Timoteo, “The Mirror Maker”
The title character of the title story of this collection is the culmination of more generations of mirror makers than the family can possibly recall by this point. Like those who came before him, Timoteo is more than well-equipped to keep churning out the very same mirrors those ancestors were making centuries before, but’s a modern man and a revolutionary. He is the inventor of a radical new concept in the art of reflective surfaces. The Metamir is ideally situated on one’s forehead since it reproduces a reflection of the person looking into the mirror not as they actually are, but as the person wearing it thinks of them.
Franz Kafka, “Translating Kafka”
While “The Mirror Maker” is a short story, “Translating Kafka” is found in the second half of the collection devoted to non-fictional essays. The essay is follow-up companion to a translation of Kafka’s novel The Trial published earlier. The stimulus was the author’s revelation that his earlier published assertion that he undertook the translation despite believing that he had no real affinity for the man. The essay proceeds to outline what he has comes to better appreciate about The Trial which has changed his mind on the subject.
Isabella, “The Great Mutation”
“The Great Mutation” is another short story and at times it almost seems like something Kafka might have penned if he’d had a happy marriage and found monetary success with his writing. The story of a young woman named Isabella who becomes the first person in her village to contract a new virus is Kafkaesque, but in an FX-series sort of way. The first symptoms of the contagion are fever and slowly intensifying itch across the back coincident with the growth of what appear to be very fine white hairs, but which are actually feathers. Recovering begins with the sprouting of the wings and the ability to learn how to fly. Isabella’s uncertain feelings toward her fame reach a natural conclusion when even her father catches the virus, but can’t quite get a handle on whole taking flight thing.
Richard Baer, “The Commander of Auschwitz”
Primo Levi is a writer primarily known for writing about Jewish themes and the Holocaust. He was a survivor himself, having been a prisoner at Auschwitz for nearly a year. Richard Baer, is the title figure in the essay “The Commander of Auschwitz.” In fact, he succeeded Rudolph Hess in that position which brings up the obvious question: why is Hess a name as well known as Himmler or Goring, but Baer an almost totally anonymous figure? Part of the essay addresses this paradox in which the only reason that anyone outside their families ever knew the names of those like Himmler and Goring is because of the multitudes of anonymous cockroaches like Baer carrying out the dirty work beneath them.
Herring Gull, Mole, Giraffe, Spider, E. Coli, “Five Intimate Interviews”
The work of fiction “Five Intimate Interviews” is precisely what it sounds like. The work appears as a transcript of five different interviews conducted by a sixth character known only as Journalist. The characters are exactly what they seem: bird, mammals, insects and even a bacterium. The interviews are brief, but funny and intellectually engaging and most amazing, perhaps, is that each comes across as a unique character rather than a mere stereotype of form to fit the work’s function.
