 60s bought in a charity shop. What a find!! 'Observant' feels to pat. You become part of the world, the mind-set. Let her 'show' you: don't expect her to 'tell' you.

The best story in this collection of tales about the fictional Mississippi town of Morgana is the story about the piano teacher, a non-Southerner of German heritage. Some of the other stories are draped in obscure language and imagery and take rather a long time to say not very much at all.

Lose yourself in this old favorite!

Not the type of book I would normally read, I was pleasantly surprised by Welty's collection of short stories. The interwoven tales create a mythology for the fictional town of Morgana and indeed new myths for the literature of the American South. A thoroughly enjoyable read and a must have for anyone who is a fan of Welty or indeed Southern literature.

These stories are truly remarkable. Eudora Welty left her early Mississippi home for higher educationand a more cosmopolitan life on the east coast of America. This allows her to bring to these superficially simple tales of the fictional community of Morgana a level and depth of meaning and sometimes a strikingly apt allusiveness. However, the stories scarcely need these additional layers of meaning and reference to compel our attention. She writes beautifully, informed by a keen eye for the particularities of the landscape and its flora and fauna and with great depth of understanding of the people who are shaped by their natural surroundings. There is little drama. Almost all is implicit and all the more powerful for it. It is difficult to pick a story that stands out, though the longest - June Recital- first introduces the most memorable of her characters: Virgie Rainey, who re-appears many years later in the final story, subtlely, yet profoundly changed. These are largely people of modest means, sometimes, as in the orphans and negroes, possessed of virtually nothing, yet in all Eudora Welty finds a simple dignity that survives even their clumsiest social faux pas. I have little doubt that on this selection alone -a personal favourite of the author - she stands beside Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy as one of the great writers of the American South. I cannot think of a finer selection of short stories.