Review: A Thousand Nights and One Night (Volume 1) by J.C Mardrus and Powys Matthews

 As part of my short story summer, I decided to tackle a big beast, The Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights, Arabian Nights Entertainment and, in my copy, The Thousand Nights and One Night. The tortured awkwardness of my title stemming from the fact that the book is a double translation with Arabic into French by J.C Mardrus and then into English by Edward Powys Mathers. It’s a four book set that claims it is ‘the only complete and accurate one in English’ but as I looked into it, that’s an impossible claim to make.

These stories come from everywhere, from India, through the middle-east and Arabic world, with sojourns into North Africa and then compiled into French with added Syrian stories (the most famous to me, Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad the Sailor all being additions to the collection) - then put into English. It’s a massive storybox from all over and accuracy seems to be a fool’s errand. I can only take what I’ve been presented and look at that.

The first volume sets up the famous frame story. The Sultan Shahryar has grown bitter after catching his wife cheating so he sleeps with a virgin every night and kills her in the morning. With the kingdom running out of virgins, his wazir’s daughter, Scheherazade is the next. She takes her little sister, Dunyazad who (peculiarly) watches them has sex before asking for a story. Scheherazade  begins it, but says she can only finish it if she’s allowed to live another day. By doing this, she lives for a thousand and one nights through her powers of storyteller. By the end of the first volume, Shahryar is warming to her a little and having vague thoughts of saving her life.

This first volume, in particular, has an awful lot of stories about people telling stories to save their lives. It also contains a great many nested stories - I’m not sure if they quite reach The Manuscript Found in Saragossa levels, but they come close. What I found really interesting is that nesting tales in this way serves a purpose within the frame narrative, if Scheherazade nests tales in each other, the resolution of one still leaves the others unresolved, and her head on her shoulders for another night.

One of the most striking thing about the book is how varied it is. There are comic tales, epic tales, romantic tales, family sagas and a whole lot more sex than I was expecting. There are brothers who ‘make lady’s parts explode’, long discussions of a man’s ‘zab’ and his ‘eggs’, the swaying hips, the round bottom. It’s a world where beautiful men and women seem to fall into sex at any time, often under the influence of wine and music. It’s also strong on bodily humour, people fart in fear, piddle themselves, find themselves locked in smelly toilets. Then there’s the violence, heads are frequently lopped off, malefactors impaled ‘from anus to mouth’, people staked out on the floor and beaten. At one point a jousting lance goes through a man and has his kidney at the end. It’s all to excess.

However, luxury and beauty are also in excess. Rosewater is sprinkled everywhere, nand is burnt, people are cleaned and rubbed and perfumed at the hamam. People are frequently given robes of honour, wear clothes of silk, cloth of gold, jewels all over. They drink water and sherberts flavoured by the same perfumes that were rubbed on them. There’s so much food, roasted sheep, kebabs, fruits, nuts, pastries - pastries galore, dripping in syrups - there’s a lot of jam talk. A higher class story will have characters expressing themselves in poetry like The Tale of Genji. When The Thousand Nights and One Night is in romantic or refined mode, it reminds me a lot of that book, then it will descend into low-brow, feculent Canterbury Tales or Gargantua and Pantagruel mode. I like both. 

Like those other books, this is also a set of stories that operate in a very different understanding of the world to now. There’s a lot of racism in the book, a black character is almost always oversexed and animalistic, even if they’re a eunuch. Jews and Christians are always the baddies in any story they are in, Persians often have access to arcane magic. It’s a world that runs on types. It’s also a world that is very comfortable with slavery, especially sexual slavery. There seems to be a rule about having no more than four wives, but as many sex slaves as can be afforded is fine. There also isn’t much difference between wife and slave, and those words are often used interchangeably. This is fine (in the text) because all women are up for it all the time and hunger for nothing more than a proud zab and love to attend the ‘weeping child’. Though it is also vital that ones own daughter is covered at all times and has her ‘precious treasure’ ever locked up.

This misogynistic element is inherent in the frame story. King Shahryar is cheated on, as is his brother. The two brothers go travelling to clear their heads and meet a sleeping jinni. The jinni has a concubine who forces them to sleep with her by threatening to wake the jinni if they don’t. She’s doing this to get back at the jinni and Shahryar concludes that if jinnis are being cheated on, he stands no chance. Yet there is a counterpoint in Scheherazade - though she does only tell her stories after sex.

