The Tainted Earth by George Berguno, Egaeus Press

This is, perhaps, the most intriguing collection I've read this past year.
A new writer to me, this, Berguno's third, now makes me pine for the
two I've only recently missed. (The Sons of Ishmael and The Exorcist's
Travelogue; albeit reobtainable as e-books, which, to a reader
of aesthetically designed independent hardbacks, isn't quite the
the same experience).
  Indeed, it feels more like a long anticipated reissue than a new
release - Berguno having only completed the last tale, according to his
afterword, less than four months ago.  I so often find myself most
rating those authors who draw, and build upon, their foreknowledge
of odd pet subjects. For Berguno's research and its utilisation - here, of
Scandinavian folk legends and wartime Europe - resonating to
subsequent eras right up to the present, challenges reader perception
without ever wilfully confusing.  A trick rare for any writer to pull-off.
  Comprising eight tales-within-tales, and ending with a novella, the
title story concerns a father who fails to realise the blood ties he has
with his son are not enough to retrieve him from the existential path
he's taken. 'The Sick Mannes Salve' concerns a will and its elusive
second condition, delivered to a struggling horror writer, by his late
uncle's strange executor and the grotesque, mirrored fate that awaits
him.
  'The Ballad of El Pichon' is another re-told fable on a seafront seller
of fake canaries and the path followed to the dark company he keeps.
'Fugue for Black Thursday' features the first of two World War 2
settings and three seemingly premonitionary sketches by the real-life
Polish author, Bruno Schulz.
  'Mouse and the Falconer' is a satisfying little tale of the consequences
of personal caution challenged by personal courage. 'The Rune Stone at
Odenslunda' - the second Scandinavian fable after 'The Tainted Earth'-
involves the mixed destinies of a fought over love match.
  'The Good Samaritan of Prague' is a Golem tale updated and, truly,
the second 'tainted earth' story here, from the fateful consequence of
the indelible mark left upon the protaganist. 'Three Drops of Death'
is a comic satire concerning the 'hero's desperate bid to save the life of
the girl he loves by two characters who engage in playing him for the
sucker he really is.
  'A Spell of Subtle Hunting' (in three cantos) reveals the second World
War 2 setting, and best outlined by Berguno himself: "...It is a very
intimate tribute to Surrealism.  (It) celebrates the dream, and...
attempts to tell a story where dream and reality coincide.  
Significantly, it celebrates the incomplete, the fragmentary, and 
the useless things in life."  By so doing, it also challenges assumptions
on the things we define as important.
  There are no weak tales here.  The most that can be directed in
terms of any doubt is an occasional over-ripeness of language in
early descriptive passages of this otherwise sublime novella. But all
nine are sublime indeed, indulging and exercising the imagination in
ways reminiscent of Meyrink, Grabinski or Gozzano at their best.
I've no hesitation in naming this collection as a future classic.

The German Refugees by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Mike Mitchell, Dedalus European Classics

Few will instinctively include Goethe in the literary canon of short, uncanny fiction.  This is hardly surprising, as he had published in his 83 years little more than a half-dozen such examples.  Far from lethargy or literary failure being the cause, Goethe was, in truth, the complete iconoclast, of which such pieces represent a mere offshoot of far larger interests.  A short attention span might then be closer to the truth.

  Best known for his two-part theatrical extravaganza, Faust, the plot of The German Refugees demonstrates this intellectual restlessness perfectly.

  The French Revolution is in progress and a resident family of German nobles escape together back across the border.  The men argue amongst themselves of its political rights and wrongs while – as we’ve seen is so often the case in European literature of this time – it takes a strong woman to calm such roused egos; in this instance the Baroness von C. of the party, who tries to reason with two, ultimately parting, combatants.

  Also, the book’s form isn’t typically formal being not so much a short story collection as a piecemeal novella.  Seven separate tales, all untitled, are related within the text by the calming, unbiased presence of the Priest.  Often put upon by the others, he is, on each occasion, otherwise urged to take the family away, imaginatively, from their predicament.  This he does via two ghost stories, two tales of thwarted love, two moral tales and, finally, a sensual, standalone fairy tale, which successfully unites each genre.

