Cross Roads [Paperback]

Karel Capek (Author), Norma Comrada (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2002

Written during and right after World War I, this volume pairs two short story collections from Karel Capek, considered one of the greatest Czech writers. The first collection, “Wayside Crosses,” presents an agonized and unsuccessful search for God and truth. These metaphysical tales are not about finding God as much as they are about discovering man’s limitations, his terror and helplessness, and understanding the value of the ongoing search. The second collection, “Painful Tales,” contains more realistic stories of characters being forced to make choices in which one good conflicts with another.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cross Roads contains two short story collections by beloved Czech author Karel Capek (1890-1938). The former, the previously untranslated Wayside Crosses, is more metaphysical in tone: its tropes include a lone footprint in the snow and a single word etched onto the nightstand of a sick man. Characters utter lines like "How external everything is!" and two of the stranded travelers in "The Lost Way" sound like rejects from Beckett. The second collection, Painful Tales, is more satisfying in its excavation of its characters' inner lives a cuckolded husband, a grieving father and a frustrated governess. Even translator Norma Comrada admits that "these are neither Capek's best nor his most enjoyable stories," but completists might show some interest.
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From Booklist

Published simultaneously with Ivan Klima's Karel Capek (see p.1815), this volume contains Capek's first two collections, Wayside Crosses (1917) and Painful Tales (1921). The stories in Wayside Crosses are mysteries, though hardly the would-be detective yarns that Capek later called them. The mysteries in them--a single footprint in a snow-covered field, a seeming murder by falling, a cry for help that goes unheeded, and so forth--are never solved. Told to inspire in readers the awe and terror their protagonists feel, they bespeak a young writer who has just realized the limitations of cognition and effective action. Painful Tales depicts people in emotional crises because of loss of love or respect, or because they see loved ones in a new, unflattering light. The protagonists are at their worst or most helpless, yet as in his mature work, Capek never satirizes or condemns them. To use a discredited phrase sincerely, he makes us feel their pain, utterly sympathetically. Early in his career, Capek is obviously a master in the making. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Catbird Press; 1 edition (July 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0945774540
• ISBN-13: 978-0945774549
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,236,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Collection of Short Stories From Karel Capek, July 26, 2003

By 

John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cross Roads (Paperback)

Karel Capek, the Czechoslovakian writer, is probably best known for coining the term "robot" in one of his plays. This splendid little volume collects two short story collections that reveal different facets of his writing. In these it is as though he anticipated Latin American magical realism and Milan Kundera's unflinching look at totaliarian governments and their relationships to those they govern decades before either became known. His magical side is displayed in the first half of "Cross Roads", while the second half features more realistic tales in which one or more moral dilemnas must be addressed, and not always to the satisfaction of the protagonist. Without a doubt this is a fine short story collection of work from the writer many regard as Czechoslovakia's finest during the first half of the 20th Century.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb, evocative, intense...ESSENTIAL, September 28, 2006

By 

R. Cook (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cross Roads (Paperback)

I bought this book hesitantly, as I have not for many years been keen on reading short story collections. A silly bias, I know, but I prefer to spend my reading time with "meatier" fare, either fiction (novels) or non-fiction (biographies or books about art, music, film, etc.). However, I had enjoyed R.U.R. in high school, and found WAR WITH THE NEWTS, which I picked up by chance some years ago, to be gripping, dramatic, humorous, and philosophical. I had been looking for THE ABSOLUTE AT LARGE, as its subject matter intrigued me, but the book was out of print and years passed. This past year, I finally read the new reissue of the latter novel, and enjoyed it greatly, (though not as much as NEWTS). So...to this volume. I wanted to read more Capek after ABSOLUTE, as I was intrigued with his light touch but sharp perceptiveness, his humor and his empathy. I found this and picked it up somewhat dubiously, as I say, due to my prejudice against short stories. However, after I had read just the first two stories, my reservations had been absoluely erased, and I have come to decide that Capek, on the basis of these very early stories, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. The first set of stories are metaphysical musings on the strangeness of existence, the unknowability of anything outside oneself, or within. The second set are more prosaic in their subject matter, but deeply empathic to the suffering of the charactes depicted within. Capek's prose is clear and free of ornamentation, and his tone is never heavy or overbearing. Yet, for all his apparent lightness of touch, each story presents snapshots of everyday human loneliness, emotional conflict, and suffering with an intensity that is almost overpowering. Capek does not hold the characters at arm's length with either disdain for them or ironic regard for the human condition. His characters are so vivid, his empathy for them so present, that the reader cannot help feeling that same empathy, not just for the fictional characters Capek offers us, but for humanity, for the frail, fearful, deaf and blind creatures we are, stumbling through the dark, hoping only to find safety and peace, solace and love.

Superb. (Needless to say, I have gone out and picked up all of Capek's volumes currently available.)