It might be this misogyny that made me really fall in love with a particular character called Mother of Calamity. She appears in ‘The Tale of King Umar Al-Numan and his Two Remarkable Sons, Sharkan and Du AL-Makan’, a 238 page epic in the middle of this volume. The whole story is a family saga with lots of romance and strife. It’s set in a war between the Islamic countries and Christian Constantinople. Mother of Calamity is one of the christians. She’s a hideous old woman with a face like ‘an old man’s bottom’ and at one point does a far that ‘sends pebbles moving’.  She’s also shrewd, cunning and relentlessly set on revenge. She’s a baddie in the story, but a really enjoyable and delicious one. 

I also really liked the depiction of Christians in this story as it was different to what I’m used to. The Thousand Nights and One Night is set in a very Muslim world, where even ogresses worship Allah and birds know the al-fatihah, so the Christians barbarian invaders. While the Muslim soldiers go into battle after a wash and prayer, the Christians use ‘supreme incense of patriarchal excrements’, ground up patriarch shit. This shit isn’t even pure, as they get through so much that it has the shit of lesser clergymen mixed in. Needless to say, it doesn’t help the Christians and when they die their souls fly out their bowels and straight to hell. (In the second volume, a man explains how Christians don’t wash because a priest washed them when they were babies and don’t feel they need to again).

Another character I really enjoyed was the Barber of Baghdad. He’d popped up in another story where his garrulous ways had ruined another man’s life. He denies this, saying he’s the sensible one in his family and known as ‘the silent’ because he speaks so rarely and his words are always well chosen. He then goes on to tell about all his less sensible brothers, all while showing how talkative and foolish he really is.

There’s a story where a group of people all find themselves lumbered with a corpse and palm it off on someone else, till all of them are accused of the murder and have to tell stories to save their lives. There’s a detective tale where a wazir has to discover who murdered a woman chopped up and buried in a pot, on pain of his own life. There’s one about a fisherman tricking a genie back into a sealed pot. 

This volume consists of 644 pages of densely typed tales and there are another 1,698 pages to go.

Trip: A Day in Derby

During the summer holidays I took a day trip to Lincoln by train. I mostly went to mooch around the castle and spend some Waterstones vouchers in the remainders room they have there. As I was on the train, I looked at other destinations and wondered which of them would have the best 18th Century options - having not been to a good eighteenth century related thing for some time. 

Derby was the clear winner. The town that Bonnie Prince Charlie (shown above) reached before turning back during the '45 Jacobite rebellion, the town Erasmus Darwin ended up in after Lichfield, the home of the first modern factory, a silk mill founded in 1721 and the home of frequent 18th century science book jacket author, Joseph Wright of Derby.  

My first stop was at a little cafe for a fry up and a cup of tea. I knew it was the right place because it was full of old people and seemed to have a nice little community around it, then I found the Eagle bookshop. I can't walk past a second-hand bookshop so I popped in. One of the things I've said about moving to Grimsby is how the charity shops only seem to have those Catherine Cookson, working-class-woman-in-period-costume books. I may be seriously misguided, they may be great books, but they've never appealed to me. This shop was the motherlode of those kind of books, face after face of women in clogs. I didn't find anything for me there, but if you're after regency romance, they have a bookcase full.

 

My first museum was the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Not only does it hold a lot of Joseph Wright of Derby paintings, but it's also holding a special exhibition about his candlelight paintings that brings together many of them for the first time in 80 years. 

I didn't realise how large his An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump and A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery are, they dominated the room in which they were placed. I thought the writeup was very astute when it said, "Wright's fascination lay not in the scientific principle being demonstrated but in the spectacle of knowledge being kindled." There is a drama to the two paintings, especially the Air Pump which is extremely captivating and enticing. I also really liked the inclusion of a preparatory sketch, both in itself, the goofy unfinished quality of the faces and the fact it became part of the gallery as the payment in missed taxes. 

I was also struck by how the experimenter in both paintings has a similar red jacket, but in the Orrey painting, the experimenter is more dignified but in the Air Pump, he has a more alchemist air. Wright also painted an alchemist in a work with the wonderfully long title of, The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher's Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers. It's another dramatic piece, with the titular alchemist glowing in the light of the phosphorus. There were also paintings of people studying sculptures by candlelight and a group of blacksmiths around a forge. The exhibition went into details about the origins of candlelit paintings, Wright's childhood interest in magic lanterns and the box he used to study lighting effects. It was really interesting.

