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The King in the Tree
A master of literary transformation, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler turns his attention to the transformations of love in these three hypnotic novellas. • “No one alive writes better about yearning and heartbreak…. Before such mastery, a reader can do nothing but bow his head.” —The Washington Post Book WorldWhile ostensibly showing her home to a prospective buyer, the narrator of “Revenge” unfolds an origami-like narrative of betrayal and psychic violence. In “An Adventure of Don Juan” the legendary seducer seeks out new diversion on an English country estate with devastating results. And the title novella retells the story of Tristan and Ysolt from the agonized perspective of King Mark, a husband who compulsively looks for evidence of his wife’s adultery yet compulsively denies what he finds. Combining enchantment as ancient as Sheherezade’s with up-to-the-minute acuity and unease, The King in the Tree is Millhauser at his best.
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 18, 2003
10 people are currently reading
333 people want to read
About the author
Steven Millhauser
67 books468 followersMillhauser was born in New York City, grew up in Connecticut, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965. He then pursued a doctorate in English at Brown University. He never completed his dissertation but wrote parts of Edwin Mullhouse and From the Realm of Morpheus in two separate stays at Brown. Between times at the university, he wrote Portrait of a Romantic at his parents' house in Connecticut. His story "The Invention of Robert Herendeen" (in The Barnum Museum) features a failed student who has moved back in with his parents; the story is loosely based on this period of Millhauser's life.
Until the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut novel, Edwin Mullhouse. This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death at age eleven, features the fictional Jeffrey Cartwright playing Boswell to Edwin's Johnson. Edwin Mullhouse brought critical acclaim, and Millhauser followed with a second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, in 1977, and his first collection of short stories, In The Penny Arcade, in 1986.
Possibly the most well-known of his short stories is "Eisenheim the Illusionist" (published in "The Barnum Museum"), based on a pseudo-mythical tale of a magician who stunned audiences in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century. It was made into the film, The Illusionist (2006).
Millhauser's stories often treat fantasy themes in a manner reminiscent of Poe or Borges, with a distinctively American voice. As critic Russell Potter has noted, "in (Millhauser's stories), mechanical cowboys at penny arcades come to life; curious amusement parks, museums, or catacombs beckon with secret passageways and walking automata; dreamers dream and children fly out their windows at night on magic carpets."
Millhauser's collections of stories continued with The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993), and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998). The unexpected success of Martin Dressler in 1997 brought Millhauser increased attention. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories made the New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2008".
Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and teaches at Skidmore College.
Until the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut novel, Edwin Mullhouse. This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death at age eleven, features the fictional Jeffrey Cartwright playing Boswell to Edwin's Johnson. Edwin Mullhouse brought critical acclaim, and Millhauser followed with a second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, in 1977, and his first collection of short stories, In The Penny Arcade, in 1986.
Possibly the most well-known of his short stories is "Eisenheim the Illusionist" (published in "The Barnum Museum"), based on a pseudo-mythical tale of a magician who stunned audiences in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century. It was made into the film, The Illusionist (2006).
Millhauser's stories often treat fantasy themes in a manner reminiscent of Poe or Borges, with a distinctively American voice. As critic Russell Potter has noted, "in (Millhauser's stories), mechanical cowboys at penny arcades come to life; curious amusement parks, museums, or catacombs beckon with secret passageways and walking automata; dreamers dream and children fly out their windows at night on magic carpets."
Millhauser's collections of stories continued with The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993), and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998). The unexpected success of Martin Dressler in 1997 brought Millhauser increased attention. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories made the New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2008".
Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and teaches at Skidmore College.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
June 1, 2022
The King in the Tree is three novellas of love and unfaithfulness that have powerful aura of fairy tales or, to be more precise, of postmodernistic fables.
Steven Millhauser faithfully remains original and inventive throughout the book.
Robert is an unfaithful husband in Revenge – a weird story of the deceived wife’s extravagant vengeance.
But when Don Juan finds himself on the estate not unlike that of Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel he turns into a vaudeville figure and starts living an idyllic life – An Adventure of Don Juan is a kind of postmodern pastoral.
But unlike the minstrel’s song The King in the Tree is a sorrowful tale of Tristan and Ysolt full of sadness and suffering.
