Mal D'Afrique and Stories from Other Places

A winner of the Minnesota Voices Project, an annual competition for the upper Midwest's emerging writers, Mal D'Afrique is the debut collection of short stories, some no more than a few pages, from Yugoslav emigre Cervenka. The author, who now teaches at the Univ. of Minnesota, has traveled around the world, and his settings here are equally widespread, ranging from rural America to the Malay Peninsula. In ``The Picture of Frau Grau,'' a Czech doctor in a dismal town creates an idyllic fantasy life with a stolen portrait of a beautiful woman. In a haunting tangent to the story, the hospital's janitor remembers his dead brother-in-law, who had been ``proud to use only one match per day, lighting the first cigarette in the morning and then lighting all the others through the day.'' He spent his last days motionless except for his right hand. Pantomiming his brother-in-law's last moments, ``Mrazek moved his hand in front of his mouth, as if taking imaginary puffs from a cigarette, in slow motion, in and out, and again.'' In the title story, a traveler in West Africa is transfixed by another man's description of his home in Quebec, a cabin in the forest with ``just spruce, tamarack, some white pine--real tall ones--and clumps of birches, white like the snow under them.'' The narrator leaves West Africa for a picturesque cabin in Canada, only to find himself inexplicably pining for West Africa: ``I know my malady is incurable, its origin poorly understood. The French call it Mal D'Afrique.'' It is this ability to concisely, and seemingly without effort, evoke the curious mix of deep delight and overpowering loss that is Cervenka's gift. (June)