The fool And other moral tales

Symbols and signs take on life-changing meanings in Serre's three sharp, sophisticated, and inventive tales (following The Governesses). Examining a tarot deck given to her by a friend, the narrator of "The Fool" realizes she has already encountered the eponymous card in real life: "You think things appear only on playing cards.... In reality, they exist in life." The Fool has already come to her in various guises, including Carl, her lover, and the nameless childhood dread that long ago inspired her to become a writer, "to make a pact with the thing that threatens you." In the slyly funny anti-bildungsroman "The Narrator," a man travels to a chalet to write, and as he engages in an affair with his landlady, he's both delighted and inundated with material, feeling that "nothing remained of the world but... the ghostly apparitions of dreams," which he will turn into a book. But his inability to connect with others occasions a crisis; he no longer wishes "to feel holier-than-thou with your precious images... to feel smug simply because you're different." Dreamy and deeply sexual, "The Wishing Table" revisits and revises the literature of debauchery; its narrator, now nearing 40, recounts a happily incestuous childhood. Drawing on fairy tales and psychoanalysis, pornography and poststructuralism, Serre constructs stunning and searing stories that will remain with readers. (Sept.)

In three mysterious tales, Serre explores the moral implications of self-destructive impulses, storytelling, and sexual taboo.Serre (The Governesses, 2018), one of France's finest fabulists, returns in full force in this slim, freshly translated collection. In "The Fool," an unnamed narrator considers the first card in the Major Arcana of the tarot, linking the image to her drive for self-destruction and her ability to fall in and out of love. Caught between "fear and ecstasy, ecstasy and fear," she knows only too well how to keep this rapturous back and forth at bayand how to call it down upon herself. In "The Narrator," the subject of storytelling is debated by friends vacationing in a chalet. With her customary wit, Serre has created two competing narratorsthe title character, who has no control over the story he's in, and the narrator of the story itself, who dishes up metacommentary on the morality of narration: "To feel holier-than-thou with your precious images, yes, yes, that's all very fine. But to feel smug simply because you're alone, simply because you're different from others and in possession of a secretmorally, that's not so good." As characters discover how they've been portrayed throughout the story, they begin to revolt, pushing the title character to give up his power as a storyteller in order to live in the world. But the crown jewel of this collection is the perverse, absurd, and affecting story "The Wishing Table," in which a young woman looks back on her childhood as a member of an incestuous family. Although the narrator rejects the idea of sexual abuse and embraces the "moral chaos" of her upbringing, her social isolation and strangeness permeate her adult relationships. Only after the death of her parents and years of celibacy does she uncover how to marry love with desire by reconciling her past. "[You] had onlyas I had always known and believedto pay close attention for a terrible joy to be born, for a work of art to emerge from your body, your hands, your eyes, your poor broken heart," she thinks at last.A strange, beguiling collection about the perils of desire in all its forms. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.