SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: December 13, 2021] “Tobermory”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my seventh time reading the Calendar. The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.
Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, a British author born in Myanmar (then British Burma). He loved skewering the British upper class.
This story is hilarious.
An upper class couple is throwing a party and they have invited a host of boorish people. They’ve also invited Mr. Cornelius Appin, a “clever” man with a vague reputation.
It soon came out that Appin discovered a means for instructing animals in the art of human speech. The room is incredulous, until he says that his first subject was the hosts’ own cat Tobermory.
They ask if the cat can now understand one syllable sentence, but Appin says no, the cat can fully converse.
Tobermory is brought before them and instantly says nasty things about the intelligence of one of the guests (based on what the hosts said about her), implies that another guest has been having affairs that he has witnessed and yet a third couple only came to the party because the hosts had a better cook than they did.
The ending is as dark as anything you might read at Christmastime.
I will have to check out this Saki a bit more, methinks.
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