The gallery itself also has a Wright room, featuring non-candlelit pictures, including a portrait of Erasmus Darwin and two that were inspired by Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. I definitely prefer the drama of the candle pictures, but I'd give the others house room.

The museum also includes a section of prehistoric Derby (or pre-Derby), with a mammoth tusk and a rhinoceros skeleton; some remnants of Roman era Derby and a few things from the tussle between the Mercians and the Grand Army of the Vikings. There's even a sarcophagus legendarily associated with the bones of St Alkmund, who was temporarily moved to Derby by Æthelflæd - oh, and a stuffed racing pigeon called The King of Rome.

Towards the back of the museum is a wooden panelled room telling the story of the '45 Jacobite rebellion. It contains a piece of Flora McDonald's dress and a model of eighteenth century Derby. Most peculiarly, the room is lined with the panels from the room where the decision was made to take the Jacobite army back to Scotland instead of moving on to London. Some photos of the museum include a mannequin of Bonnie Prince Charlie, but I'm sad to say that's not there anymore. 

My next museum was the Pickford's House Museum. Originally built by Joseph Pickford, the designer of Wedgewood's House, Etruria Hall, it served as his home and showpiece. The rooms in the ground floor are decked out to show how the upwardly mobile Pickfords lived, with their drawing room, large entrance hallway and dining room with more Joseph Wright paintings.

It's a very nicely done house museum, although the kitchen doesn't have the standard regulation pretend food a lot of them have. One oddity is that the house contains a 1930s bathroom and an Edwardian bathroom that also serve as the toilets for the public. It did feel a lot like visiting someone's house. 

Things get weird on the second floor with a special exhibition about Lara Croft. I didn't realise that the Tomb Raider games were created in Derby, but the people of Derby definitely do. There are a number of rooms containing the computers used to code the game, props from the films and various models, magazine covers and posters of the star herself - though not a lot about how controversial the character was at times. There's also a chance to play the original game on PlayStation. I had it on PC and playing it here reminded me why I never got past the first level and why I don't play computer games. 

The top floor contains one of the country's largest collections of toy theatres (of course). The first production to be held in a Derby theatre was of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer and it was also where the debut production of Dracula was held. While I enjoyed all three of my museum visits, Pickford's House was my favourite, it was quirky and charming.

My last museum was The Museum of Making, held in the Lombe's silk mill, it was opened in 2021 after a £17 million refurbishment. It's certainly the most impressive of the three museums to walk into, with a disassembled car and a Roll's Royce jet engine hanging from the ceiling.

The first gallery is about the mill itself, the result of industrial espionage, it was the first of the mills along the Derwent that later included Arkwright's famous mill. These buildings revolutionised the world, and the stretch of the river where they were built is now a Unesco world heritage site. The museum doesn't shy away from the child labour and environmental impact of these buildings either. The rest of gallery is a showcase of things built in and near Derby, from chimney pots to a mini nuclear reactor developed by Roll's Royce. It also features Erasmus Darwin's microscope and a copy of Flamsteed's map of the stars - with illustrations by Hogarth's father-in-law, James Thornhill.

The second floor holds 'assemblage'. Billed as "not your average museum display", it's a collection of objects organised by the material that made them. It struck me as a bit odds-n-sods, a jumble sale of random items. I asked the volunteer on the floor about it and they confirmed it was a space to put things.. many of them a little underwhelming - lots of chimney pots. I did very much enjoy the placement of these two railway signs though.

The third floor had a little exhibition that seems to mainly serve as an advertisement for the John Smedley company, who make £240 jumpers. The rest of the floor is a pay-to-entry hot decking area.

The Museum of Making is a very strikingly presented museum but I found it a little lacking. I think what it needed were more human stories. During Easter I went to the Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet in Sheffield and that's crammed full of the stories of the people that worked there. The Museum of Making was a little colourless in comparison, especially after the utterly charming Pickford's House. 

All in all, I very much enjoyed my Derby trip and I recommend it as a very decent 18th century day out. 

