Opium and Other Stories

This is something else. Not addiction. Opium is a picture about the third world where everyone wants to be. Maybe not this way tho... These ditties are pictures and visions from Csath unearthly mind. 'The Red Esther' or 'Erna' - warm stories with the woman of his great, deep soul. The impossible points are in which you get being arrested, and get turned out to another line. To an innocent, life-made sudden end. Csath's voice talks to you as your friend, slightly introduce you into this land and this is another thing what makes the whole thing so enchanting. Book a seat for this beautiful journey.

I ran acrosss this odd book while taking a class on "Literature from the Other Europe", meaning, not Britain, Franch or Spain. What I found was perhaps the truest account of addiction I've seen from anywhere but America or England. "Opium" is a short story that covers in a few pages the euphoria and self loathing of the addict. This wasn't written by someone faking addiction. You can feel everything as if you were living it yourself.

Opium Dreams is a rather obscure little collection of short stories by a virtually unknown writer who died under bizarre and violent circumstances at the end of World War I. The stories are excellent dream-like journeys through the macabre world of addiction. From opium to absinthe, each story is a window which sheds light on the darker sides of the human mind caught in the throes of addiction. It is less didactic and more enjoyable than De Quincey--definitely the product of a mind ravaged by the subject matter of the stories. A rarity which is well worth adding to any library.

"Opium" and the other stories in this slim volume use fiction to convey the wonder and horror of narcotic addiction in a way that few other books have managed to do. It stands with De Quincey's "Confessions" and Cocteau's "Opium: Diary of a Cure" as the finest examples of the true cost of addiction, but because it's fiction it draws the reader into the world of the addict even more accurately than the other two examples do. A masterpiece that should be better known than it is.