I think I hate Eudora Welty. I suppose I should clarify: I think I hate Eudora Welty's work. And it's not because I think she's a bad writer. In the past I've spoken about how her stories can seem old-fashioned, and about how a reader can feel they're jumping through a whole host of challenging hoops for nothing. Perhaps maybe I can equate her stories to a game of chess: each character seems to serve a specific function, and each piece moves around the board, stiffly, according to their assigned function, interacting with other pieces/functions in different ways to achieve a certain goal. Now, even though each piece may be meticulously hand carved and striking in appearance, and the board may be handsomely colored and designed, and the collisions of pieces may be somewhat inventive, the last thing you ever want recounted to you is the full picture of the ins and outs of a particular chess game, even a thrilling one. I guess what I'm saying is, the stories—with the shared theme of journeys into the unknown—don't ever feel alive to me. You can say Greek mythology essentially takes on a "chess game" form, but with one key exception: there was one captivating, unpredictable human being in there running amok, upsetting everybody's clockwork function (Odysseus actually makes an appearance here but, perhaps unsurprisingly, he comes across as boring.) Even in the most interesting story, "No Place for You, My Love," about two strangers who decide to venture south of New Orleans on a whim, the evocative and lengthy descriptions of that very unusual, very swampy, bug-clouded world eventually begin to reek of dried paint, and the people begin to feel plasticine. Eudora Welty was such a skilled writer, it's possible that this is exactly what she wanted her work to feel like: not a flowing filmreel of ongoing life, but a past rendered in swirling, melodramatic oils that's been framed and encased in protective glass. That's entirely possible. But if I die and find out that the world of death smells exactly like dried paint, I wouldn't at all be surprised. One star.