Abracadabra

Across these sharply satirical, psychologically charged sketches, ordinary life is pushed into the strange, the comic, and the unsettling. A young narrator follows Minna, a shy girl who matures into a wife and mother under the pressure of marriage, discipline, and suffering, only to discover relief in the eerie conviction that she has "no body" at all. What begins as private comfort hardens into a doctrine of detachment, raising a disturbing question: if pain can be denied so completely, what happens to compassion, grief, and truth? That same tension between surface brilliance and hidden unease runs through a glittering music-hall scene, where a sensational Brazilian performer turns beauty into grotesque parody and provokes a mysterious voice, a false alarm, and an uncanny burst of light onstage. Elsewhere, the book moves into street-level mystery and social irony, following a poor lodger drawn to an elderly, saintly man whose nocturnal wanderings hint at secret charity or some deeper purpose. Alongside these darker tales stand vivid satirical portraits of modern appetite: a woman driven by sensation and reinvention, and a smug English "perfect" man whose toughness masks prejudice, class anxiety, and contempt for sympathy. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.