Tales from Two Pockets [Paperback]

Karel Capek (Author), P. Selver (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1967

Capek wrote 48 stories that deconstruct the mystery story by breaking one rule here, three rules there, and yet also make for wonderful reading. His unique approaches to the mysteries of justice and truth are full of the ordinary and the extraordinary, humor and humanism.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Karel Capek (1890-1938), one of the greatest Czechoslovakian authors of the century, and who mastered numerous forms of writing, was particularly inventive with the genre of mystery, detective, and crime fiction. In Tales from Two Pockets, however, Capek took the crime story and related forms of the genre to new levels, weaving strange, short, and powerful psychological studies of ordinary human beings caught in extraordinary and improbable circumstances. Through these intense but always fun stories, Capek moves brilliantly but lightly in the philosophical realms of human existence, exploring the nature of crime and justice, even the very concept of truth. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

This newly translated collection of all Capek's mystery stories originally published in Czechslovakia in the late '20s is one of the great works of the mystery genre. In 48 gripping short works, Capek ( War with the Newts ) proves that he had not only mastered the plot and mood necessary for good suspense but that he was able to take his mysteries to philosophical heights few in the genre aspire to. His stories deconstruct the very suppositions that make crime fiction plausible by calling into question the reliance of the typical literary detective on the powers of deduction and the moral correctness of human judgment. Thus the title character of "The Adventures of a Breach-of-Promise Con Man" turns out to be more honorable than the detective pursuing him; the man asked to judge a murderess in "The Juror" discovers that his entire society is on trial; and in the book's most surreal story, "The Last Judgment," God himself leaves the eternal fate of a multiple murderer in the hands of a human court, claiming that "Because I know everything, I can't possibly judge." In their dissection of truth and our capacity for judgment, the dilemmas in Capek's work are not always resolved, or are solved incidentally. These haunting, parable-like works reconfirm Capek's standing as one of Czechoslovakia's most intellectually piercing literary voices. Illustrations not seen by PW .
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 215 pages
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin (August 1967)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0048230057
• ISBN-13: 978-0048230058
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Stories from a Czech Legend, December 30, 2004

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tales from Two Pockets (Paperback)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fun book, January 2, 2001

By 

doc peterson (Portland, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tales from Two Pockets (Paperback)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars savor them slowly, October 6, 2000

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tales from Two Pockets (Paperback)

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+