The Last Bell

This is the long-overdue English-language debut by a contemporary of Kafka’s—though it might make more sense to consider Urzidil a counterpoint to his fellow Bohemian, for his stories confront the Jewish-Czech identity that Kafka was content to dissolve in allegory. Kafka’s first book was one of the few items in Urzidil’s suitcase when he fled Nazi-occupied Europe for New York, and there’s an echo of Urzidil’s flight in the title story, in which a servant inherits her masters’ fortune after they are forced to flee the Germans, only to learn that wealth amounts to little in a city of fear. “The Duchess of Albanera” concerns a pompous bank clerk turned thief who hides a stolen Bronzino portrait in his apartment, where it speaks to him of the difference between an image and its likeness. In “Siegelmann’s Journeys,” this collection’s clear masterpiece, a lonely travel agent who’s never left home fabricates his adventures abroad to impress an equally lonely spinster; he realizes only after they are married that a honeymoon is out of the question, as “the Venice of his dreams and its fantastic topographies would be overpowered and annihilated by reality.” Generally, the more allegorical stories are the weaker ones: “Borderland” succeeds as tragic tale of a touched and unusual child who defies the adult world at all costs, but “Where the Valley Ends,” about two villages split by a valley and the “idiotic son” who roams between them, reveals the shortcomings of this otherwise ingenious writer. (Apr.)