Adventures in the Skin Trade

by Dylan Thomas

Book Overview

This collection of the poet Dylan Thomas's fiction-and what an extraordinary storyteller he was -holds special interest because it ranges from the early stories such as "The School for Witches" and "The Burning Baby," with their powerful inheritance of Welsh mythology and wild imagination, to the chapters he completed before his death of the alas unfinished novel Adventures in the Skin Trade. Adventures is the story, written in a shrewd, sly, deadpan...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081120202X
• ISBN13: 9780811202022
• Release Date: January 1969
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

passivity?

A wonderful piece of writing. Samual Bennett, the main character, is a young man who attempts to let his life's course be dictated only by external influences. His move to London is preceded by the destruction of his parent's precious mementoes, thereby ensuring that he can never return home. The book, cut short by the death of Thomas, follows the youth on his adventure in passivity with sparkling prose and incredible characters. Unfortunately we can only speculate on the final outcome.

altered landscapes...

wow... not what i expected.while the plot itself does not have time to become remarkable, the characters are animated enough to compensate. the whole thing seemed to be a cartoonish farce; i could not help thinking of old beatles movies and episodes of scooby doo (?)this appears to have been written from an altered perspective (or was intended to convey one) as characters shift in and out of the story's focus in a stalled, haphazard way such that each one is grooving to his own inner music. the individuality and breadth of creativity displayed here by thomas and his unique assembly of characters is amazing considering the book's platry 60 pages.highly recommeded.

leaving your hometown as an inner adventure

A fine beginning: The main character of this never completed novel, due to the early death of Dylan Thomas, is Samuel Bennet. He grows up in a small town and feels very bored in this area. So, when he's twenty, he decides to go to London, where he expects to find life more interesting. This is how the story starts and the reader is probably curious to learn more of all the detailed adventures a young man can get into. But what Thomas describes is not only what Samuel encounters, he also gives a unique example of what a person may feel and think like in such a situation. With this topic, Thomas has to stand a comparism with authors like Joyce (A portrait of an artist as young man) or Wilde (The picture of Dorian Gray)and he does it quite well. To lead the reader into Samuel's world he clinks out from reality and tells some passages in a very surrealistic way. Not only this is a proof of quality, but Thomas builds up a unity to the outer world with some accurate themes wh! ich he positions with an twinkle in the eye in the story. If one thinks of the importance of the topics he develops during the story, there is hard to find a comparable piece in world literature, which is written in such a structured an allthough amusing way. The major topics are for example: Leaving home and going to the big town, getting rid of your childhood's place and planning your own future; to position oneself in the social classes; and how to manage with problems of your own childhood and where it may end when you just escape from them. In the whole I would say this is a book which has never got the reputation it may deserves, but the author has probably had too much success with other pieces within his lifetime, that this book has been a little out of the spotlight.

Dyaln Thomas at his best

Dyaln Thomas writes this amusing tale of a young man who destroys his parent's house and then runs away to London. He meets some interesting characters and has a crazy adventure while he's there. However, Thomas never completed it, but we're lucky we have the little bit that he wrote