Product Description

In Dressing Up for the Carnival, Carol Shields distills her characteristic wisdom, elegance, and insouciant humor in twenty-two luminous stories. A wealth of surprises and contrasts, this collection ranges from the lyricism of "Weather," in which a couple's life is thrown into chaos when the National Association of Meteorologists goes on strike, to the swampy sexuality of "Eros," in which a room in a Parisian hotel on the verge of ruin is the catalyst for passion, to the brave confidence of "A Scarf"-new for this collection-which chronicles the realities of a fledging author's book tour. Playful, graceful, acutely observed, and generous of spirit, these stories will delight her devoted fans and win her new converts as well.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #605997 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
In her third collection of short fiction, Dressing Up for the Carnival, Carol Shields employs two tales about clothing as structural bookends. The title story, which functions as her opening salvo, begins with a highly suggestive sentence: "All over town people are putting on their costumes." In some cases, of course, this is a literal description. Tamara, for example, dons a yellow cotton skirt without checking the weather, for "her clothes are the weather, as powerful in their sunniness as the strong, muzzy early morning light." But clearly Shields is also making a statement about identity--about the mix-and-match process of deciding who we are. Thus we get the more discreet high jinks of

X, an anonymous middle-aged citizen who, sometimes, in the privacy of his own bedroom, in the embrace of happiness, waltzes about in his wife's lace-trimmed nightgown.... He lifts the blind an inch and sees the sun setting boldly behind his pear tree, its mingled coarseness and refinement giving an air of confusion.

The final story, "Dressing Down," details the friction between a hardcore nudist and his reluctant wife, and suggests very nearly the opposite moral: we are defined by the garments we remove. Elsewhere, Shields explores the questions of identity and intimacy with less of a sartorial accent. "Invention" features another fractured marriage, this one done in by the wife's invention of a steering-wheel muff ("Money began to trickle in, then became rivers of money, especially when she introduced her famous faux-leopard muff, which became the signature for all that was chic, young, adventurous, and daring"). In "Eros," surely among the most elegant stories in this elegant collection, sex is both transcendent and suffocating, an entrance into the self and every human being's cross to bear. Dressing Up for the Carnival is a witty performance in which Shields occasionally thumbs her nose at the very notion of the traditional short story (much as she tinkered with novelistic protocol in The Stone Diaries). But make no mistake: she's a serious artist, with her eye fixed firmly on the naked (or at least half-undressed) truth. --Bob Brandeis

From Publishers Weekly
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Shields infuses this enigmatic and quirky collection of 22 short stories with ingenious characterizations in heartfelt tales that are mostly character sketches capturing the gestural, kinetic truths about the lives glimpsed here, with happy results. The title story begins, "All over town people are putting on their costumes" and catalogues a dozen characters finding themselves surprised by the joy they take in their accessories: two young sisters flaunt their plastic ski passes a month after their vacation; a secretary pushes a unique English pram for her boss's new baby; an old man buys daffodils for his unfriendly daughter-in-law. In a similar fly-on-the-wall style, "Dying for Love" peeks in on three women who, unlucky in love, are considering suicide, but each finds "a handrail of hope to hang onto." Unforgettable moments include the beginning of "The Harp," when the huge concert instrument falls from an overhead window and injures a passerby; the harpist then visits the victim in the hospital. "Reportage" also is memorable for an unlikely happenstance: the discovery of Roman ruins on a Manitoba farm. When tourism supplants wheat farming, it's a boon to everyone except a retired Latin teacher. Many of the stories are light and breezy but not unsatisfying, because the characters are winning even in their mostly cameo-like appearances. Already distinctive, they could evolve into such complex or intriguing Shields characters as The Stone Diaries' Daisy Stone Goodwill or Larry Weller of Larry's Party. Some tales are slighter vignettes, but all share enough whimsy, humor and wisdom to make the collection thoroughly enjoyable and, in many instances, illuminating. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Washington Post
Along with being an important work, 'Dressing up for the Carnival' is an endlessly levitating entertainment.

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Customer Reviews

Hooked by Carol Shields
Carol Shields hooked me in with Stone Diaries and I have subsequently enjoyed Happenstance, Larry's Party and a Celibate Season. I have just completed Dressing Up for the Carnival and am yet again amazed by Carol's ability to take the simplest things and see into them and beyond their common use. The story Mirrors is a typical example - we take them so much for granted and yet we do not look at them but "into them". Her language is rich, descriptive, insightful and makes me want to hear her voice. I love the glimpses she gives into married lives and the various swings and roundabouts of relationships, the distances between people and the tiny, meaningful, tender moments - Windows is a typical example. I am delighted to discover that I have many more of her books to enjoy and am now about to continue my research on Carol with the help of this site.

Hit and (mostly) miss.
After the disappointment of Carol Shields' last book, the novel Larry's Party, I thought I would give her a second try with this collection of short stories. At times Shields doesn't disappoint - Dressing Up For The Carnival has a few wonderful stories - I particularly like 'Mirrors'. However, in many stories Shields tries to put an imaginative and poetic slant on the everyday banal - but sadly with little success. Most of the stories here seem forced, the result of some self-imposed writing excerise that in the end read like teenage creative writing exams. For such an accomplished writer many of these stories seem young and naive - even unfinished perhaps. Her themes of aging women, often disappointed by life or the infidelities of men, are bittersweet but in the end left me with nothing.

A True Example of Writing as Art
Carol Shields can take an ordinary word and polish it into a shining gemstone. Finely-tuned phrases are scattered plentifully throughout each chapter of _Dressing Up for the Carnival_, straddling the gap between poetry and fiction. This collection of stories is so spare, it almost feels empty at first. But you find Shields has emptied her work of distractions and needless explanations so you can more clearly see . Her focus on minute details is selective and purposeful. She reveals deep insights on the human condition through small observations-ones only a keen observer could see, and only a master writer like Shields could translate into words. If you want to be entertained, this book may not be for you. If you want to think deeply and be stirred to a higher level of emotion, pick up this book. You'll find yourself setting it down after every story so you can absorb each word.