Audiobook · read by volunteers
Chronicles of Clovis
Saki (1870–1916)
Read by Alan Davis Drake (1945-2010), Graham Redman · 29 chapters · 6 h 40
About the book
Clovis Sangrail is witty, wicked and never short of a plan. In Chronicles of Clovis, Saki gathers twenty-eight sharp little stories in which polite society is delightfully disturbed by pranks, matchmaking, a talking cat and well-aimed insults. Clovis himself drifts through many of the tales, cheerfully upsetting aunts, hostesses and anyone who takes themselves too seriously, but other characters take centre stage as well. The humour is dry, quick and often distinctly cruel, yet it is delivered with such elegance that you cannot help laughing. Famous pieces such as Tobermory, in which a cat learns to speak at a country house party, sit alongside quieter, stranger stories with a hint of menace. An introduction by A. A. Milne opens the collection, and two readers share the performance across nearly seven hours. If you enjoy Edwardian wit with a sting in its tail, you are in for a treat.
Introduction
Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), a British writer born in Burma who became one of the great masters of the short story. His tales mock the manners and pretensions of Edwardian England with a lightness that disguises a sharp edge, and his work has influenced humorous writers ever since. He was killed in action in 1916, during the First World War, and left a body of work far smaller than it might have been.
Chronicles of Clovis, published in 1911, is his third collection of short stories, following Reginald and Reginald in Russia. Clovis Sangrail is in effect a successor to Reginald: a young man of epigrammatic wit and no scruples, who appears in many of the stories and sets the tone of the book. Not every tale features him, however, and the collection also contains pieces of a different mood, some of which move towards the macabre or the fantastic. Titles such as Esme, The Match-Maker and Tobermory suggest the range of the book, which includes some of the author's most frequently anthologised work, and Sredni Vashtar, a darker tale of a lonely child and his pet, shows how far it can travel from drawing-room comedy.
This LibriVox recording opens with an introduction by A. A. Milne and contains twenty-nine files in all, with a running time of about six hours and forty minutes. The readers are Graham Redman and the late Alan Davis Drake, whose voices suit the dry, ironic style. For anyone who loves Wodehouse, Wilde or the comedy of manners, Saki is essential listening, and these stories show him at the height of his powers.
Public domain
Saki died in 1916: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text