True to its name, this 1932 collection by the Czech author of War with the Newts is crowded with sprites, fairies and others of that insubstantial ilk. Genuine fantasy results, however, when they cross paths with stubbornly human types in such sweetly absurd scenes as when a policeman serves notice to a dragon (“Hello there . . . mind showing me your papers? Do you have an ID? A gun permit? A library card?”) or a bevy of doctors diagnoses a magician gagging on a plum pit (variously acute prunitis, choking plumitis, stonepititis of the pharynx and prunoplumryx stonepititis). The author’s brother contributes illustrations and one tale “for good measure,” adding his gentle mark to a mix that smacks of Wilde, in the beatific magician of “The Great Cat’s Tale”; of Gogol, in the incorrigible hat of “The Tramp’s Tale”; of Kipling throughout; and, above all, of Capek’s own animism, endowing cat, mailman, hydra, American detective and frog with good, jovial souls.

Incorrigible!

Froog: Until finding this tale, the only thing I knew about him was that he’d invented “robot” for a play called R.U.R.. (I’m just glad, and astonished, that you apparently haven’t blogged about him yet. :) (At least in Froogville — don’t know about the Barstool.))

Although Capek predated them by several decades, this tale — and what I’ve since read of the others — seems to share some of the spirit of the fantastic explored (and exhibited) by Central European authors like Lem and Kundera. That one about Lazarus sounds like a keeper.

cynth: Yes, lots of ks here and Risk, aren’t there? Kamchatka sounds like somebody breaking his teeth on a mouthful of gravel.

He has some marvellous fables about historical characters: I particularly recall one about Alexander the Great (justifying his succession of expeditions ever further eastward in a letter home to his old tutor Aristotle), and another about Lazarus (who so hated being dead that after his resurrection he becomes a hypochondriac invalid). I’d never come across the rascally hat before, though.

I was somehow reminded (well, it was the courtroom setting and all the place names that did it) of a short story by Saki called The Lost Sanjak, a case of mistaken identity in which a young man is confused with a murderer and finds that the only thing that can prove his true identity and save him is his supposedly encylopedic knowledge of the geography of the Ottoman Empire.

And to read some of his tales for children.

Now I’m wondering about the private life of the Hogwarts Sorting Hat…

Miriam: Oh yeah, “cossack” is pretty much a guarantee of… interestingness. Though I have to admit that — aside from the hat-chasing action — the one thing that caught my eye in this was all the place names. When I first pasted it into the post, WordPress kept changing all the diacriticals into question marks. I finally gave up and just replaced them with Roman-alphabet “equivalents,” but in the meantime reading the story was like being interrupted every five seconds by someone saying Huh? What’s that? and that? WHAT?

like my recaptcha too: musing curfew