Title: Strange traffic
First published: 1995
Description: The stories of Irene Dische deal in the emotional contraband people inadvertently smuggle - guilt, love, loyalty, deceit, disappointment: A staid and affluent American Jew returns to Germany to claim an ambiguous patrimony. A homosexual restaurateur gets the chance to cook another meal for his first lover. Ghosts haunt the New York apartment of a retired Viennese scientist whose past has been obscured by time and self-delusion.

With biting humor, Dische recounts the small tragedies of people condemned by the vagaries of modern existence to a restless mobility: the Polish maid in Berlin; the Irish nanny in New York; the American hippie in Tripoli; the East German defector born in Mongolia, bred in Shanghai, and with mistresses and bank accounts in three countries. Defectors, tourists, refugees - wishful travelers all - expect freedom and change to lift their spirits, only to stumble under the weight of nostalgia.

But what they miss are not the predictable objects of consolation - the gold wedding ring, the fading love letter, the home left behind - but their lifelong habits of paranoia. Dische's prose is as highly and strangely flavored as the lives and circumstances she describes. Sure-handed and quirky, driven by a provocative eccentricity of vision, Irene Dische's stories signal the arrival of a major new literary talent.
Subjects: Manners and customs, Fiction, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, general, Fiction, short stories (single author)
LC classification: PS3554.I825 S77 1995