Having read Mr Salary and enjoyed it for an hour or so, I really have taken a greater interest in the various Faber Stories titles. On that note, and particularly because it has a cool-looking cover, Milan Kundera’s Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead caught my eye.
In essence, this book is about a younger man who ends up spending the night with an older widowed woman. Quite like Rooney’s Mr Salary, Kundera’s short story has an underlying focus on intimacy, age gaps, and the strange desire for another person’s warmth as a form of escapism.
Unlike Rooney’s story, Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead was written in the very late 1960s, which should give it a differing aura and context compared to the more modern stories included in Faber’s line of ultra-short fiction.
Leave a Reply