These stories are specifically about crime and the law, but they more generally encompass the human condition.
The second volume of unusual case histories by a German defense attorney with a literary flair.
As a follow-up to Crime (2011), this very similar collection can’t offer the revelatory impact of its predecessor, nor the consistency (the reader suspects that the best stories were used in the earlier book). Yet its combination of legal experience and literary command will continue to find favor with those who appreciated the debut. These are compressed, matter-of-fact accounts which the author maintains are based on criminal cases in which he was involved, but often read like existential parables that probe the limits of the law in exploring the mysteries of the human heart and psyche. The opening “Funfair” details an inexplicable gang rape by “perfectly normal men” of a young victim who had consciously done nothing to turn these men into animals. “Later nobody could explain anything,” says the author, who was then a young lawyer, and for whom the case would provide a rite of passage, an initiation, when it became obvious that the law could do nothing, that “legal proceedings would end here and that guilt was another matter entirely” and that “we knew we'd lost our innocence and that this was irrelevant.” Though the narratives are often as terse as the best hard-boiled crime fiction, the most compelling tales have a philosophical dimension reminiscent of Kafka or Camus. In “The Other Man,” a narrative of random sex and its complications, the author writes of a woman who had never anticipated the consequences of desire. Other stories are slighter, with O. Henry twists, but they are also relatively short.
These stories are specifically about crime and the law, but they more generally encompass the human condition.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-59949-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Twelve mesmerizing tales about the subterranean forces of artistic creation, and about the eruption of the uncanny into quotidian life, by one of the most idiosyncratic and inventive modern American writers. Millhauser, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Martin Dressler (1998), typically works a narrow but deep terrain, focusing on such things as the allure of various kinds of underworld, the lives of obsessed artists, the shimmering mysteries of the natural world. All are present in this new collection. The title story examines what happens when a performer possessing almost supernatural skill in his craft feels driven by his own need to excel and by the desires of his audiences—to transgress, using his knives to explore the boundary between art and life, with fatal consequences. Art, Millhauser reminds us, is necessary (the knife thrower’s audiences crave his performances), but also necessarily dangerous. “Paradise Park” offers another version of the creator an transgressor, represented by the astonishing efforts of a designer of a turn-of-the-century amusement park on Coney Island to outdo his rivals, culminating in the creation of a vast underground park more like purgatory than paradise, challenging its audiences ideas about what art and technology should do. Several of the tales here, including “Flying Carpets,” “The Sisterhood of Night,” and “Clair de Lune,” issue from Millhauser’s fascination with the special receptivity that children and adolescents demonstrate for the mysterious potentials of life, for sensing the sheer strangeness behind the everyday. “Balloon Flight, 1870” mingles metaphysics with the traditional elements of an adventure tale, and “A Visit” offers an ironic reworking of an old folklore motif, involving the marriage of a man and an animal. Enchanting, often disturbing tales, written in a prose of deceptive simplicity, providing further evidence that Millhauser is a fabulist of rare power.
Pub Date: May 6, 1998
ISBN: 0-609-60070-2
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
Poet Block’s story debut is a find: droll tales full of real, rumpled, irony-laden life. Even the weaker links here—the more linear stories—offer their passing if humbler pleasures, as in the tales of a high-school band whose leader marches it actually out to pasture (—The Gothenburg Marching Band—), a farmer who keeps a chimpanzee (—A Bed-Time Story—), or two toughs so jealous of a local boy made good that they want to murder him (—The Stanley Andrews Story—). When a nun, though, runs out of gas outside a farmer’s house (—St. Anthony and the Fish—), then moves in and transforms his life, the result deepens gracefully into real seriousness (—At night, sometimes, Ned could feel . . . nothing creep right up to the house and almost stare in the windows—). Though Garrison Keillor is better on the air than on the page, Block can catch the tone and pace of an oral Keillor and tack it down for keeps, as in —Land of the Midnight Blonde,— about life in the Fargo of today. And at his very best, Block turns the dreariness of existence in Nebraska or the Dakotas into something approaching musical hymns to humanity—in stories like the 1918-set —Zadoc Xenophon Cannot View Bright New Moons. Can Vera Montague?—, about a spinster liberated through learning to type; or —Demon in the Closet,— the positively uproarious tale of a pregnancy in the family; or —The Dirty Shame Hotel— itself, about the denizens of a flea-bag hotel, which has the bleakness of an Edward Hopper painting, the happy tumult of a Calder circus, and the lyricism of a Dylan Thomas—and features, among other remarkable characters, a professor set on explaining —the physics of human desire— by proving that —both light and gravity work on the principle of suction.— A Sherwood Anderson for our time—funny, ironic, inventive, brimming with sympathy.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-89823-187-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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