Customer Reviews

Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy

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Long before the words "magical realism" ever cropped up in literary criticism, Avram Davidson was quietly creating a spectacular body of erudite, eloquent, evocative history-as-myth. The Dr. Eszterhazy stories, along with the Vergil novels and "Adventures in Unhistory", are the pinnacle of his accomplishment.

No one has ever had a better ear for dialect, a better sense of the self-importance of minor officials, a better notion of how Balkan politics play out in the back-alleys of minor capitals. And certainly no one has ever had such a perfect (and reverent) sense of the ridiculous, when it comes to the probable behavior of the Vicar-at-Large of the Unreconciled Zwinglians, or the demands of the Frores for an independent Bureau of Weights and Measures, or the universal value of a glass of shnopps, wudky, or St. Martin's.

If you do not love these stories, you're probably just not ready for them yet.

Each of the "short stories" is long enough for a meaningful theme. The elderly Catholic titular queen of Carinthia's summary of the history of the Reformation alone is worth the price of the book, as Dr. Calvin flees from France to Germany, changes his name to Luther, is thrown out by the local ruler, goes to Switzerland, changes his name to Zwingli, and that's why the Switzers have to come to France to be confirmed.

Avram Davidson imagines a world where science is slightly skewed: alchemy works, phrenology (studying the bumps on a skull to determine personality) is a real science, etc. The author takes each "scientific" dead end of the late 19th century (and earlier centuries) and builds witty, cohesive stories around each one. His characters are great and all his plots neatly resolve. The more you know about European history, the more fun you'll get out of his books (Mr. Davidson is, I believe, a professor of an arcane branch of European history).