The Cardiff Team

168 pp. A collection of short stories by the Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow. When Guy Davenport looks at the world, the world changes; sometimes just a little and sometimes a lot. And no reader is the same after reading his or her first Davenport story. He is a writer perfectly described by the term "singular" and in praising his work, from fiction to poetry, from translations to essays, critics all over the world have noted his unique manner, his remarkable erudition and his startling humor. He is the finely realized perfection of high modernism blended with an American sensibility as old as Emerson's. Guy Davenport's story collection A Table of Green Fields (New Directions, 1993) was praised for its amazing artistry and "stratospheric" literary intelligence (Kirkus Reviews). As The Washington Post noted, "It draws one in with its austere, beautifully formal sentences, its rich pattern of memory." In Davenport's follow-up collection, The Cardiff Team, the stories continue in this vein, their texts a wondrous collage of persons, events, and ideas from cultural history. The central theme is that of tribeless people joining, or trying to join, a team, a tribe, or a society. In "The Messengers," Franz Kafka visits the Jungborn Health Spa in the Harz mountains and tries to feel comfortable in his own skin. In "Boys Smell Like Oranges," a soccer team of boys from Henry de Montherlant's Les Olympiques is its own contained tribe. The Cardiff Team perfectly displays Guy Davenport's illustrious prose and his audacity; confirming The New Yorker's assertion that his is "among the very few, truly original voices now audible in American letters."