Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #351418 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-22
• Released on: 1999-02-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

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."

From Library Journal
Millhauser, winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Martin Dressler (LJ 4/15/96), shows his boundless imagination in this collection of surreal, fanciful, and dark-edged stories. Breaking the rules of short-story writing, half of the selections lack a central character and are instead narrated by a nameless "we." Though this may distance the reader, it gives insight into group consciousness, something rarely expressed so directly in fiction. We are also treated to Millhauser's elaborate descriptions of awe-inspiring, otherworldly amusement parks, department stores, and underground passageways. Even his more conventional stories give us flying carpets, duels, and two-foot frogs, and for this reason the book is perhaps best read in small doses, lest Millhauser's descriptions become overwhelming. Unique and always fascinating; essential for academic and larger public libraries.AChristine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Idaho Lib., Moscow
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Twelve mesmerizing tales about the subterranean forces of artistic creation, and about the eruption of the uncanny into quotidian life, by one of the most idiosyncratic and inventive modern American writers. Millhauser, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Martin Dressler (1998), typically works a narrow but deep terrain, focusing on such things as the allure of various kinds of underworld, the lives of obsessed artists, the shimmering mysteries of the natural world. All are present in this new collection. The title story examines what happens when a performer possessing almost supernatural skill in his craft feels driven by his own need to excel and by the desires of his audiencesto transgress, using his knives to explore the boundary between art and life, with fatal consequences. Art, Millhauser reminds us, is necessary (the knife thrower's audiences crave his performances), but also necessarily dangerous. ``Paradise Park'' offers another version of the creator an transgressor, represented by the astonishing efforts of a designer of a turn-of-the-century amusement park on Coney Island to outdo his rivals, culminating in the creation of a vast underground park more like purgatory than paradise, challenging its audiences ideas about what art and technology should do. Several of the tales here, including ``Flying Carpets,'' ``The Sisterhood of Night,'' and ``Clair de Lune,'' issue from Millhauser's fascination with the special receptivity that children and adolescents demonstrate for the mysterious potentials of life, for sensing the sheer strangeness behind the everyday. ``Balloon Flight, 1870'' mingles metaphysics with the traditional elements of an adventure tale, and ``A Visit'' offers an ironic reworking of an old folklore motif, involving the marriage of a man and an animal. Enchanting, often disturbing tales, written in a prose of deceptive simplicity, providing further evidence that Millhauser is a fabulist of rare power. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

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.

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.