Cross Roads

"Cross Roads," Catbird's third volume of stories by Karel apek, consists of two early story collections, one written during World War I and the other written shortly thereafter. The first of these collections, "Wayside Crosses," has never appeared in English. The second collection, "Painful Tales," appeared in English in 1930 as "Money and Other Stories" in a mediocre, and practically unknown, translation.

The first collection, "Wayside Crosses," is concerned with how one experiences the absolute. These metaphysical tales involve discovering our spiritual limitations and appreciating our sense of mystery. Like most of apek's stories, these are searching tales about searches, sometimes detective stories that do not follow the rules and do not have solutions, that are about a different sort of detection. Others are about apparent miracles that have no explanations. When answers are found, they are sudden, fleeting moments of intuition that cannot be communicated. Some of the stories also represent apek's first attempts at literary cubism. These stories are essential to understanding apek's oeuvre and his lifelong search.

The second collection, "Painful Tales," consists of more realistic stories about characters being forced to make choices in which one good conflicts with another. "Here people act badly, cowardly, cruelly, or weakly," apek wrote, "and the whole point is that you cannot condemn any of them. I wanted to show man in humiliation and weakness, without debasing his value as a human being." Here apek's search, as well as the reader's, is for sympathy and tolerance, learning to judge the characters for their self-doubt and self-torment as well as for their acts. But apek was also trying his hand at a relatively traditional form of literary storytelling; the results feel somewhat like the stories of Balzac or Maupassant.

The stories in this volume are fascinating in terms of their artistry, their perspectives and, in "Painful Tales," their view of some of the darker and sadder sides of human nature. Together, they provide an excellent view of a young writer both trying to find his voice and trying to cope with the horrors of the First World War.

"Keep 'Wayside Crosses' just down the shelf from Kafka, or Bruno Schulz;
put 'Painful Tales' near Chekhov or Babel. They may not equal the very best
literature of the century, but they will not be out of place in its company."
Dan Halpern,The New Republic

"['Wayside Crosses' is] the most experimental fiction [apek] ever produced.
It is best described as a collection ... of secular parables. ... These are mystery stories
which lack solutions, in which metaphysical McGuffins provoke abstract speculations. ...
['Painful Tales' is] apek's most conventional story collection ...
The stories offer a bleak view of human relationships."
Leo Carey, Times Literary Supplement

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