TRAPS by Friedrich Duerrenmatt

Swiss author and playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921-1990) is most famous as the author of the deservedly revered play The Visit (1956), a glorious black comedy in which a fabulously wealthy woman returns to her home town and offers a fantastic sum for the life of the man who got her pregnant and cast her aside, causing her to fall into a life of prostitution. (Until she marries a rich man, etc.) It's a great exploration of issues like greed, justice, retribution, and feminism, as well as wickedly and darkly funny.

This was another recommendation from Marvin Kaye, and I have to say that he redeems himself with this. Traps was originally published in 1956 as Die Panne (literally, "A Dangerous Game") and is a great example of Durrenmatt's style and wit. In fact, it could very easily be turned into a play.

Alfredo Traps, a traveling textile salesman, experiences an auto accident in a small town, presumably in Switzerland although it could be Germany or Austria or anywhere else. The one hotel is packed full, and he is recommended to go ask a local man with a large house if he can be put up as a guest.

Well, the local guy is more than willing to put him up, and even invites him to a lavish dinner that night. And it comes out that the host is a former judge, and the other guests include lawyers, prosecutors, and a former hangman! And over dinner, they go full-force into a game in which Traps is subjected to interrogation in a mock trial over dinner. Out comes Traps' ambition, his philandering, his callousness, and then the question is raised...was his business rival's death a mere accident? Or did Traps murder him by carefully manipulating events?

It's brief; the paperback I got from the library is only 122 pages long, and is a quick read. On the surface, this reads like a good thriller play, perhaps an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In fact, it's been filmed multiple times: in 1957 as an episode of the old American TV series Suspicion, in 1971 in India as the movie Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe! (or "Silence! The Court is in Session!"), and in '72 in Italy as the movie La piu bella serata della mia vita (literally, "The most beautiful night of my life"), and perhaps a few other times that I wasn't able to track down. The plot about the oblivious, arrogant, self-absorbed Traps (and boy, is that name symbolic!) being caught in a web by the seemingly jovial men around him is classic stuff...but then a little ambiguity is raised, and the reader is left wondering if it's just a case of a late-blooming conscience.

On a deeper level, it really came across to me as an indictment of the ruthless ambition that's a product of our industrialized, corporatized world, and of the destructiveness than can result when selfish people go after their own good with no regard for how it affects others. I guess this falls into Hannah Arendt's description of "the banality of evil."

This is good zesty stuff that still reads well today. If you can get your hands on it, read it. Some enterprising publisher should dust off some Durrenmatt and make an omnibus edition available. Anyone out there, hm?

CASTAWAY by James Gould Cozzens

I tracked this down and read it based on recommendations from author and editor Marvin Kaye, who praised it for its "heart-stopping suspense." While it certainly is unusual, and perhaps worth reading in some aspects, it's not something I really had any fun with.

Mr. Lecky enters a vast, empty department store, and proceeds to make arrangements to survive and defend himself. It's more than obvious that some sort of catastrophe has occurred, but no reference is actually made to it or do we ever know exactly what happened or how Lecky survived. We're just presented with his efforts to arm himself and survive. Eventually someone termed an "idiot" makes his way into the store, and Lecky ends up shooting and killing him. Lecky continues to make a little fort and survive, but finally...(SPOILER: goes back to the body and realizes it's himself. The end.)

It's brief, but it took me several days to read it because I found the writing stilted and outdated, and the actual story to be fairly uninteresting. It seems to be meant to be allegorical, perhaps of man's aloneness in the universe, or just a sort of modern Robinson Crusoe. However, the ambiguous ending gives it a supernatural air; perhaps a way of saying that man's struggle to survive will ultimately destroy him?

It's a sort of book that one reads as a challenge and struggles with, rather than enjoys. It's one of those rare works that crosses Literary Significance with genre content. Still, I have to say I didn't like it much. It often was rather dull and drawn-out for my tastes, even for such a brief work (in hardcover, just over 100 pages). It would certainly be good for those writing in the current trend of apocalyptic fiction; Lecky's struggle to survive and make sense of things like firearms and cooking would be good grist for their mill. But for me, it just wasn't that suspenseful or interesting. Mr. Kaye's recommendation seems off...but then I found out he's a craniosacral therapist and reiki "healer", both practices that I find to be horrifying quackery, which makes me view Mr. Kaye in quite another light. I still find him a good anthologist, though.

James Gould Cozzens (1903-1973) was an author of some controversy; his novel Guard of Honor, a WWII story, won a Pulitzer, but later works like By Love Possessed raised ire for purportedly being racist and/or anti-Semitic, even though he probably was more of a general misanthrope with little hope for humanity as a whole. An attempt at young adult literature bombed and he vanished from the literary scene for the last ten years of his life. He was a harsh critic of modernism, and today some find his works off-putting in their use of archaic words and conservative or downbeat themes, and even sometimes lack of action in his stories. (Although, he still has some fans, of course.) By Love Possessed was made into a dreadful movie with Lana Turner that had the dubious distinction of being the first-ever in-flight movie.

Not especially recommended, unless you're interested in apocalyptic literature.