Gods, Men and Ghosts

When I started my new job, I was asked to answer any three of a dozen questions for an item introducing me. One was “What is your greatest fear?”. I said I’d read 1984 and enough other dystopias to beware of divulging that.

The Bureau d'échange de Maux is a short story that opens with recollections of the “wondrously evil old man” in a small, quirky building in a Parisian side street. He and it are immediately enticing and repellant; the reader is drawn into the narrator’s curiosity - and compulsion.
“You paid twenty francs… for admission to the bureau and then had the right to exchange any evil or misfortune with anyone on the premises for some evil or misfortune that he ‘could afford’.”
A capitalist spin on show more Faust, with seductive atmospherics.

Some startling exchanges are made in “the dingy ends of that low-ceilinged room”, including wisdom for folly and death for life.

The narrator is, of course, tempted to try a trade, but he’s also cautious.
“Man has never yet benefited by the marvellous and that the more miraculous his advantage appears to be the more securely and tightly do the gods or the witches catch him.”
Read the story (link below) to see how what he does relates to my opening paragraph.

Image: Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, by Pieter Claes (Source)

Quotes

• “Its doorway made of three brown beams of wood, the top one overlapping the others like the Greek letter pi, all the rest painted green, a house far lower and narrower than its neighbours and infinitely stranger.”

• “A man's own evil is to him the worst thing there is or ever could be, and that an evil so unbalances all men's minds that they always seek for extremes in that small grim shop.”

See also

• My only other encounter with Lord Dunsany’s work was more than a decade ago, when I read his YA (not that it was described as such back then) novella, The King of Elfland’s Daughter. I found the purple prose a bit much and wrote that “I prefer things a little darker”: see my review HERE. This shorter story certainly delivers that, which is amusing, because I also wrote of Elfland that “the moral is perhaps ‘Be careful what you wish for’”. Well, I got what I wished for - and am glad of it - though the narrator of this story is more equivocal.

• A strict translation of “maux” is “ailments”, but here, it’s explicitly about “evil” from the start.

• This was published in 1916 and features a single, but strongly anti-Semitic analogy.

Short story club

I read this in Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 4 September 2023.

You can read this story HERE.

You can join the group here. show less

The Jorkens stories and those from the books of wonder were the best. I was let down by the final section of stories about the gods.