Customer Reviews

TALES FROM TWO POCKETS

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The fourth Earl of Chesterfield once admonished his son to "wear your learning, like your watch in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one." The stories contained in Karel Capek's "Tales From Two Pockets", unlike Chesterfield's watch, are worth taking out and reading again and again and again.

Karel Capek played a pivotal role in Czech arts, literature, and politics in the years of the first Czech Republic. He was a playwright and, with his brother, authored "RUR", the play that introduced the word robot to the world. His novel War With the Newts remains today one of the great pieces of dystopian fiction. His life and work during this period was inextricably linked with a strong belief in the newly born Czechoslovakian Republic. Capek's devout faith in democracy and his aversion to both fascism and communism was well known. His intimate socio-political relationship with Czech President Tomas Masaryk served as an inspiration to Vaclav Havel the artist who became president after the Velvet Revolution.

The 48 stories in Tales From Two Pockets first appeared in print in 1928 in a Prague newspaper. They were known as pocket tales because presumably the newspaper could be folded and placed in ones coat pocket after getting off the tram. Immensely popular the first 24 stories were published in book form as Tales from One Pocket. The remaining 24 stories were originally published as Tales From the Other Pocket. This edition, published by Catbird Press (which has done a marvelous job of publishing English editions of Czech masterpieces) and excellently translated by Norma Comrada, contain all 48 tales.

To call the first 24 stories detective stories would not do them justice. They do tend to involve a murder or a crime of some sort but Capek stands the genre on its head. They involve more than the solution of a crime. Capek tends to work around the crime to look and spin small stories that tell us a little bit more about human nature than about the crime business. Each story contains a snippet; they are too short to be an exegesis on humanity. But each snippet is worth reading and after you read one or two you can put them in your pocket and start all over again.

The second 24 stories each flow from one into another. Think of a group of people sitting around a table in a bar. One tells a story about a crime or some other foul deed. After one story is finished someone pipes in and announces, "I can top that". They stories flow seamlessly one to another. Again, no single story packs a huge `message' but cumulatively they are thought provoking and provocative. It should also be mentioned that the stories are also just fun to read. Capek was one of the first Czech authors to write in colloquial Czech. His writing style was not formalistic and stilted. He wrote the way people talked and his stories are all warmly told and engaging.

So, put these tales in your pocket and pull them out whenever you'd like to lose yourself for a little while in the world of little mysteries created by Karel Capek.

I purchased this book on the recommendations of Amazon.com readers. I was not disappointed. Tales from Two Pockets is a collection of short-stories by Czech mystery writer and playwrite Karel Capek. The stories are delightful, with many humorous and unexpected twists. Each story is wholly different from the others, but all are brilliant and a joy to read.

My Brother-in-Law first mentioned this collection of stories by Karel Capek, one of the seminal Czech writers of the pre-Communist era, best known now, if at all, for originating the term "robot" in his 1920 play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots. These stories, which originally began appearing in 1928 in his newspaper column, are all short mysteries; but they are a unique type of mystery. Capek is less interested in the mechanics of the mystery story itself than in the essential mysteries of human existence: a coded telegram makes a family doubt their daughter, a man is obsessed with footprints that disappear in the snow, a community is wonders why a certain woman is the only one who can find a certain type of blue flower, a stamp collection stolen in childhood is shown to have warped an old man's life, God sits in judgment on a condemned man, and so on. Some are really terrific, some merely amusing, but all are interesting, albeit brief, meditations on our perceptions of the appearance of things, how those appearances often mask a much different reality and how those perceptions shape us.

To my mind, this is a collection that is best read a story at a time, much as he wrote them. While they are somewhat interconnected, I found that reading several in succession was less enjoyable than savoring one a night or every couple of nights. Let them ripen this way and the tales leave behind some indelible images.

GRADE: B+

Aptly translated into English from the original Czech by Norma Comrada, Tales from Two Pockets is an anthology of 48 classic short stories by Karl Capek, each of which centers on the themes of mystery, solving puzzles and discovering deft culprits. Tales From Two Pockets is a mind-teasing, imaginative, and deftly woven collection which will aptly serve to introduce Capek to a new generation of readers, and is a "must" for anyone who appreciates a well and deftly written story.

great stories to read a few at a time, not necessarily in order. they are like a whimsical sherlock holmes with a definite eastern european bent. i had never read any Capek before and I think this has been a great start.

"Tales from Two Pockets" should have a special place in the minds of its readers. That's the place reserved for works which are entertaining without being trivial, consistently amusing and delightful upon re-reading, and which appear to have been written effortlessly and on the spur of the moment (this latter characterization is probably an illusion, since even a rapidly written piece by the right writer incorporates a lifetime of craftsmanship and professional skill). The stories in this collection, which combines two different but related sets of stories ("from one pocket, then the other"), were written for Capek's newspaper columns during 1928-1929. Czech readers responded enthusiastically to these stories, which started out clearly enough as detective or crime stories but soon overflowed the boundaries of that category to become something very different: reflections on the human mind and character under duress and meditations on the nature of crime, punishment, and, most especially, justice. The difficulty of judgment which is fair to both the victim and the perpetrator is a theme returned to several times, leaving the question an open one, even in the most gruesome cases, e.g., "The Ballad of Jura Cup", in which the motive is highly personal and bizarre, or "An Ordinary Murder" in which the motive is routine but the results are unsettling. Also related to this idea is the story (from the first set of 24) entitled "The last Judgment", which seems to be the prototype of the stories in a completely different collection,"Apocryphal Tales", stories that veer off in the direction of "alternate reality" parables (this may be the story which Capek himself thought of as "the turning point" within the whole collection of 48 stories).

