Tales from Two Pockets
by Karel Capek
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Book Summary Information
Author: Karel CapekTranslator: Norma Comrada
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1994-06-01
ISBN: 0945774257
Number of pages: 365
Publisher: Catbird Press
Book Reviews of Tales from Two Pockets
Book Review: The best mystery short-story collection I've read
Summary: 5 Stars
Poe, Doyle, Christie -- none of their stories is better than "The Stolen Cactus," "The Crime at the Post Office," or "Footprints." This collection of crime stories had all the twists and clever resolutions I could ask for. Unexpectedly, it also has quite a few insights into human nature and coping with reality. I read "The Man Who Couldn't Sleep" after a night of disturbing dreams and felt as if Capek were writing to me from the grave.
I found this book in the English-language section of a bookstore in Prague, during my first visit to the Czech Republic, which is a surprising and wonderful place. I didn't know the first thing about Czech culture or history before then. I didn't even know that one of Capek's contemporaries in Prague was Kafka, who was Czech, not German.
Reading Capek convinced me that Kafka was -- like Capek -- a humorist; unfortunately humanities professors in the U.S. don't get the joke. In other words, Capek is Kafkaesque and Kafka is Capekesque. Both drew quirky little images, too. That's right: Kafka drew pictures in his manuscripts. A few of Capek's illustrations are reproduced in this book, as well. (Karl Capek's brother Josef was a member of the little-known and very odd Czech Cubist Movement, a group that abhorred right angles.)
The prose in this translation is a bit ponderous, though, so I recommend that when your first open this book you temporarily abandon your requirements -- if any -- that crime fiction be terse and gritty. Remember that you're reading a translation from a Slavic language written a decade after WW I. In addition, the stories are first-person narratives, a form that is little used these days.
I'm eager to read more Capek. And it would be great if the publisher would create a Kindle version of his work.
Summary of Tales from Two Pockets
Capek wrote 48 stories that deconstruct the mystery story by breaking one rule here, three rules there, and yet also make for wonderful reading. His unique approaches to the mysteries of justice and truth are full of the ordinary and the extraordinary, humor and humanism.
Karel Capek (1890-1938), one of the greatest Czechoslovakian authors of the century, and who mastered numerous forms of writing, was particularly inventive with the genre of mystery, detective, and crime fiction. In Tales from Two Pockets, however, Capek took the crime story and related forms of the genre to new levels, weaving strange, short, and powerful psychological studies of ordinary human beings caught in extraordinary and improbable circumstances. Through these intense but always fun stories, Capek moves brilliantly but lightly in the philosophical realms of human existence, exploring the nature of crime and justice, even the very concept of truth.
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