Short Fiction Tuesday

Something a little different today: "The End of the Garden" by Michal Ajvaz.

I've just finished reading his book The Other City and deeply enjoyed it. The image of the library/jungle that makes up a chapter near the end of the book is especially cool, and one that I could see people enjoying as a stand-alone excerpt (though it doesn't have much of a resolution within it). His new book, The Golden Age (which just came out in English translation about a week ago) also sounds very good.

So I came across this story by him as well. There's a surreal, shifting dream-logic to the story, and as with the library jungle chapter that I think could stand alone, it doesn't really have a resolution any more than a dream would, just an end. But I loved the playful philosophical references and internal debates the narrator engages in, trying to apply Kant's categorical imperative to the situation of a woman assaulting a komodo dragon...

If the story (or any of the other bits about the writer) interest you, here's a good essay about Ajvaz on his publisher's website.