 

'Short Story Summer' - John Collier, Edith Pearlman and Muriel Spark

 From June to August I’ve been indulging in what I’ve called ‘short story summer’. The first few books (Irving, Hoffman and Pu Songling) could all be linked to the eighteenth century, and the last four are one of my big reads - which left three short story collections sort of loose and unaccounted for. So I reviewed them here. 

 

Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier

Having read John Collier’s Tom’s A-Cold (which I very much enjoyed) and His Monkey Wife (which I didn’t enjoy as much), I decided to read Fancies and Goodnights, a collection of short stories. Ray Bradbury’s introduction was about how influential Collier had been on him, as well as on The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with a number of the stories being adapted for those shows. One of his stories also inspired Little Shop of Horrors and one of Stephen Sondheim’s earliest musicals. They seemed worth a read.

One of the first things I noticed was that these stories are frequently actual stories. This may seem redundant, but I’ve often read a modern short story collection where the pieces seem like excerpts of novels or just.. interesting bits of writing. These stories actually have beginnings, middles and endings for the most part, the endings usually having a twist - and that twist usually being murder. This was the weakness of this collection, where most of the stories would be very enjoyable in the context of a magazine or by itself, the construction of them becomes quite plain and the twists quite predictable.

Collier’s total aversion to women and marriage also comes across very plainly throughout the collection also. Almost all the women in the stories fall under the category of innocent, sexual harpy and nag. Pretty much any story with a married couple in them will end with the wife being murdered, usually framed in a way that it’s a comeuppance for their sexual harpyness, their nagging or as a result of their innocence. There was misogyny in His Monkey Wife which rubbed against the larky telling and that feeling multiplies across 30-odd stories. 

My favourite story, ‘Mary’ did actual portray a sweet love story. A young man and woman fall in love. He’s a showman who tours an intelligent pig called Mary, who he lives with in a caravan as they tour. The woman moves in and they travel together, with the woman growing more and more jealous of Mary the pig, who seems to revel in her position above the wife. Of course someone dies on the story, but that someone is a spoilt pig.

Another good story is the very first one ‘The Bottle Shop’ where a man buys a genie but things don’t turn out as he wished. What makes it fun is the mundane way the shop is depicted against the magic things it sells. I enjoyed the story about the people living in department stores, the one where superstitious villagers believe a man’s chequebook contains magic money, the one about a flea who feels the feelings of everyone he’s bitten. There were two stories about a man burying his wife under the house which would have worked better if they had been swapped around.

Collier manages to have a lot of variety in the setting and tone of the stories. Some feel more American, others more English, they are told in different voices and registers, he can often pull out a surprising simile. Collier is a good writer and many of the stories are good but the clockwork behind them, which is so satisfying at first, does get tedious. I’d recommend We All Hear Stories in the Dark by Robert Shearman, which does the weird story thing with more warmth, wit and variety. 

Honeydew by Edith Pearlman

Edith Pearlman has a really fitting name, as each of the pieces in this book feel like little pearls. They grow like pearls, identifying a little grit in a characters life but develop into positive, hopeful depictions of the world which makes them enjoyable and precious. I’d be reluctant about calling these stories though. 

For example, ‘Blessed Harry’ is about a man who receives a scam email asking him to talk about ‘the mystery of life and death’, which leads him to think about his life. We learn about his job, wife, children and the deceased Uncle James, who used to live with them. We also are told about Harry, a houseplant which clings to life and is a part of their daily routines. When he finds out the email is a scam, he comforts himself in the love of his family and wonders why the plant keeps on living. As such, we are introduced to the characters, they feel real and loveable and you wish them the best. They do things and feel things and think things. It’s all conveyed with ease and a good eye for a striking detail. Yet, it’s not quite a story. All the ingredients are there, events, characters, theme but they don’t all pull together exactly. 

It’s odd, because some of these pieces are packed with stuff, ‘Castle 4’ has a cast of hundreds, a number of locations, dual love stories, tales of connection, healing and peaceful death - but it still doesn’t quite cohere into a story shape. It means that I was enjoying the book a great deal but always slightly unsatisfied. The blurb says the stories contain ‘whole lives in ten pages’ and they do, but whole lives are not stories, that’s why biographies often fall flat. 

Many of the pieces are set in the same fictional neighbourhood, with a number set in an antique shop owned by a woman called Rennie. She makes it a rule to never get involved in the lives of her customers but inevitably breaks the rule all the time. I found her charming and I’d like to visit her shop.