Love remains a keystone even in fairy tales.
Steven Millhauser faithfully remains original and inventive throughout the book.
When I first met Robert, when I was twenty-four and he was thirty, he used to come into the bookstore where I was working. He wore jeans and work boots and flannel shirts. He looked like a skinny lumberjack. I thought he was my age – a student, maybe. Even then he was an interesting man. A teacher who hated teachers, an intellectual who made fun of intellectuals, a Jew with no ties to Judaism – unless you count the piano.
Robert is an unfaithful husband in Revenge – a weird story of the deceived wife’s extravagant vengeance.
Venetian women were out for pleasure, and Don Juan had bedded so many of them that he sometimes had the sense that Venice was an immense brothel composed of watery corridors and floating bedrooms hung with murky mirrors and paintings of swooning women ravished by centaurs.
But when Don Juan finds himself on the estate not unlike that of Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel he turns into a vaudeville figure and starts living an idyllic life – An Adventure of Don Juan is a kind of postmodern pastoral.
Their minstrels sing of love – only of love. Never do they sing of battles, of fallen heroes, of ruin and misery. Their songs know nothing of our stern world, with its bitter burdens and sorrows; for them all is youth, zephyrs, the green buds of a perpetual May.
But unlike the minstrel’s song The King in the Tree is a sorrowful tale of Tristan and Ysolt full of sadness and suffering.
Love remains a keystone even in fairy tales.
November 17, 2018
Türkçe'deki adı "Ağaçtaki Kral", üç novelladan oluşuyor. Konular ilginç olmasına karşın akmadı kitap bir türlü, tökezledim, sıkıldım okurken. Velhasıl ya orijinal dilinden okumak lazımmış ya da okumamak...
May 31, 2016
Love at an Impasse
Three novellas, at roughly 50, 80, and 100 pages each. All have to do with adultery. All three explore a curious state of stasis, where passion is undiminished, but no further move seems possible, a kind of amatory checkmate. The two longer stories, in addition, revisit operatic characters—from Mozart's Don Giovanni and Wagner's Tristan and Isolde—or rather the original myths on which those operas were based. While the first story is good, the other two are the real reason for buying the book.
The first story, "Revenge," is contemporary. A garrulous woman is showing her house to a buyer, shortly after the death of her husband. As she proceeds through the various rooms—front hall, living room, downstairs bath, kitchen—she reveals more about her twenty-two-year marriage, and it soon becomes clear that the potential buyer is by no means a random stranger. I won't say more, because the way in which Millhauser gradually reveals information is a large part of his cleverness. Except to say that, although he appears to be setting up a number of melodramatic scenarios, he eventually leads to a far more subtle outcome.
The second piece, "An Adventure of Don Juan," is richer and more complex, clearly a novella rather than a mere story. It also shows Millhauser's power with words, when he chooses to pull out all the stops (though the quality of his writing is such that he rarely needs to do so). But when Don Juan is Venice, Millhauser matches the baroque decadence word for word:
Gottfried von Strassburg's story of Tristan and Isolde will be most familiar through the Wagner opera. Sir Tristan is sent by his uncle King Mark of Cornwall to fetch Isolde from Ireland as his bride. After accidentally drinking a love potion, they cannot resist their passion, and when their midnight tryst is discovered in the second act, Tristan is mortally wounded. He goes to his home in Brittany, but dies just before Isolde arrives to join him. Millhauser omits the love potion entirely, and spends almost the whole story expanding on events behind the scenes in Wagner's Act II: the couple's attempts to conceal their love, the growing suspicion in King Mark's court, and the King's reluctance to believe the worst. [He tells this, incidentally, through the eyes of the King's chief adviser, Thomas of Britain, who in fact was the earliest-known author of the Tristan legend, and (though only fragments remain) the presumed source for Gottfried.] It is a long, mesmerizing story, without any obvious crescendo, but with many small movements, an ebb and flow in the balance between the three characters, Tristan, Ysolt, and Mark, all of whom are so bound by love and respect for one another that no resolution seems possible. Although the ending of the story is roughly the same, Millhauser's version of Tristan's wound is quite different, once more avoiding the kind of dramatic climax that one might expect.
