Stranger Books

Last book club we talked about The Stranger. I ended up reading the entire series (in English, at least). I’m going to post the books, then share some overall thoughts. Welcome to this rabbit hole.

The Stranger, by Max Frei (translated by Polly Gannon)

Max is a self-described loser whose nocturnal inclinations and love of dreams leave him out of place in the world. Fortunately, someone in a dream offers him the perfect job: the Nocturnal Representative of the Most Venerable Head of the Minor Secret Investigative Force in the magical City of Echo. Will Max adjust to this strange new world? How did he get over there in the first place? Is this all just a crazy dream?

Spoilers: Yes; by streetcar; and maybe.

The book is divided into seven stories. They cover his early days in Echo—staying with his mentor and boss, Sir Juffin Hully, and being absolutely confounded by everything—and end with him taking the lead on an expedition, and saving the day against the ghost of a malicious magician.

The first big issue with the book is the translation. There are sentences that don’t parse, or jokes that don’t make sense. Max is supposed to speak differently than everyone else, and it doesn’t really come across; and I get the impression that there’s a lot of wordplay that didn’t convert. To cite a Goodreads review:¹:

- I have read it in Russian first. And was really looking forward to read it english. When I did I was very disappointed, since book heavily relies on dialogs and funny moments related to the differences of idioms in Echo in comparison to then Max is used to, a creative translation was absolutely crucial and it was not done so […]. Moreover after translation book turned so impersonal it is almost impossible to connect to the main character, this probably due to the fact that the personality of Max was in original book conveyed by his use of language and in translated version this peculiarities were eliminated.

This contributes to the second problem: The start is rough. The book is intentionally alienating, putting the reader in the same place as Max while he adjusts to this new world. We don’t know who Max is, we don’t understand what’s going on, and, as per the above quote, the writing wasn’t doing anything for me. It was hard to get into.

I think it was the third or fourth story that started to hook me. I paid more attention when Max finally told us how he got the job and travelled to Echo. Then I started growing fond of the other members of the Minor Secret Investigative Force. By the time I got to the end, I was ready to launch into the next book.

Some random thoughts:

• Max’s magic functions entirely by dream logic, and that aspect of the book really worked for me.

• I like how weird Echo is. It’s a magical city, sure, but everyone drives around in cars (or “amobilers”). The buildings are normal-sized, but the rooms are massive. Getting ready in the morning involves swimming in multiple “bathing pools”, and his coworkers rib Max for only having three. The Investigate Force has a flock of intelligent birds that can be queried for information. City life seems to revolve entirely around going to restaurants, and people live for hundreds of years.

• There are also hints of the strange history of Echo. The Epoch of Orders crumbled during the Troubled Times, and now we’re a hundred years into the Code of Krember. Many of the troubles Max has to deal with are echoes (heh) of this recent past.

• This was written by a Ukrainian in the late 90s. I bet this book reads very differently if you lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Stranger’s Woes, by Max Frei (translated by Polly Gannon and Ast A. Moore)

Max’s story continues. Now established in Echo, and accustomed to the Mantle of Death, what comes next?

Most of the stories in the first book were pretty short, except for the final story which was roughly a third of the book. This time we have three hefty stories. The first involves Max and Lady Melamori dealing with a Robin Hood figure in Magaxon Forest. The second involves a bunch of foreigners visiting Echo, including a delegation of Arvarox hunting a fugitive, a cantankerous old man plaguing the Melifaro family, and a group from the Barren Lands—Max’s cover story is that he’s a barbarian from the Barren Lands, and they’d like to meet their famous countryman. The third story puts Max in charge of the Investigative Force while Sir Juffin is busy, only to deal with an outbreak of zombies in a nobby part of town.

I have conflicted feelings about this book. I think the stories are all pretty good. I don’t like how the third story ends: Max is trapped forever, until he decides … not to be? I feel like I missed something.² The first and third stories have some strange (intentional!) overlaps that I’ll get into later—I don’t think they should be in the same book.

On the other hand, it’s probably the best follow-up. More things go wrong for Max in the book, which I like. He finishes the book a little bit older and wiser.

I was laughing because I remembered how horrified I had been the last time the subject was raised. What I had worried about most was that my orderly and predictable life would have to undergo change. I’d wanted to leave it all as it was, not touch it, not even dust anything off. Yet my life still crumbled, very unexpectedly, and I was the one who caused it.

