The Colonel’s Daughter by Robert Coover, 2013
The magic trick:
Describing very seriously – with a matter-of-fact, reportage-style narration – a situation that gets increasingly ridiculous
Back again with more wacky fiction from Robert Coover.
I continue to marvel at how consistently his much vaunted narrative experiments magically seem to coincide with giving him the opportunity to write about young women in a fairly sexually explicit way. But leaving that provocative statement as mere suggestion, I will say that “The Colonel’s Daughter” struck me as a fun and excellent short story.
The narrative tone emphasizes the omniscient in third-person omniscient. It’s very authoritative and matter-of-fact, which pairs hilariously with the plot developments that grow increasingly ridiculous.
And that’s quite a trick on Coover’s part.
The selection:
The threat of betrayal is widely felt in the room—there is, for example, a sinister-looking man with bulging eyes behind thick bottle-glass spectacles, sitting silently apart, whom no one seems to know—but no one wishes to reveal his anxieties for fear of revealing his temptations as well, so instead of watching one another the conspirators concentrate on the Colonel’s daughter as she passes among them with the coffee and the biscuits. The Colonel watches them watch his daughter. Some gaze up at her face, others at her breasts, or at her hips, her costume, her legs. The men who stare at her figure are not necessarily less trustworthy than those who watch her face, and those who avert their eyes or meditate, seemingly, upon their brandy, are probably the most dangerous of all.
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