Indeed, whatever their actual length, all three pieces seem a little long for their content. But I now believe that their length is their content. Millhauser is not interested in a story as an arrow headed straight for its target, but rather as something suspended in mid-air, barely moving at all. The cover illustration is not very well drawn, but if you see it as the reflection of a person's face in the water with a leaf floating on its surface, it would be the perfect equivalent of Millhauser's hypnotic stasis. I have only encountered it once or twice before in literature: in Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Melisande, in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (and in the semi-comic "Tristan" story he wrote as a kind of preview of it), in some of the mythological stories of A. S. Byatt and Angela Carter, and most especially in Julien Gracq's extraordinary neo-medieval novella, The Castle of Argol. Millhauser is in distinguished company.
Three novellas, at roughly 50, 80, and 100 pages each. All have to do with adultery. All three explore a curious state of stasis, where passion is undiminished, but no further move seems possible, a kind of amatory checkmate. The two longer stories, in addition, revisit operatic characters—from Mozart's Don Giovanni and Wagner's Tristan and Isolde—or rather the original myths on which those operas were based. While the first story is good, the other two are the real reason for buying the book.
The first story, "Revenge," is contemporary. A garrulous woman is showing her house to a buyer, shortly after the death of her husband. As she proceeds through the various rooms—front hall, living room, downstairs bath, kitchen—she reveals more about her twenty-two-year marriage, and it soon becomes clear that the potential buyer is by no means a random stranger. I won't say more, because the way in which Millhauser gradually reveals information is a large part of his cleverness. Except to say that, although he appears to be setting up a number of melodramatic scenarios, he eventually leads to a far more subtle outcome.
The second piece, "An Adventure of Don Juan," is richer and more complex, clearly a novella rather than a mere story. It also shows Millhauser's power with words, when he chooses to pull out all the stops (though the quality of his writing is such that he rarely needs to do so). But when Don Juan is Venice, Millhauser matches the baroque decadence word for word:
What bound him was the shimmer of the place, the sense of a world given over to duplication and dissolution: the stone steps going down into the water and joining their own reflection seemed to invite you down into a watery kingdom of forbidden desires, while the water trembling in ripples of light on the stone facades and the arches of ancient bridges turned the solid world into nothing but air and light, an illusion, a wizard's spell. It was a fragile, trembling world that might vanish at any moment—and perhaps that was the secret of the feverish life that began at night, when women wearing the masks of wolves and birds of prey beckoned from passing gondolas, while torchlight rippled in the black water and dark figures disappeared into doorways. Venetian women were out for pleasure, and Don Juan had bedded so many of them that he sometimes had the sense that Venice was an immense brothel composed of watery corridors and floating bedrooms hung with murky mirrors and paintings of swooning women ravished by centaurs.But Juan is bored, and accepts the invitation of a rich English gentleman to stay with him on his country estate. And in that limpid landscape, he is hosted by two elegant ladies: his host's wife and her unmarried sister. Of course, he intends to bed them both, but (to his growing surprise) does not immediately do so. Meanwhile, the place exerts its own magic, a kind of eighteenth-century theme park. In this, Millhauser has perfectly caught the spirit of the age. His host, Augustus Hood, is not only a keen landscape gardener, transforming portions of his estate into replicas of famous places in history, art, and myth, but also an inventor and impresario, filling it with mechanical animals and actors hired to play the appropriate roles. And underlying all this is a serious discussion of whether man's ability to design this simulacrum of nature is proof or disproof of the existence of a Great Designer in charge of the whole world.
Gottfried von Strassburg's story of Tristan and Isolde will be most familiar through the Wagner opera. Sir Tristan is sent by his uncle King Mark of Cornwall to fetch Isolde from Ireland as his bride. After accidentally drinking a love potion, they cannot resist their passion, and when their midnight tryst is discovered in the second act, Tristan is mortally wounded. He goes to his home in Brittany, but dies just before Isolde arrives to join him. Millhauser omits the love potion entirely, and spends almost the whole story expanding on events behind the scenes in Wagner's Act II: the couple's attempts to conceal their love, the growing suspicion in King Mark's court, and the King's reluctance to believe the worst. [He tells this, incidentally, through the eyes of the King's chief adviser, Thomas of Britain, who in fact was the earliest-known author of the Tristan legend, and (though only fragments remain) the presumed source for Gottfried.] It is a long, mesmerizing story, without any obvious crescendo, but with many small movements, an ebb and flow in the balance between the three characters, Tristan, Ysolt, and Mark, all of whom are so bound by love and respect for one another that no resolution seems possible. Although the ending of the story is roughly the same, Millhauser's version of Tristan's wound is quite different, once more avoiding the kind of dramatic climax that one might expect.