“I was just thinking about what a fool I was,” I said when I had laughed myself out. “I got scared at your suggestion that I play an unfamiliar game with rules I didn’t know, and then I ended up playing a dozen unfamiliar games with no rules whatsoever.”

“Are you saying that you may change your mind?” said Juffin, raising his eyebrows. “That’s news to me! Are you getting wiser?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe I’ll change my mind, maybe I won’t. It all depends on what I think of His Majesty’s ‘clever plan.’ Anyway, I used to be against any games of this sort, but now … In short, I’d like to familiarize myself with the rules of the game before making a decision.”

The Stranger’s Magic, by Max Frei (translated by Polly Gannon and Ast A. Moore)

Max’s life is becoming increasingly complicated. Thanks to King Gurig VIII’s scheme, he’s going to have to deal with people from the Barren Lands for the next few years. He also has to figure out why one of his friends tried to kill him. The second half of the book involves a hunt for a pair of magical items stolen from another friend, and a poetry reading.

OK. I can argue that the first book is Max’s origin story. The second book, if you squint at it, is about Max gaining some wisdom and experience.

I have no idea what this book was about.

I liked it. The scene where Max is attacked is a good “holy shit, what’s going on?” moment. Later we get to see Max lose control and slaughter a bunch of people (who fortunately were an illusion designed to infuriate him, not actual people). I loved the poetry reading. There’s a recurring bit where Max talks to Sir Shurf Lonli-Lokli about dystopian sci-fi novels he’s been pulling out of the Chink in the Universe.

But I don’t think the two stories have anything to do with each other. The stakes in the first story are much higher than the second, which makes for an anti-climatic ending. There’s a bit at the very end where Max helps out some minor characters in his life simply because he can, which is a good moment of maturity. But, like … it’s two novellas, not a book.

I really liked this bit:

“I sometimes think that you are much older than you seem to be,” said Shurf. “You have known bad times, you have been a poet, and you have been a drunkard. When did you have time to do all that, Max? Or is this a secret?”

“A hole in the heavens above you, Shurf!” I said, laughing. “This is no secret. First, I’m very quick. Second, I did it all at the same time. Plus, I exaggerated the ‘face in the plate’ part for Anday’s benefit so he could feel he had something in common with me. It’s my way of sucking up to the master. I didn’t really do much carousing. As for my age—Well, that will have to remain my little secret.”

[…]

“It did while I lived there. Now I live here, and Juffin says I have every chance of living as long as any of you. I sure want to believe that.”

“So you’re not older but younger that you seem to be?” Shurf was too much of a pedant to let it go without nailing it down.

“That’s correct,” I said. “I’ve only lived a little over thirty years. Oh, but please don’t tell Melifaro. He’ll immediately try to adopt me and send me to preschool.”

“I am not in the habit of exposing someone else’s secrets,” said Shurf. “Nor have I ever been. I think you know that. How odd: you have surprised me so many times tonight that it is almost beyond my capacity to be surprised. Are you doing this on purpose? And if so, what is the purpose?”

“Are you kidding, Shurf? On purpose? What nonsense! Today’s just been that kind of day. New moon, the Three-Horned Moon, poetry contests, sentimental reminiscences, and so on. Let’s change the subject. Have you finished the book I fetched for you yesterday?”

The Stranger’s Shadow, by Max Frei (translated by Polly Gannon and Ast A. Moore)

The fourth and final book of the series. It’s another two adventures. Let’s do it.

The first story involves a plague of Lonely Shadows in Echo. If one of these shadows touches the shadow of a living person, that person dies and their shadow becomes a Lonely Shadow. Max and friends must travel to the Dark Side to deal with the shadows before they multiple and kill everyone in Echo; and the Juffin sends him, Sir Melifaro, and Sir Kofa Yox to deal with the magician who sent the shadows in the first place.

The second story kicks off when Max’s household is transformed into tiny dolls by the legendary creature Doroth, a magical mouse that led King Mynin’s Secret Retinue some three thousand years ago. Max will have to speak to King Mynin’s Shadow, receive yet another magical upgrade, and venture deep into the Dark Side to confront the beast and save the day.