The second set of 24 stories is a continuous round-table conversation, organized along the lines of the Decameron. One story ends, and a thematically-related one begins (or a story is based on a stray remark or characterization in the immediately preceding story), something like a baton that is passed from one relay racer to the next. Often there is a smaller story within the larger one, recruiting another member at the table as a second narrator. From the formal point of view the most interesting of these is "The Confession", in which a priest, a lawyer, and a doctor are all told the same story by the same man over several decades - he has done something terrible (his deed is never specified) and must talk about it or implode, though he feels neither contrition nor guilt nor remorse, while he has a specific desire to avoid retribution (which is why he picks men professionally and ethically bound to keep his confession a secret). It's a large and eclectic collection of narrators that Capek creates - including policemen, businessmen of various stripes, a doctor, a priest, a "jailbird", a journalist, civil servants, and men of unidentified callings. Based on their names and their vocations they are meant to be a representative sample of inter-war Czechoslovakia's polyglot mixture of ethnicities, nationalities, religions, and social strata. This is the "social undercurrent" of these stories, an idealized picture of a hybrid, pluralistic society created by an admirer and strong advocate of T. G. Masaryk and the political system of the First Republic.

The translation by Norma Comrada is excellent, colloquial and fluent. As is her Introduction, which gives the background of the stories' creation and of Capek's familiarity with the detective-story genre in the literatures of France, England and America. On a light note, the musings of the lifelong bachelor, Police Captain Bartosek, on a kidnapped child (which I think of as "Bartosek on Babies") should be required reading for new mothers and new policemen as well. And it is in his portrayal of policemen that we see the breach that separates Capek's time and place from the grimmer post-World-War-II world of Czechoslovakia. We meet Captain Havalka who sympathizes with the inner turmoil of Jura Cup, and, more than once, we see at work the squirrel-toothed Inspector Pistora, whose unprepossessing exterior houses a first-class deductive brain that rivals that of Sherlock Holmes. Then there is Detective Holub, who, when recovering the funds that the confidence-man Plichta has defrauded from widows and lonely women, allows Plichta to deduct his "operational expenses" from the restitution he makes and admires his strict system of accounting (it is Holub who says,"We like ordinary criminals, not mysteries"). You can't imagine such empathetic portraits of policemen after 1945, though P. Kohout has tried his best to endow even State-Security policemen with admirable streaks in their characters.

The stories were written during the "calm years" of the First Republic, after the difficulties of setting up a new state had been dealt with, and before the Depression and the encroaching threats of international power-politics had arrived. This allowed Capek a respite to write as he pleased without an eye looking over his own shoulder at the political excitements of the years before and the years to follow. As Comrada points out, it would be incorrect to call these works "detective stories" or even "crime stories" (in many of them there are neither crimes nor solutions). However the reader characterizes them, it should be obvious that Capek displayed a relaxed freedom of spirit as he wrote them and took a great deal of pleasure in doing so, both of which are strongly communicated to the reader.

Capek's short stories are a challenge and a delight to read. The Disappearance of Mr. Hirsh and An Ordinary Murder are particularly good. The creative story lines and believable characters make this one of my favorite books. I highly recommend it

Poe, Doyle, Christie -- none of their stories is better than "The Stolen Cactus," "The Crime at the Post Office," or "Footprints." This collection of crime stories had all the twists and clever resolutions I could ask for. Unexpectedly, it also has quite a few insights into human nature and coping with reality. I read "The Man Who Couldn't Sleep" after a night of disturbing dreams and felt as if Capek were writing to me from the grave.

I found this book in the English-language section of a bookstore in Prague, during my first visit to the Czech Republic, which is a surprising and wonderful place. I didn't know the first thing about Czech culture or history before then. I didn't even know that one of Capek's contemporaries in Prague was Kafka, who was Czech, not German.

Reading Capek convinced me that Kafka was -- like Capek -- a humorist; unfortunately humanities professors in the U.S. don't get the joke. In other words, Capek is Kafkaesque and Kafka is Capekesque. Both drew quirky little images, too. That's right: Kafka drew pictures in his manuscripts. A few of Capek's illustrations are reproduced in this book, as well. (Karl Capek's brother Josef was a member of the little-known and very odd Czech Cubist Movement, a group that abhorred right angles.)

The prose in this translation is a bit ponderous, though, so I recommend that when your first open this book you temporarily abandon your requirements -- if any -- that crime fiction be terse and gritty. Remember that you're reading a translation from a Slavic language written a decade after WW I. In addition, the stories are first-person narratives, a form that is little used these days.

I'm eager to read more Capek. And it would be great if the publisher would create a Kindle version of his work.

A superb collection of stories told in a simple, yet very descriptive and captivating language, each a different nugget. Some are very funny, others reach a quiet conclusion, others make you think, but not enough to rob you of your sleep. Nice to read just a few at a time, otherwise it's hard to remember them all. Can be read completely out of sequence. Enjoy!