Indeed, whatever their actual length, all three pieces seem a little long for their content. But I now believe that their length is their content. Millhauser is not interested in a story as an arrow headed straight for its target, but rather as something suspended in mid-air, barely moving at all. The cover illustration is not very well drawn, but if you see it as the reflection of a person's face in the water with a leaf floating on its surface, it would be the perfect equivalent of Millhauser's hypnotic stasis. I have only encountered it once or twice before in literature: in Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Melisande, in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (and in the semi-comic "Tristan" story he wrote as a kind of preview of it), in some of the mythological stories of A. S. Byatt and Angela Carter, and most especially in Julien Gracq's extraordinary neo-medieval novella, The Castle of Argol. Millhauser is in distinguished company.
May 26, 2019
Revenge ★★★★★
An Adventure of Don Juan ★★★✫✫
The King in the Tree ★★★★✫
An Adventure of Don Juan ★★★✫✫
The King in the Tree ★★★★✫
June 29, 2016
Steven Millhauser's King in the Tree is a collection of three novellas: Revenge, An Adventure of Don Juan, and the eponymous King in the Tree. Only the latter story felt like it deserved to be of novella length; the other two stories could have been edited down to short story-length to greater effect.
I don't know exactly what to say regarding the stories in the collection. I am a fan of Millhauser's short fiction, having loved almost everything I've read by him. Two stories that come to mind are “Miracle Polish” and “The Invasion from Outer Space,” both published in The New Yorker. He has a way of taking a conventional idea and making the reader perceive this familiar idea or story or trope from new perspectives. This is evident in this collection in An Adventure of Don Juan, where Don Juan experiences time away from his familiar Italian terrain and lives in leisure in England, in the company of a man named Augustus Hood, Hood's wife, and their companion Georgiana. Hood is an inventor of sorts, able to create his own reality, quite literally, and able to turn fictional worlds from novels or epics into reality. The story goes on a bit too long, and in some respects, the length of the story makes the climax less revealing and more expected, perhaps.
Revenge, I wish, were shorter too. I don't want to say too much to reveal the plot, but I sort of don't think it matters either. The narrator in the story, wife of a recently deceased man, is talking to you, navigating you through the different rooms in her house. You then are a prospective buyer of the house, it seems, but someone more: someone whom the narrator would like to take her vengeance out on. At some point, though, the joke is on you, the reader, is the feeling that I got, because it is revealed in the story that the whole of the story is just a series of set pieces to lure you into the plot, itself not terribly important to the relationship Millhauser is trying to cultivate with you, the Reader.
The King in the Tree is a retelling of the classic love story of Tristan and Ysolt. The back cover of my paperback copy incorrectly identifies the story as being from the perspective of the king, who is married to Ysolt, but the story is quite literally told from the perspective of the king's close compatriot Thomas of Cornwall. The book explores the king's suspicions of Tristan and Ysolt's protracted affair as well as Thomas's role as to how much of a confidant he is supposed to be in view of the affair. This novella is Millhauser at his best, and thank God it is saved for last.
I don't know exactly what to say regarding the stories in the collection. I am a fan of Millhauser's short fiction, having loved almost everything I've read by him. Two stories that come to mind are “Miracle Polish” and “The Invasion from Outer Space,” both published in The New Yorker. He has a way of taking a conventional idea and making the reader perceive this familiar idea or story or trope from new perspectives. This is evident in this collection in An Adventure of Don Juan, where Don Juan experiences time away from his familiar Italian terrain and lives in leisure in England, in the company of a man named Augustus Hood, Hood's wife, and their companion Georgiana. Hood is an inventor of sorts, able to create his own reality, quite literally, and able to turn fictional worlds from novels or epics into reality. The story goes on a bit too long, and in some respects, the length of the story makes the climax less revealing and more expected, perhaps.