The book is still an enjoyable experience though. Most of the pieces have a comforting vision of humanity and community, people usually come together in them and they are reminders of goodness in a world that often seems uninterested in them. While the lack of stories bugged me, the characters were very well drawn, vivd and layered and real. There’s a lot to like in Honeydew, even if I couldn’t love it.

The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark is a writer who manages to write the novels that only Muriel Spark could write. I find them a little hit and miss but I always find them interesting and unique. How would I fair with Spark’s ventures into a notably hit and miss genre, short stories? In short, hit and miss - but with far more hits than misses.

These stories range from her earliest works to some written shortly before her death. The collection seems a little haphazard, certainly not in chronological order but the first few stories (and among her earliest) all deal with having dual nationality in England and The Colony - now Zimbabwe, but then, Rhodesia. The Colony is painted as something of a living hell, at least a purgatory. It’s dry, hot, intense and violent. Almost all these stories involve a ‘shooting incident’ and these are depicted as perfectly ordinary events.

The racial perspective in these stories is interesting. The English people (and those of English descent) are depicted as trapped, often drunk and yearning for the quiet, muted raininess of England. The native population largely feature as scenery, serving in crowd scenes or as background but never as characters in themselves. It’s the Dutch who are the wildcards, and are always the people pulling the triggers in these shooting incidents. These general groups of people are pretty much fixed in place for all the stories set in The Colony, as if Spark can’t perceive them falling out in any other way.

Out of these stories, I probably most enjoyed Bang Bang, You’re Dead, in which an elderly person is being shown seemingly idyllic, exotic videos taken of her but remembers the far more grubby reality. I was also entertained and bemused by The Pawnbroker’s Daughter, which includes a family who use their little power to insist on a family-wide delusion. The Go-Away Bird was almost a novella, and told a full story that seemed to mainly exist for the punchline at the end.

One of the things I love about Muriel Spark, that also infuriates me, is the way she often occludes some of the character motivations or reasons behind things. In A Playhouse Called Remarkable a friend of the narrator claims to be an ancient being from the moon who brought culture down to earth. Most strangely, the stone age residents of Hamstead Heath have a mayor, town hall and press, but only one entertainment, chanting ‘tum tum ya’. It’s got a very grisly end. In The Twins, the reader has to put together clues to conclude that a couple’s children are manipulating them and everyone around them. Nothing is outright stated though. Generally if Spark states something, it’s categorically not the truth in the story.

The stories are mostly told in the first person from someone at an angle to the story. This is one of the things that make the worlds she paints so obtuse. Sometimes the narrator sounds like it may be Spark herself, many of these are writers. The narrator of The Snobs watches two very persistent social climbers trying to bag a stay in a French chateau (the narrator also says she’s met them before, but doesn’t elaborate where. In Harper and Wilson the narrator is pestered by the characters from an unfinished manuscript. She claims Ladies and Gentlemen was based on a true event and it’s fun to wonder how many of the other stories were.

Spark does a fun line in ghosts and ghost adjacent stuff. One line from the stories I had come across before was the reveal, “that’s when he murdered me”. Another has a woman wandering around in her daily routine, aware she’s forgotten something - only to find the thing she had forgotten was her body, which is laying murdered. There’s a man who is alive but whose ghost lives with his mum as a separate entity, and another story about a psychiatrist haunted by a pearly shadow. Mrs Pinkerton’s Apocalypse only seems to exist to make puns about flying saucers.. that was an odd one.

Two of the most peculiar stories follow each other, one I loved and one I did not. You Should Have Seen the Mess was about a working class woman who doesn’t realise how much the upper classes love their mess, mouldering piles of stuff and mismatched chairs. She even turns down a very (financially) rewarding husband because he’s so untidy - because she doesn’t realise cleanliness is a poor person’s virtue. Quest for Lavishes Ghast is about someone who hears that phrase everywhere and decides it must mean something. I can see how the story may have come about, a mishearing that created an intriguing phrase, but it comes off as more irritating than anything else.

However, most of these stories are both entertaining and satisfying, packed full of the uniqueness that makes Muriel Spark a writer worth visiting.

Review: Strange Tales of a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling

 Pu Songling’s stories were my favourite in 100 Chinese Myths and Fantasies so I picked up Penguin’s edition which contains 104 of them as well as Pu’s preface with plenty of (useful!) notes to them all.

