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| Sunday, April 22, 2012 04:13 AM |
| (Last updated on Sunday, April 22, 2012 04:20 AM) | | Book Report - Little Kingdoms: Three Novellas |
 by Fëanor |
Like the title says, this is a collection of three novellas, all quite different from each other, and all written by Steven Millhauser, copyright 1993. Poppy thought I might like it and got it out of the library for me. She was right! Thanks, poppy!
The first and longest story is The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne, a relatively realistic look at the life of a newspaper cartoonist and animator, set in 1920 New York. I say relatively realistic because the story occasionally takes brief and surreal detours into the fantastic, thanks to the fact that our main character, John Franklin Payne, isn't as firmly nailed down to reality as it is safe to be. In fact he is so obsessed with the magical worlds he creates in his drawings that he misses a lot of what's going on in his own life. He's mostly unaware of the always-present and ever-widening gap between himself and his wife Cora, and between his philosophy and the philosophy of the modern world, as exemplified by his best (and really only) friend, Max, a fellow employee at the newspaper. It's a sad story with dramatic tension and even a little frustration; you're filled throughout with the constant dread that something is about to go horribly wrong, as well as the knowledge that Payne has no idea and never will until it's too late. But it's also a story with many moments of odd and eerie beauty. Though he destroys himself to make it, Payne's fantasy world seems almost worth the terrible price.
The second story in the book is The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon, a cerebral fantasy tale told in a series of short vignettes. This story reminded me very strongly of the work of Italo Calvino, especially his Invisible Cities, and that's a high compliment. It's a story about stories, and how they make the world, and how the world makes them. It's set in a town existing at the uneasy end of the medieval period, when the noble class is beginning to cede its power to the commercial class. The arrival of a foreign visitor plants a seed of suspicion in the Prince's mind that ultimately destroys many lives, and sets up a tense new dynamic in the castle that the story leaves cleverly and powerfully unresolved. The tale is ancient, but still present; simple, but with infinite variety and complexity of detail; brief, but unending.
The final story is unique. It's called Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810-1846), and the title will give you an idea of its form; it's like the pamphlet you might pick up at an exhibition at an art museum or gallery. Each section is headed by a number, the title of a painting, the year or years it was likely painted, the materials used, and the size. The text then goes on to provide a description and analysis of said painting, as well as details from the artist's life at that time, complete with quotes from personal letters and scholarly works on the subject. This means as you are reading about the paintings, you are also slowly learning the sad and disturbing story of the life of Edmund Moorash. The format also gives you the strong and uneasy sense that this is nonfiction; given this much detail and documentation, it becomes hard to believe you're reading about things and people that don't exist. The piece is written in an occasionally poetically appreciative, but mostly dryly academic tone, and with the assumption that you already know the basic outlines of Moorash's life and art, which makes it all the more effective; as our narrator casually drops hints and foreshadows what's to come, the tension rises, and a heavy sense of foreboding and doom fills the reader. It's similar to the feeling generated by the first story, but here even more pronounced. [UPDATE: Another interesting connection between the first and third stories is that in both of them Millhauser takes upon himself the difficult task of creating fantastic visual art - drawings, cartoons, and paintings - by describing it with only words. In both cases he succeeds admirably.] There's even the vague sense that something mystical, demonic, and other-worldly is at work in Moorash's swirling, shifting, surreal paintings. His art is a deadly weapon.
Although each of these stories are quite different, there are certain themes and moods that run throughout them all. Millhauser is preoccupied with the nature of art, with the grotesque, and with infidelity (I got the sense he wrote these stories right after the end of an unhappy marriage, but that's just a wild guess). I didn't realize until now that the 2006 film The Illusionist was based on his story, "Eisenheim the Illusionist," which I will definitely have to seek out. |
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