Revenge, I wish, were shorter too. I don't want to say too much to reveal the plot, but I sort of don't think it matters either. The narrator in the story, wife of a recently deceased man, is talking to you, navigating you through the different rooms in her house. You then are a prospective buyer of the house, it seems, but someone more: someone whom the narrator would like to take her vengeance out on. At some point, though, the joke is on you, the reader, is the feeling that I got, because it is revealed in the story that the whole of the story is just a series of set pieces to lure you into the plot, itself not terribly important to the relationship Millhauser is trying to cultivate with you, the Reader.
The King in the Tree is a retelling of the classic love story of Tristan and Ysolt. The back cover of my paperback copy incorrectly identifies the story as being from the perspective of the king, who is married to Ysolt, but the story is quite literally told from the perspective of the king's close compatriot Thomas of Cornwall. The book explores the king's suspicions of Tristan and Ysolt's protracted affair as well as Thomas's role as to how much of a confidant he is supposed to be in view of the affair. This novella is Millhauser at his best, and thank God it is saved for last.
December 5, 2009
This is another book I've had a long time, at least 5 years. Millhauser has written 3 novellas about love and relationships. In 2 of them he pushes aside the veil obscuring legend or myth to reveal characters made round and human. It's here that we meet Don Juan in hell, more of a wounded Fisher King than aggressive seducer. "The King in the Tree" tells the foreground of the King Mark, Tristan and Ysolt legend, before the lovers flee the kingdom. The opening story is a pained monologue of a woman directed at her husband's mistress. Millhauser is a wonderful writer. These are serious reflections on love yet he touches them with pinches and dashes of humor. One can both sympathise and be amused at the plight of Don Juan. And the reader is invited to see the optimism of King Mark as he tries to find levity in approaching tragedy. He's king as father, seeing the good in all his children in the face of disappointment.
July 31, 2020
Here are three novellas from a master of the short form. Millhauser's first novella "Revenge," like many of his best imaginative collections, uses a space and builds a story around it's oddness. A humdrum walkthrough of a prospective house pulls us into a tale of revenge. The present-tense is a fascinating touch and the narrator's rich detailed monologue is eerie and compelling. "The King in the Tree" is a re-working of the Tristan and Isolde story. It is rich in setting and a bit of a tearjerker. There are dwarves, rich imagery, and a sense of male paranoia about the Queen throughout. Narrated by a fusty Polonius-like adviser to the king, I was impressed with Millhauser's ability to move between Don Juan, present, day and legend. Here are three stories of complex love. And, as usual, I'd advise you to read Millhauser anytime you're free.
November 3, 2009
Ack, this came SO CLOSE to being a really great book, and just didn't quite make it. It's three novellas, the first of which is so jarringly different in tone and subject matter (though they're all ostensibly about deception - which is true, but that's still not enough to smooth over the gaps) that it really detracts from the work as a whole. The second story is probably the most solid of the three; the third is beautiful but unfortunately consists of so much betray-forgive-betray-forgive that pretty soon you stop caring and can't decide whether you're more sick of the betrayer betraying or the forgiver forgiving. That being said, the writing is dark and excellent, and I'd like to try giving more of his stories a shot.
August 4, 2014
Finished the first story. Revenge. Incredible! Did not expect that. I give it 5 stars. Finished An adventure of Don Juan, the ending.. i saw it coming. But the story was entretaining and i liked the charecters. 3.5 stars. Finishedthe last story. The king in the tree. A story about Tristan and Ysolt from the point of view of Thomas, the king's advisor and King Marks perspective. Pretty good but full of people knowing that something is wrong and doing nothing about it which irritates me. 4 stars. All in all i will go buy some other Millhauser short novellas, i liked them.
October 23, 2019
My seventh Millhauser, in my attempt to read all his stuff. This was a great collection of novellas, all three of them very enjoyable, with “An Adventure of Don Juan” as a particular favourite. If you want to give this author a try, start with the short story collection "Dangerous laughter", it's his best. Especially recommended for fans of Robert Aickman, Philip K. Dick or Borges.