Pu Songling wrote his Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio throughout his life in the late 17th and early 18th century as an outlet for his frustrations in achieving the second degree in the incredibly strict Chinese bureaucracy. He took stories from friends, from letters, from local myth and his own imagination but they weren’t published until 1766. It’s a fascinating collection which apparently moves between two genres, chaunqui - a sort of ‘strange-but-true’ account of something unusual, be it supernatural or an oddity of nature or human behaviour; and zhiguai, a more shaped ‘fairytale-ish’ story. It means that this collection, despite the length and repetition of some situations (ghosts, fox spirits, magical taoist priests) it remains lively and varied. 

The experience, for this modern reader, is like scrolling through a rabbit hole of ‘you wouldn’t believe this’ type articles but you do it by turning pages, so it’s clearly much better for you. This experience bridges the gap between time, distance and culture, making the whole book an engaging read. Cultural oddities, like footbinding, almost fade into obscurity - before leaping back when you realise that all the most attractive women in the book have a ‘hobbling’ or ‘shuffling’ gait and that a tiny slipper is regarded as the most erotic object in the world.

It’s very much the sexual politics of an unmarried man reading literature in his study - women are often this peculiar and intoxicating figures, beautiful, human-like and unknown. It’s no surprise they often end up being ghosts or fox-spirits. There’s also a pervading insecurity when it comes to performing manhood which comes out in stories like ‘The Silkworm’, where a man’s penis is the same size of a silkworm chrysalis, which scuppers all his life chances. There’s also the fox spirit with a massive penis, or the man who hit his with a hammer to show its strength (and the other man who put a wheel on his and wheeled it around to show it off).

Although a structured study of these stories could tell a reader an awful lot about the society Pu Songling was part of, the chief experience of reading it is one of novelty and surprise. Even the titles are catching, I would find myself ready to go to bed and see the next story has the title ‘Duck Trouble’ and think, one more.. then see the next is called ‘Big Sneeze’ and decide another little one can’t hurt. (Incidentally, ‘Duck Trouble’ is about a man who is cursed to grow eiderdown until he forces someone to insult him and ‘Big Sneeze’ is about someone who sneezes out monsters.)

There’s a story about a man blinded by mud, whose pupils go on little jaunts out of his nose before deciding to settle in one eye, leaving the man two-pupiled like Liu Chung. There’s a story about a man who marries a bee, a woman having an affair with her dog, a man literally laughing his head off and another who is decapitated with his severed head remarking on the sharpness of the sword. I’m not sure how this edition was put together, but there’s one very sweet story about snakes being friends and another about a nasty snake who eats people. Robert Burton would have had a field day with this book.

Mixed in with all this is an eye-witness account of an earthquake, which Pu Songling experienced as a child and the first recorded description of the Indian rope trick. This trick is performed by a Daoist monk, who often appear as trickster beings, gifted with special powers which they mainly use to troll those around them. A number of stories contain homunculi but there are very few giants. I was surprised how few religious elements there were, there’s this unusual mix of Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian elements in the book, a few river gods and a whole panoply of ghosts and spirits but Buddhas don’t pop up like they do in Journey to the West or King Gesar. 

I found ghosts the most interesting. Some of them are malevolent, like the old ghost lady who spat water at people and killed them but most are more pensive and looking for love. Apparently sex with a ghost is incredible but it can kill - because the ghost takes the life force. Many of the ghosts genuinely fall in love with mortals but fear the destructive powers of their copulating. High level fox spirits can also do this, but tend to do it for fun, being more mischievous. Yet there were a number of noble fox spirits and cultured ones as well. My favourite story ‘Lotus Fragrance’ ended with a fox, a ghost and a mortal in a very happy thrupple.

I very much enjoyed Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio as a book which was consistently entertaining and surprising. Somehow it managed to not fall into tale fatigue, helped in part by the concision of the tales themselves. I’m not sure who I’d recommend the book to exactly, but I would recommend it.

 

Review: Tales of Hoffman

 For the second in my short story summer, I decided to read a collection of stories written by someone born in the eighteenth century, who published until a death from syphilis in 1822. ETA Hoffman was a German writer, probably best known for a story which was turned into The Nutcracker. He was also a musician who worked around operas and the stories in this collection have an operatic bigness, but a strangeness all his own.

