What do You think about The Knife Thrower And Other Stories (1999)?
review to come but for now:i am in love with the story, "a visit". extended passage transcribed below, in spoiler tags -- i'm not ruining the story here, but by sharing the passage i give away what the story is about.(view spoiler)[His little mocking rebuke irritated me, and I recalled how he had always irritated me, and made me retreat more deeply into myself, because of some little reproach, some little ironic look, and it seemed strange to me that someone who irritated me and made me retreat into myself was also someone who released me into a freer version of myself, a version superior to the constricted one that had always felt like my own hand on my throat. But who was Albert, after all, that he should have the power to release me or constrict me-- this man I no longer knew, with this run-down house and his ludicrous frog-wife. There I ate for a while in sudden silence, looking only at my food, and when I glanced up I saw him looking at me kindly, almost affectionately. "It's all right," he said quietly, as if he understood, as if he knew how difficult it was for me this journey, this wife, this life. And I was grateful, as I had always been, for we had been close, he and I, back then. After lunch he insisted on showing me his land-- his domain, as he called it. I had hoped that Alice might stay behind, so that I could speak with him alone, but it was clear that he wanted her to come with us. So as we made our way out the back door and into his domain she followed along, taking hops about two strides in length, always a little behind us or a little before. At the back of the house a patch of overgrown lawn lead to a vegetable garden on both sides of a grassy path. There were vines of green peas and string beans climbing tall sticks, clusters of green peppers, rows of carrots and radishes identified by seed packets on short sticks, fat heads of lettuce and flashes of yellow squash-- a rich and well-tended oasis, as if the living centre of the house were here, on the outside, hidden in the back. At the end of the garden grew a scattering of fruit trees , pear and cherry and plum. An old wire fence with a broken wooden gate separated the garden from the land beyond. We walked along a vague footpath through fields of high grass, passed into thickets of oak and maple, crossed a stream. Alice kept up the pace. Alice in sunlight, Alice in the open air, no longer a grotesque pet, a monstrous mistake of Nature, a nightmare frog and freakish wife, but rather a companion of sorts, staying alongside us, resting when we rested--Albert's pal. And yet it was more than that. For when she emerged from the high grass or treeshade into full sunlight, I saw or sensed for a moment, with a kind of inner start, Alice as she was, Alice in the sheer brightness and fullness of her being, as if the dark malachite sheen of her skin, the pale shimmer of her throat, the moist warmth of her eyes, were as natural and mysterious as the flight of a bird. Then I would tumble back into myself and realize I was walking with my old friend beside a monstrous lumbering frog who had somehow become his wife, and howl of inward laughter and rage would erupt in me, calmed almost at once by the rolling meadows, the shady thickets, the black crow rising from a tree with slowly lifted and lowered wings, rising higher and higher into the pale blue sky touched here and there with delicate fernlike clouds. The pond appeared suddenly, on the far side of a low rise. Reeds and cattails grew in thick clusters at the marshy edge. We sat down on flat-topped boulders and looked out at the green-brown water, where a few brown ducks floated, out pst fields to a line of low hills. There was a desolate beauty about the place, as if we had come to the edge of the world. "It was over there I first saw her," Albert said, pointing to a cluster of reeds. Alice sat off to one side, low to the ground, in a clump of grass at the water's edge. She was still as a rock, except for her sides moving in and out as she breathed. I imagined her growing in the depths of the pond, under a mantle of lilypads and mottled scum, down below the rays of green sunlight, far down, at the silent bottom of the world. (hide spoiler)]
—Maureen
My father had taught me not to believe in stories about Martians and spaceships, and these tales were like those stories: even as you refused to believe them, you saw them, as if the sheer effort of not believing them made them glow in your mind.-The Flying CarpetsIn a world dense with understanding, oppressive with explanation and insight and love, the members of the silent sisterhood long to evade definition, to remain mysterious and ungraspable. Tell us! we cry, our voices shrill with love. Tell us everything! Then we will forgive you. But the girls do not wish to tell us anything, they don't wish to be heard at all.- The Sisterhood of NightI am having the hardest time pulling together what I want to say about this book, so I apologize in advance if any of this is unclear, and I will come back and do this better if better ever comes together. Remember when albums mattered? When you had to buy music not song by song but as a collection of connected songs? How some artists would actually arrange the whole album as a piece of collective art above and beyond the particular songs themselves? That is this book. The whole work taken together comprises a meditation much greater than the parts. Some of the parts don't even work all that well without the whole.The theme of the collection emerged with surprising clarity as I was fighting with "Paradise Park," which at first appeared to be a retread of "The Dream of the Consortium." But as I picked apart analogies and worked the puzzles, it turned out to be a revisit to "The New Automaton Theater" and "The Knife Thrower." Then after a brief WTH moment with "Kaspar Hauser Speaks," Millhauser turns full back to the thread of the theme and expands it out with "Beneath the Cellars of Our Town." By this point the book is no longer an anthology of short stories. It is an extended meditation on imagination, particularly the creation and consumption of art and the relationships between art, artist, and consumer (reader). It is one of those books that almost need to be reread as soon as finished, because once its theme emerges in the last pages, the whole work need re-examination with the new perspective in mind. (I am going to wait a bit on that myself, but I will do it eventually.) There is also a nice rhythm to this collection. The stories move from night to day and back again in an almost unbroken progression. There is also a pattern of rising and falling, from flights to explorations of subterranean worlds that begs for a closer examination. The seams of the work are showing in places, and the repetitive nature of the anthology is a little frustrating, but between the meat of the theme and the beauty of the writing (particularly "Flying Carpets," "Clair de Lune," "The Dream of the Consortium," and "Balloon Flight, 1870"), there is really very little to complain about here. I loved it even the moments of frustration.(I see in other reviews that some have dismissed this as derivative of Italo Calvino and recommended Invisible Cities instead. I do very much want to read that (not just because I get Lorde's "Team" stuck in my head when I hear the title), but I think I will read Dangerous Laughter and Enchanted Night first. There is nothing new under the sun, and revisiting the same concepts from a different angle does not strike me as an immense burden.)
—Amy (Other Amy)
As soon as I read a few of Steven Millhauser's stories in The New Yorker (and Harpers? I think...) I knew that he would be one of my favorite writers. There are certain writers whose voices pierce right into you, and Millhauser is one of them for me. But then I waited a long time before reading a full book by him. In the meantime, one of his stories was adapted into the film "The Illusionist." Despite the fact that Millhauser has won a Pulitzer, every time I looked for one of his books at a Borders store, they seemed to be completely or almost completely absent. I finally tracked down a used copy (of a British edition) of this collection featuring one of my favorite Millhauser stories, "The Knife Thrower."Millhauser writes in a somewhat distant voice, revealing very little in the way of character. His stories are often more like fictional versions of essays or nonfiction books. Sometimes he narrates a story in the first-person-plural "we." Sometimes he writes in a sort mock-journalism. These stories remind me of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" and the "Fictions" of Borges. Some recurring themes emerge in this collection, including a desire to escape everyday life by flying into the air or descending into tunnels or underground amusement parks. Several stories involve the need to be entertained -- and the boundaries of what is considered entertainment.A few of the stories in this collection are a little perfunctory, so I've knocked one star off the rating, but many of the stories are simply magnificent works of the imagination that will haunt me for a long time, including the title story, "The New Automaton Theatre" and "The Sisterhood of the Night."
—Robert