November 6, 2014
3 superb novellas. mostly about love betrayal and revenge
July 31, 2024
Extraordinary! Steven Millhauser has a brilliant mind. I was so impressed with Martin Dressler..., that I read Disruptions as well. And I was so impressed I bought The King in the Tree.... "3 Novellas" is printed on the front cover, under the title. Revenge is a dark twisted tale, so crafted as to impress me with another side of Millhauser I hadn't imagined. Although it is the shortest of the three, it is a novella, rather than a short story, because there is so much in it, such details of place and characters and love and deceit and guilt and, yes revenge. It is not a murder/mystery type of revenge, but a carefully plotted and structured revenge of the heart and mind. It seems to have burdened the plotter more than the victim, who doesn't speak, so we have to imagine what goes through her mind.
In An Adventure of Don Juan, we see the old rascal as randy as ever, but can it be that he will change his spots after all? We say "A leopard can not change its spots" to point out something equally as improbable. But in this adventure, the old womanizer is forced to confront himself. It is a fascinating tale, full of unexpected turns and philosophical ruminations.
In The King in the Tree, we are treated to a new version of the old love tragedy of Tristan und Ysolt (or Isolde, as Wagner has it in his 5-hour opera). But this is no story about the lovers, but with them, next to them, as told by their friends, courtiers, and the King. We see this story unfold slowly and then run off through wild highs and lows of suspicion, suspense, trysts, forgiveness, passion, rumor, and envy. This one I could not put down.
The collection exceeded my expectations by leaps and bounds. What a wonderful read! I cannot recommend it highly enough.
In An Adventure of Don Juan, we see the old rascal as randy as ever, but can it be that he will change his spots after all? We say "A leopard can not change its spots" to point out something equally as improbable. But in this adventure, the old womanizer is forced to confront himself. It is a fascinating tale, full of unexpected turns and philosophical ruminations.
In The King in the Tree, we are treated to a new version of the old love tragedy of Tristan und Ysolt (or Isolde, as Wagner has it in his 5-hour opera). But this is no story about the lovers, but with them, next to them, as told by their friends, courtiers, and the King. We see this story unfold slowly and then run off through wild highs and lows of suspicion, suspense, trysts, forgiveness, passion, rumor, and envy. This one I could not put down.
The collection exceeded my expectations by leaps and bounds. What a wonderful read! I cannot recommend it highly enough.
June 2, 2020
The first novella in this volume was okay. Interesting narrative with a few unexpected twists and turns and a unique premise. The second novella was a tale about the legendary Don Juan's visit to England. Hard as it is to imagine, the author succeeded in making Don Juan boring. I started skimming after about 20 pages. The third novella was a retelling of the legend of Tristan and Ysolt, and, again, the author had me falling asleep within a few pages...so I gave up. Time is too precious.
February 29, 2020
The middle piece here - ‘An Adventure of Don Juan’ is one of the great stories I’ve ever read. I love its whimsy, its efficiency, and its sadness. I have re-read it at least a half dozen times since 2005. The other two stories also provide literary satisfaction and entertainment, but the Don Juan title is like nothing else for me.
August 14, 2021
I thought this would be one of those books that I gave three stars to, then donated, but because it has Tristan and Ysolt in it, I have to keep it. The writing is great, but I'm not thrilled with the devices. I also don't remember the middle story at all and I just read the book last week. However, the first and third novellas seem to be grappling with threesomes, and I'm interested in that.
May 17, 2019
The first story, while well-told, did not really hold my attention. The second story held it more. The final story, and the story which lends its title to the book, is by far the most intriguing and heart-wrenching of the three. It is for this story you should read this book.
May 3, 2022
The best story of these three is the titular one, in which the king really does get into a tree, along with his trusted Thomas, to spy on his wife and supposed lover, who seem to know they are being watched and put on an act. The king doesn't want to believe his wife isn't being faithful, but despite avowing her innocence, he is eaten alive by doubt and jealousy.
The second story, "An Adventure of Don Juan," pics up where the original ends, with Don Juan feeling like an actor--his amours becoming repetitive and passionless. He visits England with a newfound friend thinking a change of pace will revive his passion, only to have it thwarted by possibly his first true love.