  Such a framing device is hardly unusual in literature and was, perhaps, a more commercial option then, in the early, populist rise of the novel and a hoped for adaptation into a play.  (Aged 45, Goethe was at the peak of his fame by this point having been a high-ranking official in Weimar, having begun to tout Faust and, now, something of a Classics scholar in the Arts and Sciences).  He may also have felt something of a social responsibility – taking into account his role as a public servant - in that it features several ‘happy’ endings.  But, don’t be put off.  They don’t feel anodyne or unduly fake in context.

  To 21^st century eyes, the whole feels only slightly retro in the exchange of wit and familial interplay - not unlike a Bergman film from the 1960s’ or 1970s’.  Besides, any satirical allusions need not be made by the reader, as the stories remain, as they stand, self-explanatory.  The straightforward, unpretentious language in Mike Mitchell’s translation also belies its original publication date of 1795, making the whole quite a speed of a read.

  For those interested in mopping up the remainder of Goethe’s short fiction, I’d urge you to seek out Tales For Transformation, published in hardback by Peter Owen and in paperback by City Lights.  I will also be returning to the Dedalus European Classics series later in the New Year.

Oriental Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn, Wordsworth Editions

It is always refreshing to discover a British author from the late Victorian and Edwardian eras unencumbered by Christianity and its mono-centric repressions.  If unquestioning atheism is too much to ask, then those highly sceptical agnostics have at least gone in their own, intriguingly divergent directions.

  Algernon Blackwood, from youth, favoured a form of Eastern nature mysticism; John Barlas, Baudelairean revolutionary socialism, with Buddhism alone favoured by the writer of this three-volume collection.  Except Lafcadio Hearn was only ever British in the colonial sense, his life cosmopolitan to an almost wayward degree.

  Born of an Irish father and Grecian mother, David Stuart Davies’s usual informative introduction reveals a subsequent existence as a newspaperman in New Orleans, before moving on to Japan, aged forty, to study the culture, eventually settling to marry a local girl and change his name to ‘Yakumo Koizumi.’  (As if ‘Lafcadio’ wasn’t an original enough a choice for him, being pronounced Lefcadia after the Greek-Ionian island upon which he was born).

  The stories making up these three very short - and very plotless - collections, are fables, related to the reader almost as anecdotes, as if around a public bar.  This is just as well considering the Eastern names for places, times, ranks and reliquaries prompting footnotes at the bottom of the first two collections and so the inevitable pause every few pages.  Stick with these, though, as they are not unduly long, certainly informative, while evoking mystical mind pictures that, with focused detail, open up a world of Eastern mythology a textbook three times the size could not inspire.

  Like most fables, the construct in each is the same.  A beautiful and mysterious young woman captures the heart of a brave young soldier (invariably a Samurai in this case) and gives him a life choice by which to prove his heart.  By either reneging on a promise given or justifying it, is his fate sealed.  In the former case, one of the lovers (invariably the woman) dies.  In the latter, the male lover may yet die through proving his worth.  There are rarely happy-endings.

  Glimpses of what might today be considered ‘body horror’ (in truth, self-flagellation) accompanies the climaxes, but a large enough minority ensure you will not be left feeling too depressed.  Of course, these are also morality tales.  A few go against this grain.

  ‘Silkworms’ is inspired by the saying of a Chinese proverb told the author, who then quotes the proverb’s source.  It is as groundbreaking and beautiful a short story as I have ever read.

  ‘Incense’ continues in this vein of being more article than tale, with its history and varied early uses.

  ‘A Passional Karma’ is another suggesting Hearn is quoting an experience from life, while, for a change, it is the woman in the tale it has to tell who has the last laugh.

  Unlike other white Colonial writers of his day, Hearn himself is never judgemental, letting the material do the talking.  Since he integrated, going ‘native,’ this lends modernity to what is a passively appreciative voice.