The Fool and Other Moral Tales
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the brilliant, sui generis Anne Serre—author of the celebrated Governesses—come three delicious, thoroughly out-of-the-way tales.
Fairy-tale atmospheres and complex narratives are a hallmark of the fiction of Anne Serre, represented here by three radically heterodox novellas. The Fool “may have stepped out of a tarot pack: I came across this little figure rather late in life. Not being familiar with playing cards, still less with the tarot, I was a bit uncomfortable when I first set eyes on him. I believe in magic figures and distrust them…a figure observing you can turn the world upside down.” The Narrator concerns a sort of writer-hero: “Outcasts who can’t even tell a story are what you might call dropouts, lunatics, misfits. With them the narrator is in his element, but has one huge advantage: he can tell a story.” Little Table, Set Yourself!—a moral tale concerning a family happily polyamorous—is the most overtly a fable of these three works, and the briefest, but thin as a razor is thin. A dream logic rules each of these wildly unpredictable, sensual and surreal novellas: these may be romps, but nevertheless deeply moral and entirely unforgettable ones.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Symbols and signs take on life-changing meanings in Serre's three sharp, sophisticated, and inventive tales (following The Governesses). Examining a tarot deck given to her by a friend, the narrator of "The Fool" realizes she has already encountered the eponymous card in real life: "You think things appear only on playing cards.... In reality, they exist in life." The Fool has already come to her in various guises, including Carl, her lover, and the nameless childhood dread that long ago inspired her to become a writer, "to make a pact with the thing that threatens you." In the slyly funny anti-bildungsroman "The Narrator," a man travels to a chalet to write, and as he engages in an affair with his landlady, he's both delighted and inundated with material, feeling that "nothing remained of the world but... the ghostly apparitions of dreams," which he will turn into a book. But his inability to connect with others occasions a crisis; he no longer wishes "to feel holier-than-thou with your precious images... to feel smug simply because you're different." Dreamy and deeply sexual, "The Wishing Table" revisits and revises the literature of debauchery; its narrator, now nearing 40, recounts a happily incestuous childhood. Drawing on fairy tales and psychoanalysis, pornography and poststructuralism, Serre constructs stunning and searing stories that will remain with readers.
