Last Notes and Other Stories

The 10 first-person stories of Dobozy's debut, remarkable for their psychological and emotional complexity, yearn to make sense of eccentric and opaque behavior, sometimes by engaging in it. The first story, "Into the Ring," centers on a married couple who box each other to release the mutual frustration of their inability to conceive. In the moving and funny "Philip's Killer Hat," the narrator tries to dissuade his off-kilter brother from sending letters to the Thelonious Monk estate that explain the musician's tight-fitting hats "contributed to the madness that overtook" him. Dobozy draws on his Hungarian heritage in several stories. In "Four Uncles," the narrator recounts his harrowing 1958 escape from Hungary and his later reconnection with his uncles through the Canadian-Hungarian exile community. In "The Inert Landscapes of György Ferenc," the son of an exiled Hungarian painter recounts his father's dislike of his adoptive Canada, an "art-resistant" country "that would not be reproduced." Dobozy's prose is an artistic and intellectual boon. (Sept.)