The collections kicks off with a banger, ‘Mademoiselle de Scudery’, which is about the historic author of Amadis the Gaul, who is embroiled in a murder mystery where she must determine a man’s guilt and plumb the depths of madness - just add The Doctor and some aliens and it’d fit Doctor Who perfectly. Scudery is not much of a detective, she actually makes things worse in her attempts to help. The beginning is wonderfully striking, a desperate man banging on the door but being turned away because his desperation makes him terrifying. As a reader, I knew a huge mistake was happening but could do nothing to change it. The city of Paris has been recovering from a well-connected poison gang and is now reeling from a gang of people murdering young men bringing jewellery to their lovers. 

The solution to the mystery is really interesting. Scudery had been introduced to Rene Cardillac, an eccentric goldsmith who has trouble letting go of his magnificent creations. It’s revealed that Cardillac is the lone killer. His passion for gold and jewels so strong that he can’t let anyone else have them, so kills his customers and steals back the goods. It’s an explanation that is both extreme in its psychological darkness and vaguely plausible. The collection is started with one of the strongest stories.

The next, ‘The Sandman’ is about a man who has childhood nightmares of a figure that comes to his house when he is asleep and makes his parents upset and nervous. He calls this figure the sandman and, one day, peeps in to see him. It’s then described that the Sandman tears of his limbs and boils out his eyeballs - but this can’t be true in the more grounded reality of the book. Certainly his level-headed fiancee, Clara, doesn’t believe it.

Then the plot moves the man to a city where he falls in love with a strange woman, beautiful and precise, short of words but oddly stiff. It turns out she is an automaton, essentially a clockwork robot, and it’s connected to the Sandman somehow. It’s a weird, brooding story, full of odd mentions of eyes. It would seem the story as a connected series of events only lives in the protagonist’s head, that he’s strung together odd moments of his life and created a whole nightmarish concoction.

‘The Entail’ started off as a full on gothic, with more flowery writing than the other stories. A castle stands in a wasteland near the sea, surrounded by ‘storm-proclaiming seagulls’ where the owner only visits once a year. It’s a place of dark secrets and ghostly re-enactments of them. The cause of the whole problem is an entail, a legal contract about who the castle goes to, and the story gets snarled up by the ins and outs of it, leaving it weaker than it started.

‘Doge and Dogeressa’ is a story I knew a little about. I’ve been to the Doge’s Palace and seen where Martin Faliero’s portrait has been covered up. Hoffman weaves this story with hints of witchcraft and almost fairytale like elements, where a penniless rower with a mysterious past is weaved into it. It’s a little less intense than the best stories in the collection but entertaining. 

‘Mines of Falun’ is a sort of reverse Ancient Mariner, with hallucinatory descriptions of a mine being like the sea, haunted by the Queen of the underground and piling on the dread. It’s based on the true story of finding a man buried by a mine collapse 50 years ago and his body being preserved by the airlessness but Hoffman adds levels of folklore and madness all his own.

‘Arthurhof’ and ‘The Choosing of a Bride’ were probably the weakest stories in the collection. The first doesn’t have the intensity of the others and without ‘Doge and Dogeressa’s’ interesting history. I found ‘The Choosing of a Bride’ to be a random collection of events with very little causation. It was a shame it was the last story in the book because it left me feeling lukewarm about the collection, a feeling that faded as I remembered all the brilliant stories.

My favourite story is ‘Councillor Krespel’. It’s not the most satisfyingly constructed of them, it’s essentially half build-up and then half explanation, but something about it gripped me. I loved Krespe; with his sing-song voice, strangely constructed house (apparently something the real Krespel did) and habit of taking violins apart. There was also something brilliant about the secret at the heart of the book not being a villainous one, but one drawn from love and care (if a little smothering). I found it so fascinating that his daughter’s genetic condition leaves her with the most beautiful voice in the world, but also leads to her death if she sings - and that he dissected the violins to find similar flaws. The images and ideas really linger.

I very much enjoyed this collection of stories, most of them being perfect drops of story that conveyed the full satisfaction of a novel. It wasn’t like some short story collections which seem like auditions for future novels, or ones where they seemed to be just moments, but were fully constructed and decent stories. I don’t know much about Hoffman, but if the stories are anything to go by, he must have been an interesting person, these stories are so full of madness, romance and feelings too big to contain. Strange his other works are about a nutcracker and a tomcat.