A Faker's Dozen: Stories
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The wicked exploits of an assortment of louts and losers occupy Melvin Jules Bukiet's profligate imagination in these delectable stories.
The title of Melvin Jules Bukiet's latest collection hints at the deceitful nature of its multiple protagonists. An aspiring writer stalks Vladmir Nabokov across midtown Manhattan one afternoon in the summer of Watergate. A young co-ed's seduction of her elderly philosophy professor delivers her an A and him lasting happiness. Max, "a liar and a voyeur, like any true artist," wanders the East Village taking photographs of murder victims. A famous Holocaust survivor "with the big eyes and the big prize" conducts an impromptu circumcision.
Ranging from 1895 Prague to the site of a Central American rebellion to the home of a certain Seattle software magnate to the roof of an urban skyscraper, each of these outrageous (though occasionally tender) stories offers keen insight into human nature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bukiet (Strange Fire, etc.) loses his bearings in this strained, wooden collection, which strives so hard to be clever that subtlety flies out the window. The 11 stories are best compared to Woody Allen's fictional sendups of great writers, but lack Allen's intelligent wit and insight. "The Two Franzes," a story about the young Franz Kafka, reads like a discarded skit for an intellectual's Saturday Night Live!, with 12-year-old Franz playing messenger boy to his first mentor, playwright Franz Grillparzer. Kafka's budding talent is ploddingly noted ("he often had ideas that he didn't know what to do with"), as is the genesis of The Metamorphosis ("You little insect," hisses his sister). Many of the entries focus on writers and the theme of literary envy. In "Squeak, Memory," Vladimir Nabokov is stalked by a young fan in 1973, with the Watergate scandal providing a contrived backdrop. In "Paper Hero," an unknown novelist plans a ridiculous publicity stunt at a German book fair that goes predictably awry (he's flogging a novel called Strange Fire). In the ambitious metafictional story "Tongue of the Jews," a WASP-y corporate lawyer becomes a guilt-ridden chronicler of Holocaust stories and is drawn into the plot of a Philip Roth type novel, but the effort is marred by broad caricatures of wealthy Jewish New Yorkers. Throughout, Bukiet's pacing is uncertain and his tone uneven, literary pastiche alternating with bald colloquialisms ("Randall sometimes knew when he had been dissed"). These juxtapositions at times yield flashes of humor, but Bukiet never exhibits the incisive wit required for effective satire or farce.