Eleven Prague Corpses

Russian author, editor, and historian Kobrin weaves 10 not-so-simple mysteries—in some, murder predominates, while in others, the narrator’s sanity is on trial—into a diffuse whole in his first collection of short stories translated into English. Each episodic investigation takes place in “damned Prague” and is initiated by a “Russified” expat with conflicted feelings about the city. With frequent references to the universe of Kafka, the neighborhoods and their inhabitants come to feel immediate through the eyes of the outcast narrator: Czech clerks with “impossibly short haircuts and their solarium-fried girlfriends,” the noisy thought-killing rumble of the tram, the “fortified walls of boiled dough bathing in thick brown lakes of meat gravy.” The sardonic narrator (or narrators, depending on the reader’s interpretation), who speaks Russian but prefers to speak English, often refers to literature as he navigates the Czech language and its people. The stories that work best—“CCTV” and “The Triumph of Evil”—expertly mix absurdity, immorality, and morbid humor. Many of the stories involve speculation about multiple unsolved murders. However, the passages that indulge in theorizing about crime feel rushed and fussy, and the reader never gets to piece together clues in real time alongside the narrator. But Kobrin’s intricate renderings of Prague, underlying the amorphous chain of intersecting stories, open up a city both tidy and terrifying. (Mar.)