Flecker’s Magic

by Norman H. Matson

Spike Flecker, a red-headed art student from Minnesota, wanders into a Paris café and meets a young witch — très chic! She gives him a magic ring that entitles him to one wish, and five days to make up his mind.
Fame, success, a beautiful woman, wealth, happiness — Spike can't decide what to wish for. And while he is worrying about it, he is also thinking about the witch. The deadline is drawing near.

This charming brew of fantasy and philosophy originally was published in the 1920's under the title of Flecker’s Magic and won considerable critical attention.

Genres: Norman

243 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1926

About the author

Norman Heggem (or Haghejm) Matson, American author.

Reviews

[Alan Lang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Timeless. What would you do if you could wish for anything in the whole wide world? What might you choose? How would you decide? E.M. Forster loved this book. I do, too.

[Mike]

Short, and yet it seems much longer than it needs to be at times. This is because the main character, a 21-year-old struggling American artist living in Paris, spends so much time introspecting and philosophizing. He is dithering about what to wish for, having been given a ring by a young woman who says she's a witch (and can back it up by performing remarkable feats), and told that it will grant him one wish.

He has a vivid imagination, and can see the downsides of each wish he thinks of, which at least puts him ahead of most fictional people who are granted wishes - but it also means that he just wanders along through his life, procrastinating the decision while the deadline he's been given looms closer. He eats (very well; he's not a starving artist), he philosophizes, he paints, he sleeps, he havers, he dithers, he blathers. An old witch turns up a few times and advises him to wish for happiness, but, disgusted by her, he's also repelled by the idea (and worried that she might be the same person as the young witch, who he's fallen for, in the way of young men).

He fails to make a decision, and then the book goes into a series of long conversations which get increasingly nonsensical and self-indulgently pointless, and at that point I gave up on it. I can see it being interesting if you were around the main character's age and still looking for a philosophy of life, though even then, the philosophies of life it presents are diffuse, out-of-date and sometimes surreal. But for me, it wasn't interesting.

[· · Rating 2 out of 5]

(20 April, 2026)

A schizophrenic tale, one part awesome, one part awful.

The chance of a lifetime seemingly wasted and a really bad '... and they rode off into the sunset' ending.

A magic ring grants one wish, what should one wish for? Money? Fame? Power? ... happiness? Spike knows only that he does not know what he wants. But

"Men are busy all their lives because if they stopped and wondered what they wanted they wouldn’t know."

If happiness is the goal, then how could he achieve it? If it's by having money, how much? Because

"No matter what amount he finally chose, he would forever regret he had not taken more!"

Maybe living forever could be it, although immortality might be a curse too. The problem is one of choice, a paradox of choice to be precise. With a seemingly endless selection of options, Spike is stuck, Jean Buridan would understand.

When the choice is finally made - too early for my taste, by the way - this suddenly descends into chaos. Explanation; recounting past events and more boring stuff, all terribly done. From brilliance to dreck in no time at all.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

An old work of fantasy. I read about it once in a history, and decided to try it out.

A young American in Paris is offered a magical ring to grant a wish, and the story proceeds from his thinking on that. Alas, the synopsis made it sound more magical than this.

[Ozymandias · Rating 5 out of 5]

God, that chapter with the witch will always be my favorite.