"Revenge" is what most of us plot in our heads to get back at someone who has wronged us. This goes farther than most people would go. In by doing so, maybe it gets us to rethink our own twisted plots, even if only fleeting thoughts.
The second story, "An Adventure of Don Juan," pics up where the original ends, with Don Juan feeling like an actor--his amours becoming repetitive and passionless. He visits England with a newfound friend thinking a change of pace will revive his passion, only to have it thwarted by possibly his first true love.
"Revenge" is what most of us plot in our heads to get back at someone who has wronged us. This goes farther than most people would go. In by doing so, maybe it gets us to rethink our own twisted plots, even if only fleeting thoughts.
January 15, 2020
Three stories about love, not as much magic and more realism than is usual with Steven Millhauser. Themes of dreamy moonlight walks and strange constructions do play a part though.
May 16, 2021
İlk öykü hariç diğer öykülerde dikkati dağıtacak her şey var. 2. öyküden başlayarak tam bir ayakbağı oluyor okura.
June 1, 2022
Disappointing. Millhauser's creative mind and sterling prose are all here in full. Yet, each of these novellas could have been better shorter, I believe.
September 6, 2023
A 2.5
I didn’t feel invested in the characters in any of the three stories. And the voicing felt off for me too. Revenge was a little better than the other two.
I didn’t feel invested in the characters in any of the three stories. And the voicing felt off for me too. Revenge was a little better than the other two.
June 2, 2008
Three tales of love as told by three characters standing in its shadows: a betrayed wife, a thwarted Don Juan, and a tormented king. I'm becoming a Millhauser fan, I think. His work is unique in that any given story either comes from or arrives at an undeniable truth in the dark. The stories with their keenly imagined details and impeccably wrought narratives startle and stun.
June 15, 2011
Three novellas on the theme of the tragic love triangle. The first, "Revenge," is Millhauser at his most emotionally effective. Despite the artifice in Millhauser's writing, he still manages to lure the reader into connecting with his lovesick characters. I'd compare it to how Wes Anderson's films have sympathetic characters despite the dollhouse-like settings.
July 18, 2011
The first novella, Revenge, was told in an interesting style and had a compelling storyline. The second, about a Don Juan character, was good but I didn't feel its power until the very end. The third was poetic and tragic, but it felt like reading about my best friend's tribulations with her on-and-off boyfriend.
January 30, 2013
I liked: the first novella, really got my attention with a tour of the house and all.
Would I recommend it: Yes, it has quite a lot to tell on disappointments, betrayals and memory- quite a read if you have time like a weekend or so.
The good side of it: 3 Novellas in one. I love novellas.
Award: 3 stars, one for each novella for sharing a character's world in their own way.
Would I recommend it: Yes, it has quite a lot to tell on disappointments, betrayals and memory- quite a read if you have time like a weekend or so.
The good side of it: 3 Novellas in one. I love novellas.
Award: 3 stars, one for each novella for sharing a character's world in their own way.
August 7, 2008
I'm a big Millhauser fan, but this book is severely disappointing. It is drippy and sentimental and seems like a cheap imitation of his usually fantastic writing. Its mediocrity actually made me angry. What happened, Steve?
December 17, 2015
Just upgraded my rating because I can't stop thinking about this book. It has three stories each of which are memorable. I don't know what to say about it, other than I haven't started another book so as not to erase the memory of this one.
May 25, 2010
This collection of 3 novellas was recommended by a friend and I loved every page of it. Exceptional writing and story-telling, especially his interpretations of Don Juan and Tristan and Isolde. Seriously, read the title story and you'll forget that the James Franco movie ever happened!
June 16, 2011
Steven Millhauser is a genius. I quote a lit professor of mine when I say, ever word does work in Millhauser's writing. Nothing is wasted. I got a little bogged down in the middle novella about Don Juan, but the other two completely engaged me. Loved it.
August 14, 2015
I imagine more people are familiar with the Edward Norton movie "The Illusionist" than the novella it was based on (not in this collection). But for those rare souls still willing to give the novella form a try, here is a master.
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