Pollack is well known as an expert on the Tarot, and I was quite curious to see how she might weave the deck’s fascinating images into fiction. (As she points out in her Introduction, Italian writer Italo Calvino has aptly called the Tarot “a machine for constructing stories.”) Unfortunately, the answer, at least for me, was “not very well.”
Pollack’s collection begins with “once upon a time” stories—fairy tales or fables. As the book progresses, the stories include more and more features of the modern, everyday world, though the final one returns to fairy-tale mode. The problem with fairy tale-type stories told in the traditional way is that their characters are types, not individuals, and Pollack’s tales do not rise above this limitation. They also offer advice that any reader of fairy tales will find quite familiar, such as “Be kind, especially to old women and animals,” “Maintain a positive but humble attitude,” and “When making magical requests, choose your words very carefully.”
The addition of realistic elements and the attempt to develop more individualistic characters in the later stories improves them, I think; I found the longest and most realistic story, “Simon Wisdom,” to be the best (though “The Fool, the Stick, and the Princess,” one of pure the fairy tales, was quite charming). Sometimes Pollack, whose skill and interest clearly lie on the magic side of the magic-reality mix, stumbles a bit with the reality part, however: in “Carolina in the Morning,” for instance, a nine-year-old girl who has not previously been said to have any particular knowledge of or ability with computers suddenly shows herself not only able to handle passwords, selections, and deletions but to be able to insert a virus into the bad guy’s hard drive, which seems highly unlikely.
This is one of the earliest of Pollack’s fiction books, and I am happy to report that her later ones, novels rather than short stories, are quire a bit better. I recommend The Fissure King and Godmother Night as better examples of her skill at blending magic and daily life.
The black-and-white paintings by Alex Ukolov add quite a bit to this book.
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