3 1/2 stars. A very mixed bag of stories. Two were simply "unreadable": "A Game of Clue", and "The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad". I tried reading these 2 stories, but was so bored that I decided to just skip them -- something that I can't recall ever doing before in my life. ( I decided I had better things to do with my time than trudge through these stories.) Oddly enough, some reviewers of this book (on Amazon) thought these two stories were the best! So, all we can say is that we apparently value different things in the written word.
Millhauser revels in exhaustive description. It can become very tedious, and not all readers will enjoy the endless detail. These stories are more like paintings than stories. There is very little action, very little character development. The stories are more about ideas and philosophical conundrums than about human interactions. "Eisenheim the Illusionist" is the best of the lot, followed by "The Invention of Robert Herendeen" and "Behind the Blue Curtain". These stories are like dreamscapes, and are successful at presenting the odd concepts from which each story derives. Yes, Millhauser has some interesting conceptual ideas, but they are presented more as descriptive accounts of events -- as opposed to plot-oriented events and characters. The melting of fantasy into reality, or reality into fantasy, are at the core of Millhauser's collection.
"The Barnum Museum" , "The Sepia Postcard" & "Rain" (to a lesser extent) are also good stories, but less successful than those mentioned above.
"Klassic Komix #1" and "Alice, Falling" were tedious and uninteresting to me-- but slightly better than "The Game of Clue" and "The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad". These 4 short stories seem to be experimental in nature, and they all failed to gain my interest.
So, on balance, there are some interesting stories here. But, there are some really boring ones also. Nobody can be expected to be successful all the time, so I still recommend reading this book (or, at least, some of it).
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