Invitation to a Voyage

The stronger stories in Emmanuel’s (The Quartet) slim collection are filled with vivid details and odd, pleasing phrasings. “The Invitation” is a trifle in which a woman writes to her lover in overwrought, awkward language. The better “Love and Distance: A Fragmentary Report” finds a man taking violin lessons from a woman he’s been employed to watch closely. Over the course of his observations the relationship between them grows and shifts. In “The End of Prose” an operative is given a “one-way ticket” to an assignment to investigate “subversive” activity at Poets’ House. But his superiors have ordered him “to write a report or else to write nothing,” highlighting the Beckettian futility of his efforts. In “On Horseback upon the Frozen Sea” a country manor tenant is offered a surprisingly low rent and forbidden by the taciturn owner from using the house’s main room. But mysteries spark her interest with dramatic effect. In the fine “The Cartographer’s Waltz,” a cartographer used to a routine life of collecting “samples” and “inquiries” meets an older surveyor whose wisdom and imagination help him think about the world in a fresh way. Though the rewards in these stories are slight, they are varied and sometimes compelling. (Dec.)