Alan Bennett reads from Smut
Smut: Two Unseemly Stories is the brand new book from Alan Bennett. Co-published by Faber and Profile Books, both ‘unseemly stories’ concern women in middle-life: Mrs Donaldson, whom sex takes by surprise, and Mrs Forbes, who is not surprised at all. The stories are naughty, honest and very funny.
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Composed of two new stories, The Greening of Mrs Donaldson (first published in the London Review of Books) and The Shielding of Mrs Forbes, Smut is as funny and moving as all Bennett’s work, and brings his subversive side once more to the fore.
The Shielding of Mrs Forbes
Graham Forbes is a disappointment to his mother, who thinks that if he must have a wife, he should have done better. Though her own husband isn’t all that satisfactory either. Still, this is Alan Bennett, so what is happening in the bedroom (and in lots of other places too) is altogether more startling, perhaps shocking, and ultimately more true to people’s predilections.
The Greening of Mrs Donaldson
Mrs Donaldson is a conventional middle-class woman beached on the shores of widowhood after a marriage that had been much like many others: happy to begin with, then satisfactory and finally dull. But when she decides to take in two lodgers, her mundane life becomes much more stimulating …
May 4th, 2011 at 9:10 pm
This man is a genius.