The Tower
and other stories
Jānis Ezeriņš (1891–1924)
Translated by Ilze Gulēna with a preface by Anita Liepiņa
The Latvian Jānis Ezeriņš's best work was created in the genre
of the short story. Among his literary models were Boccaccio,
Maupassant and Poe. During his active literary working
life, which lasted approximately five to
six years of his short life, Ezeriņš seemingly grasped
an encyclopaedia of possibilities and subject matter,
as well as the versatility of storytelling, not avoiding
either classical subjects or the repetition of characters
so traditional in short stories. For the twenty-first
century reader his stories evoke the atmosphere of the
post-war, newly independent, fairly multicultural Latvia,
rural mysticism hued with the "fine neurosis"
of the emerging modern era.
In many of his stories Ezeriņš disputed the single-dimensional
(e.g., good/evil) portrayal of a human being. The people
in his prose are individuals with their own unique characteristics,
often ambivalent, and subject to change in time and
situations. As is common in modern literature, Ezeriņš often blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy,
frequently making his reader laugh about the serious
while aching when reading the humorous.
Contents
Preface - The Tower - The Flea's Tale - A Game of
Chess - Father Burbeck’s Secret - The Ape - A
Body in the Marsh - The Gravediggers - The Bathhouse
at the Jocu Homestead
2012
187 pages
ISBN 978-615-5053-30-6 paperback $17.95 / €13.95
/ £11.99
CEU Press Classics ISSN 1418-0162
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