Tales of the Night
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
These eight stories are linked by a date and a motif. All of them have to do with love. Love and its conditions on the night of March 19, 1929.
In his second book and his only collection of stories, Peter Høeg proves himself to be a true storyteller in the tradition of Karen Blixen and Joseph Conrad. These beautifully constructed tales deal with love, the classic arts and sciences, and the confrontation of Western and non-Western cultures. Moving from a railroad car in the Congo to a sailboat in Lisbon's harbor to an upper-class apartment in Copenhagen, they include the tales of a young, disillusioned mathematician who comes face-to-face with his culture's distorition of Africa; an esteemed judge who runs off with the young man he has just sentenced to prison for his homosexual tendencies; and a town--sealed off from the plague--that is infiltrated by a troupe of traveling actors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published in Denmark in 1990, before HYeg's 1993 bestseller, Smilla's Sense of Snow, these eight stories take us to eight separate corners of the world on the night of March 19, 1929, a sort of universal Black Monday of the soul. In "Journey into a Dark Heart," a young Danish mathematician falls in with Joseph Conrad on a train trip up the heart of the war-torn Congo; "Hommage a Bournonville" follows star-crossed love into the esoteric world of Danish ballet; in "An Experiment on the Continuity of Love," a female scientist investigates the decay of sexual attraction by an unusual method. It's all heavily symbolic stuff, unabashedly reminiscent of Conrad, Kafka and other early-20th-century masters. Despite a certain stiffness in the prose (the fault of the translation, perhaps), the deep despair and foreboding of well-intentioned Europeans victimized by the very culture that was supposed to educate them is often painfully credible. Potent but problematic, this collection lays bare the difficulties of love, even if it must make do without the dazzling lucidity of HYeg's more recent works.
