Lucifer Unemployed
Being the name of the first book read by yours truly in this the year of 2009, as of earlier this morning.
Actually the book is more like a collection of short stories, written by Aleksander Wat back in the early quarter of the century (last century, of course). In it we find, after the informative about-the-author foreword by Czesław Miłosz,
"The Eternally Wandering Jew"
"Kings in Exile"
"The History of the Last Revolution in England"
"Has Anyone Seen Pigeon Street?"
"April Fool"
"Hermaphrodite"
"Long Live Europe!"
"Tom Bill, Heavyweight Champion," and the titular
"Lucifer Unemployed"
Most of them are about complicated role-reversals--in "The Eternally Wandering Jew" the Jews all convert to Catholicism and take over the Vatican and then all the anti-Catholic anti-Semites convert to Judaism, in a span of about a thousand years--, or weird little ironies among individuals--in "Hermaphrodite" a woman falls obsessively in love with a sexless "man" named Peter and is anguished because he, for reasons unknown to her, cannot feel any passion for her, but when he finally does and claims her, the excitement of it kills her.
Then the actual story, "Lucifer Unemployed," follows the Devil in our contemporary (okay, not quite, more like 1920s) world, frustrated because civilization has surpassed all his capabilities and he is having difficulty finding an occupation. Though he finally does, and it's amusing as to who he becomes. Really though, the entire story is amusing, and this paragraph here is one of my favorites as far as the whole tone goes:
Oh well, mercantilism doesn’t suit my nature anyway, thought the devil, leaving the king of the Stock Exchange. I haven’t the knack for commercial dealings. I’m too gullible and too easy to cheat. I used to pay the highest prices for the most mediocre souls, and then when it came to collecting, they’d slip through my fingers by reciting some cheap prayer! And there isn’t even a court that a poor devil could turn to for justice!
All in all, a very good read for people who like short stories and/or eccentric sorts of themes.