The Last Bell
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A maid who is unexpectedly left her wealthy employers' worldly possessions, when they flee the country after the Nazi occupation; a loyal bank clerk, who steals a Renaissance portrait of a Spanish noblewoman, and falls into troublesome love with her; a middle-aged travel agent, who is perhaps the least well-travelled man in the city and advises his clients from what he has read in books, anxiously awaits his looming honeymoon; a widowed villager, whose 'magnetic' (or perhaps 'crazy') twelve-year-old daughter witnesses a disturbing event; and a tiny village thrown into civil war by the disappearance of a freshly baked cheesecake - these stories about the tremendous upheaval which results when the ordinary encounters the unexpected are vividly told, with both humour and humanity. This is the first ever English publication of these both literally and metaphorically enchanting Bohemian tales, by one of the great overlooked writers of the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is the long-overdue English-language debut by a contemporary of Kafka's though it might make more sense to consider Urzidil a counterpoint to his fellow Bohemian, for his stories confront the Jewish-Czech identity that Kafka was content to dissolve in allegory. Kafka's first book was one of the few items in Urzidil's suitcase when he fled Nazi-occupied Europe for New York, and there's an echo of Urzidil's flight in the title story, in which a servant inherits her masters' fortune after they are forced to flee the Germans, only to learn that wealth amounts to little in a city of fear. "The Duchess of Albanera" concerns a pompous bank clerk turned thief who hides a stolen Bronzino portrait in his apartment, where it speaks to him of the difference between an image and its likeness. In "Siegelmann's Journeys," this collection's clear masterpiece, a lonely travel agent who's never left home fabricates his adventures abroad to impress an equally lonely spinster; he realizes only after they are married that a honeymoon is out of the question, as "the Venice of his dreams and its fantastic topographies would be overpowered and annihilated by reality." Generally, the more allegorical stories are the weaker ones: "Borderland" succeeds as tragic tale of a touched and unusual child who defies the adult world at all costs, but "Where the Valley Ends," about two villages split by a valley and the "idiotic son" who roams between them, reveals the shortcomings of this otherwise ingenious writer.
