The Man Who Walked Through Walls [Paperback]

Ayme's stories begin with unusual situations - a man who can walk through walls, a woman who can exist simultaneously in more than one place - and work out the logical consequences. Mostly these are funny, and then often unexpectedly sad or horrifying, and then funny again. The stories were published in France during the second world war, and endless continuation of the war is usually in the background. The writing reminded me of Robert Walser or Kafka - the voice is normal not writerly, and can flit around and feel like normal thinking. it's very nicely translated. If you like Walser of Kafka or Borges or even Beckett I expect you'll be pleased like me to find Ayme's writing.

This book contains ten short stories by the great Marcel Ayme, all of them new translations by Sophie Lewis. The collection starts off with Ayme's most famous tale 'The Man Who Waled Through Walls', which is about a civil servant who finds that he can walk through any wall. Bored with his mundane life he sets himself up as a master criminal, but like all things, it has to end. Along with this you have tales on a woman who can split herself into multiple copies and thus carry on affairs and get married all round the world, a novel approach to tax collecting, the problems that can arise when trying to get into Heaven, and the havoc that can come about with time, and the fact that it isn't constant.

Reading these you can see the effect of the Second World War and the occupation of France had on the author as this does show through. All the tales are fantastical to a degree but these do show a lot of pathos, and you really get a feel for the characters and their situations. Ayme doesn't hold back when taking something ludicrous and following it through to its logical conclusion, which gives all these tales a certain sense of fun. Continually playing with your expectations and showing how absurd things can become this is a real pleasure to read.

The title is that of the first of a set of mostly surrealist short stories in which a man can really walk through walls, and we see the uses to which he puts this gift. A beautifully judged story of just the right length.

This cannot be said of the next one, entitled "Sabine Women", is about a woman called Sabine who has the ability at will to multiply herself with identities that live in totally different locations. Moreover, each of the likenesses has the capacity to do the same, so in the end there are sixty-seven thousand look-alikes all over the world, each of them in some way linked to the experiences of any one of them. Not only does their ability to multiply run out of control (like the broom in the Sorcerer's Apprentice), but so, I think, does the story itself, which is wild and much too long.

The title of the next story is "Tickets in Time". In this one the government has a way (unexplained) of temporarily killing unproductive citizens - they disappear from the land of the living for a number of days each month. They are given tickets to indicate the number of days docked each month, the number depending on the degree of their unproductivity. They come back to life when the new month begins. What would be the effect of such a scheme?

"The Problem of Summertime": if governments can add an hour to summer time, why stick at one hour? In 1942 the Vatican gave relief to a world weary of the war by ordaining that time should advance by seventeen years. What happens to a Frenchman when he suddenly finds himself living seventeen years later with the knowledge of what happened in the interval? And after he has lived for some time in that future, what happens when, for some unaccountable reason, he suddenly finds himself back in 1942?

There is nothing surrealistic about the next story, "The Proverb", a painful story of paternal bullying, with an unexpectedly charitable ending.

"Poldevian Legend": the wrong people are given precedence in entering Heaven through the Pearly Gates.

"The Wife Collector" is about a tax-collector who is in arrears with his own taxes. The title gives you a clue to this the zaniest of all the stories in the book.

"The Seven League Boots": a gang of young schoolboys are obsessed by a pair of boots which a weird junk-shop owner has displayed in his window with the label that they are Seven League Boots. Until the last paragraph this story is less supernatural than the others, but examines gang-relationships and the touching relationship of one of the gang to his mother.

"The Bailiff": another story involving the Pearly Gates: when a bailiff approaches the Pearly Gates, St Peter and God disagree whether a bailiff should be cast into Hell, and he is given his life back so that - he is told - by the time of his next death the evidence will be clearer one way or the other. But when the time comes, God and St Peter are still at odds.

"While Waiting": The opening sentence of this story; "During the 1939-1972 war, in Montmartre, at the door of the grocer on rue Caulincourt, there was a queue of fourteen people who, having become friendly, decided never to part again." For what was there to go home for? They explain the misery of their lives in war-time, mostly at great length. The war seems never-ending, and so does this story.