[.ca] The Knife Thrower: and Other Stories (ISBN 0679781633)

From Amazon.com:
The Knife Thrower introduces a series of distinctively Millhauserian worlds: tiny, fabulous, self-enclosed, like Fabergé eggs or like the short-story genre itself. Flying carpets; subterranean amusement parks; a band of teenage girls who meet secretly in the night in order to do "nothing at all"; a store with departments of Moorish courtyards, volcanoes, and Aztec temples: these are Millhauser's stock-in-trade as a storyteller, and he employs them to characteristically magical effect. As in Millhauser's other books, including Edwin Mullhouse and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler, his subject is nothing less than the faculty of imagination itself. Here, however, the flights of fancy are unencumbered by Martin Dressler's wealth of period detail, and the result is fun-house prose whose pleasures and terrors are equally gossamer. Millhauser possesses the unique ability to render the quotidian strange, so that, emerging from his stories, the reader often feels the world itself an unfamiliar place--as do the shoppers at his department store, that marketplace of skillful illusion: "As we hurry along the sidewalk, we have the absurd sensation that we have entered still another department, composed of ingeniously lifelike streets with artful shadows and reflections--that our destinations lie in a far corner of the same department--that we are condemned to hurry forever through these artificial halls, bright with late afternoon light, in search of the way out."

The title story is the best in the work...:
And if you ever buy Harper's then you already own it - the story was first published there. I'm not a big fan of Millhauser's style (particularly exemplified in "The Mezzanine" and "Vox") - I find him to be clever but ultimately devoid of any emotional meaning. In other words, Millhauser's writing reminds me of a well-written user's manual for some home appliance. The Knife Thrower (the story) has some interesting ideas and would, as some have pointed out, make a good episode for the Twilight Zone. Or you could go see "Girl on A Bridge" ("La Fille sur le Pont" since it is a subtitled French import) for a great version of this idea. Perhaps this is some universal archetype since the idea seems to appeal to many. Ultimately in the realm of short stories Millhauser does not, in my opinion, rank near the top. If you enjoy his style you would probably like some of Bradbury's early work or even Ian Banks. The rest of the stories in this volume do not leave any lasting impression, much like drinking some 'lite' soft drink.

Moving, creepy and exhiliarating at the same time:
You never know where you're going in a Steven Millhauser story, but you are always glad you came along for the ride. (This reader is not a huge fan of the short-story form, but I make an exception for Millhauser and other modern masters like Stuart Dybek.) Millhauser's genius in "Knife Thrower" is his narrator's voice-a spooky, spectral "we" who seems to be both watching the bizarre spectacle below and a part of it. After a few stories, the reader becomes part of the "we," and is transported into a very strange world. It's like mainlining Frank Baum or C.S. Lewis: you start feeling like a visitor on your own planet. The atmosphere of these stories is addictive and entrancing, and it almost hurt to come to the end of this collection. Try Jeffrey Eugenides "Virgin Suicides" for another successful variation on this theme.

A well-written collection of stories asking What If?:
I had read the knife thrower story some time ago. It's a gripping tale of a somewhat small town, and what happens when the knife thrower comes to town. He's not just any knife thrower. He is, shall we say, somewhat extreme. He wounds his targets, he asks for volunteers. The audience gets excited. He's beyond the pale, yet they can't look away. Many of the stories in this book carry a "what if" theme. What if kids growing up could have flying carpets? What if amusement parks could be any way we imagined them? What if we could marry frogs? What if Kaspar Hauser had told us what he really thought about us? These possibilities are injected into otherwise normal situations and people react to them through their normal paradigms. They glimpse the magical through a preponderance of the mundane. Every story carries a tinge of danger or a trace of uneasiness. Millhauser seems to take great joy with the worlds he creates and that joy is passed on to the reader.

not sure...:
The few stories I could read were good BUT most of them were very difficult for me to get into. I have a wandering mind if Im not hooked immediately and this is NOT the type of writing to catch it. Maybe I just dont "get" it, but to me these stories are pointless and uneventful. I found myself making grocery lists in my mind and fantasizing about turtle cheesecake or a foot massage before reaching the bottom of the first pages on many of these stories. I was starting over and over again and had to eventually give up. It was pointless. My rating of "3" is only because I feel bad giving it any less. I am a nice person, just a scattered reader.

From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary:
Steven Millhauser, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his wonderful period novel, Martin Dressler, is an author who is strikingly different from his contemporaries. The Knife Thrower is pure Millhauser and in this collection of stories he once again looks at almost everything except ordinary, earthbound, twentieth-century American life. Even those stories that do have a mundane, contemporary setting, such as The Dream of the Consortium, also contain something of the mysterious as well. In this story, an ordinary shopping mall becomes a world of Moorish courtyards and Aztec pyramids. In The Sisterhood of the Night, a secret society of girls, not so unusual in itself, manages to encompass the mysterious when the girls slip out of their homes to indulge in nothing more than silence. In Clair de Lune, a boy finds himself at a baseball game. But this is a nocturnal baseball game, played by girls who are dressed as boys. Flying Carpets is a fascinating story that details both the joys and the problems inherent in that particular mode of travel. At first glance, Millhauser's stories might appear to be little more than surreal melodramas, stories that definitely have virtues but stories that also cause the reader to give up in despair. This, however, is certainly not the case. Millhauser, like Kafka, draws us effortlessly into the shimmering worlds of his imagination through his poignant and expert use of detail and the elegance and beauty of his poetic prose. In five of these twelve stories, Millhauser uses the first person plural to wonderful effect and effectively allows his narrators to speak, not only for themselves, but for their community as well. The title story, one of the collection's best, centers around a knife thrower named Hensch and the single performance given by Hensch and his assistant which involves a series of increasingly dangerous tricks. Like the audience, we remain uncertain about what it is we really witness as the story draws to a surprising close. Those already familiar with Millhauser's work will be reminded of his gorgeous story, Einsenheim the Illusionist which also follows the path from ordinary to extraordinary. Other stories in this fascinating collection also bear a debt to Millhauser's earlier work, most notably The New Automaton Theater which is reminiscent of Millhauser's novella, August Eschenburg. Both offer a biography of a master automaton maker. While August Eschenberg finds himself trumped by a fellow creator, the central character in The New Automaton Theater, Heinrich Graum, stops work at the height of his success and remains silent for a period of a dozen years. When Graum finally does return to the theater he finds something very surprising and disturbing has happened to his work. Although the first person plural seems to dominate these stories, some of the most vivid and intimate are written in the first person singular. In, A Visit, the narrator goes to see an old friend in a remote town and finds that he is married, quite happily, to a very large frog. As implausible as this story sounds, it becomes quite believable, mostly due to Millhauser's extraordinary talent for visual detail. No Way Out is the sometimes humorous story, reminiscent of South American writer Julio Cortazar, in which a man learns the dubious distinction of honor versus dishonor. Balloon Flight, 1870 is an account of an attempt to escape occupied Paris in a balloon. The narrator is at first exhilarated by his new perspective of the world from the air, but as the balloon ascends to 10,000 feet, he begins to experience dread, instead. Like the narrator of Balloon Flight, 1870, Millhauser is an author whose protagonists are always seeking escape, by ascending into the air or burrowing into the earth or perfecting their art, e.g., knife throwing. Sometimes these protagonists go too far, but in their struggles between the real and the surreal, art and life, they help to shed light on both the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of our own daily lives as well.