The Chronicles of Clovis
1911
Saki's Edwardian England is a place where courtesy masks chaos, and propriety conceals pure anarchy. At its center stands Clovis Sangrail, a young man whose gift for conversation is matched only by his talent for catastrophe. Whether he's convincing a society matron to sponsor a hyena, teaching a cat to speak devastating truths, or orchestrating a tiger's humiliating demise, Clovis approaches the absurdities of the upper classes with gleeful devastation. These 28 stories sparkle with the kind of malice that makes manners memorable. Saki skewers the Edwardian elite with a scalpel disguised as a teacup, exposing the vanity, greed, and petty cruelty beneath garden parties and county dances. The stories feel fresh and dangerous a century later because Saki understands that the funniest things are often the most unflattering. Clovis never moralizes; he simply acts, and the results are magnificent chaos. If you like your humor with teeth and your satire served cold, this is the book.
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“The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.””
— Saki
“And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.””
— Saki
“Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet here, so removed from the arteries of the latest civilization, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.””
— Saki
“There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.””
— Saki
“No one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbours now and then.””
— Saki
“It was one of those exuberant peaches that meet you halfway, so to speak, and are all over you in a moment.””
— Saki
“I can remember a menu long after I've forgotten the hostess that accompanied it.””
— Saki
“she had been the eldest sister of a large family of self-indulgent children, and her particular form of indulgence had consisted in openly disapproving of the foibles of the others. Unfortunately the hobby had grown up with her.””
— Saki
“Who are those depressed-looking young women who have just gone by?" asked the Baroness; "they have the air of people who have bowed to destiny and are not quite sure whether the salute will be returned.””
— Saki
