The Knife Thrower: And Other Stories

After only Marcel Proust, there is no author whom I more intensely enjoy than Steven Millhauser. I rank him with and even above several more-famous writers whom I also love: Faulkner, Borges, Stevenson, Joyce, and Nabokov among them. Of the seven Millhauser books that I own, this is, I believe, the best of them. The Barnum Museum, another collection of short stories, would be a close second, with the idiosyncratic novel Edwin Mullhouse being the third contender. Writing a recommendation for this book is intimidating. Millhauser possesses a distinctive literary genius, and I most certainly do not. It feels something like trying to write a musical tribute to Beethoven or to Miles Davis; a doomed effort to try to describe a great work in the same medium wherein the original artist maneuevers much more expertly. Perhaps an analogy will help. I'm told that someone once asked of Einstein what was the source of his genius. He said (I'm told) that he never got over being a child, never got over asking all sorts of childish questions. Why does the Earth go around the sun? Why is water wet? What is time? What is light? Except that, as an adult, he was also in possession of the intellectual tools available to adults: higher mathematics, and an abundance of scientific knowledge. He just kept playing with his lifelong fascinations, but with his education, he could go further to find answers. Millhauser reminds me of that in some ways. He retains the child's fascination with all of the elements of imagination: with carnivals, and fortune-tellers, and fairy tales, and arcades, and cartoons, and urban legends, and comics, and strange museums. But as a brilliant adult writer, he can probe the meaning of it all, and can gain a perspective on such things that a child cannot. Many of the selections in this book of short stories probe such questions: what excites our imagination? what adds color and mystery to the world? are these things a constructive stimulation or a form of decadence? how can we keep the flame of such fascinations alive? should we? The first story in this group addresses those questions more straightforwardly than most: in fact, slightly too straightforwardly for my taste, as it's not my favorite of this particular collection. It is the story of a knife thrower who comes to town to amaze with his feats of skill and daring, which both delight and terrify. The story lulls you in with the fairly-whispered excitement of the prospect of such a performance, and wonders when escapism and morbidity have gone too far. I prefer some of the subtler stories in this collection that probe a similar theme. The final piece, "Beneath the Cellars of Our Town," concerns a labyrinth of subterranean stone passageways, the "meaning" of which is similarly wondered about, but only after their description in realistically vivid detail. One of my favorite stories in this collection is the magnificent "Clair de lune." This story tells of a

You never know where you're going in a Steven Millhauser story, but you are always glad you came along for the ride. (This reader is not a huge fan of the short-story form, but I make an exception for Millhauser and other modern masters like Stuart Dybek.) Millhauser's genius in "Knife Thrower" is his narrator's voice-a spooky, spectral "we" who seems to be both watching the bizarre spectacle below and a part of it. After a few stories, the reader becomes part of the "we," and is transported into a very strange world. It's like mainlining Frank Baum or C.S. Lewis: you start feeling like a visitor on your own planet. The atmosphere of these stories is addictive and entrancing, and it almost hurt to come to the end of this collection. Try Jeffrey Eugenides "Virgin Suicides" for another successful variation on this theme.

Steven Millhauser, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his wonderful period novel, Martin Dressler, is an author who is strikingly different from his contemporaries. The Knife Thrower is pure Millhauser and in this collection of stories he once again looks at almost everything except ordinary, earthbound, twentieth-century American life.Even those stories that do have a mundane, contemporary setting, such as The Dream of the Consortium, also contain something of the mysterious as well. In this story, an ordinary shopping mall becomes a world of Moorish courtyards and Aztec pyramids. In The Sisterhood of the Night, a secret society of girls, not so unusual in itself, manages to encompass the mysterious when the girls slip out of their homes to indulge in nothing more than silence. In Clair de Lune, a boy finds himself at a baseball game. But this is a nocturnal baseball game, played by girls who are dressed as boys. Flying Carpets is a fascinating story that details both the joys and the problems inherent in that particular mode of travel.At first glance, Millhauser's stories might appear to be little more than surreal melodramas, stories that definitely have virtues but stories that also cause the reader to give up in despair. This, however, is certainly not the case. Millhauser, like Kafka, draws us effortlessly into the shimmering worlds of his imagination through his poignant and expert use of detail and the elegance and beauty of his poetic prose.In five of these twelve stories, Millhauser uses the first person plural to wonderful effect and effectively allows his narrators to speak, not only for themselves, but for their community as well. The title story, one of the collection's best, centers around a knife thrower named Hensch and the single performance given by Hensch and his assistant which involves a series of increasingly dangerous tricks. Like the audience, we remain uncertain about what it is we really witness as the story draws to a surprising close.Those already familiar with Millhauser's work will be reminded of his gorgeous story, Einsenheim the Illusionist which also follows the path from ordinary to extraordinary. Other stories in this fascinating collection also bear a debt to Millhauser's earlier work, most notably The New Automaton Theater which is reminiscent of Millhauser's novella, August Eschenburg. Both offer a biography of a master automaton maker. While August Eschenberg finds himself trumped by a fellow creator, the central character in The New Automaton Theater, Heinrich Graum, stops work at the height of his success and remains silent for a period of a dozen years. When Graum finally does return to the theater he finds something very surprising and disturbing has happened to his work.Although the first person plural seems to dominate these stories, some of the most vivid and intimate are written in the first person singular. In, A Visit, the narrator goes to see an old friend in a remote town and finds th

I had read the knife thrower story some time ago. It's a gripping tale of a somewhat small town, and what happens when the knife thrower comes to town. He's not just any knife thrower. He is, shall we say, somewhat extreme. He wounds his targets, he asks for volunteers. The audience gets excited. He's beyond the pale, yet they can't look away. Many of the stories in this book carry a "what if" theme. What if kids growing up could have flying carpets? What if amusement parks could be any way we imagined them? What if we could marry frogs? What if Kaspar Hauser had told us what he really thought about us? These possibilities are injected into otherwise normal situations and people react to them through their normal paradigms. They glimpse the magical through a preponderance of the mundane. Every story carries a tinge of danger or a trace of uneasiness. Millhauser seems to take great joy with the worlds he creates and that joy is passed on to the reader.

Like Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," or a favorite episode of "The Twilight Zone," these stories take you from the ordinary world to fantastic, magical, sometimes disturbing places. Milhauser makes you believe that behind our mundane everyday existance lie frightening, dreamlike possibilities. These stories stay with you long after the book is back on the shelf.