Kaeti & Company

Rating:
Summary: Kaeti is delightful
Review: Kaeti and Company is the first of two short story collections that Keith Roberts wrote about Kaeti, his dream girl. There is no unifying theme to the stories apart from a brief authorial foreword to each. But even the forewords are fiction. Roberts presents Kaeti and her friends as actors on a stage. Each foreword involves him in a dialogue in which he explains to Kaeti what her role will be in the new story. She always has the chance to turn the role down if she wishes (though she never does). The stories tell tales from the past, present and future and the characters that Kaeti and her friends play vary wildly in each. Sometimes she is a heroine, sometimes a villain, often she is ambiguous. It's a delightful conceit and perversely it really does provide a unification to a completely diverse range of themes and characters - quite an artistic triumph. And the stories are little gems, one and all.