cover image The Life & Memoirs of Dr. Pi and Other Stories

The Life & Memoirs of Dr. Pi and Other Stories

Edgar Bayley, trans. from the Spanish by Emily Toder, Interlink/Clockroot, $13 trade paper (86p) ISBN 978-1-56656-837-1

The late Argentinean avant-gardist Bayley brings a poetic precision to the short-shorts of his first English translation. Most stories feature the urbane title character, a professor, would-be ladies' man, and sometime foil, whose philosophy is best summed up in the 110-word story, "The Charmer," which opens with "I say nothing, I think nothing..." and closes with "There is nothing but moments, a few small moments." An intellectual everyman brimming with curiosity, the doctor is frequently given to pearls of wisdom, as in "The Return": "There is no innocence where there is not love." Stories find him under waterfalls, boarding trains with highly watchable passengers, or descending mountains on his way to a date. Observations are often delightfully oblique, and the best escapades arrive unsaddled by a tidy message or punch-line surprise. Only a few stories run longer than a page; Bayley's fictions are tantalizing vignettes, amusing and often absurd, and readers will likely feel a pleasant nostalgia for the elegant humor of a bygone age. (Dec.)