OK. Remember how some old TV shows like the X-Files would alternate between Monster of the Week episodes and deep lore episodes? These stories are both deep lore, and … it was a lot. They recontextualize some of—a lot of—the events in prior stories. That’s cool, but the revelations frustrate me instead of deepening my appreciation of the story. I enjoyed the stuff that wasn’t deep lore, like Melifaro’s romance with Kenlex, or the journey to Landaland.

Here’s a good bit with Melifaro (minor spoilers):

“Help yourself.” I passed him a cigarette and watched how awkwardly he drew in the smoke. “It looks like you need to emigrate to my native land. You like both coffee and cigarettes, and that’s a good start.”

“Gladly. At least for a vacation,” Melifaro said. “After all those movies you brought back with you …”

“Exactly: the movies. Real day-to-day life is far less exciting. Maybe that’s why we have so many good films. It’s a safe, artificial dream—the same one for everybody. My compatriots bend over backward to escape their reality for a while, each in his own way. They don’t all admit it, of course. I’ve managed to find the most radical way of all. What’s true is true.”

“You can say that again,” Melifaro said, then yawned. “You know, strange as it may sound, you’ve made me feel a lot better, Monster. It’s nice to think that somewhere far, far away there are a bunch of miserable nutcases like you. So get lost, Sir Nightmare. Go do what you’ve gotta do. Go to the Dark Side and catch that blasted mouse. Rescue my girl and the rest of humanity in the bargain. I’m going to hit the sack. Now I won’t have any trouble falling asleep, that’s for sure.”

The book ends with Max committing two acts of genocide. (Spoilers until the end of the paragraph.) First he has a dream where he’s compelled to slaughter a bunch of elves—they’re cursed with immortality and an insatiable urge to drink (in an uncomfortable echo of the “Drunken Injun” steroetype), and they’re portrayed as lining up to be slaughtered. Then, later, he orders his soldier to kill the Manooks: “‘To a man. Children and grown-ups, men and women. Not because they set their monstrous mouse leader on me. I am not vengeful, and if it were up to me, I would leave everything just as it is. But I know things about the Manooks now that I didn’t know before. These unfortunates are laboring under three hundred eighteen curses—and what curses! […] A curse is catching, like disease. Remember this, Barxa. This is why you must kill the Manooks—so you may survive and not be destroyed yourselves.‘”

I’ll give the last word to Melifaro: “‘Man, give me a break,’ Melifaro said, heaving a sigh. ‘Until today I was sure I was only joking when I called you Monster. I sure hoped I was, at least.‘”

---

Overall thoughts

I had a theory. It’s wrong. I thought that after the first book, they only translated the “big” stories.

It makes sense, right? The first book has six short stories, and then one long one. From then on we only have long stories, and the ordering is weird. Two of the stories in the second book clash, the third book has the big dramatic finale in the first story instead of the second, and the fourth book has two lore-heavy stories. Maybe they translated the first book in its entirety, and then cherry-picked the important stories from the remaining volumes for the follow-ups.

So I went to the Max Frei’s page on Russian Wikipedia, followed the links for the Labyrinths of Echo series, and made liberal use of Google Translate. And no, the original books correspond to the translations.

I wasn’t totally wrong. The second book lost a story introducing a pub called “Juffin’s Dozen” (which pops up again later, to my confusion). That would’ve given a little more space between the two overlapping stories. The fourth book was originally intended to be part of the third book.³ That would solve the third book’s weak ending, and the fourth book’s excessive lore.

I read the summaries from the remaining four books. There is, in fact, a logic to the entire series—there is an ending. It’s incredibly unlikely that the remaining books will be translated, given that the English books came out between 2009 and 2013. Perhaps one day they’ll come. I’d be interested in reading them.

That said, it’s a weird series. From what we got, the first book is simultaneously the best and worst book: It has the roughest translation, and it’s hard to get into, but it’s the most satisfying as a book. The translation improves as the books go on, but even in the fourth book there are still sentences that don’t quite parse, and jokes that don’t make sense. Still, the underlying tension in the series—Max is a stranger from Earth, everything he wishes for will come true, and he loves Echo—is a killer hook. It’s a good series.

Addenda:

• Zomg, the names. There are so many Xs. Apparently the Russian x has a k or kh sound, but they were generally translated with the English x. The names generated by Google Translate read so much better: “Kholomi” instead of “Xolomi”, or “Huron” instead of “Xuron”.

• I also got to shout out the names of the various orders. They’re all like the Order of the Sepulchral Dog, or the Order of the Green Moon, or the Order of the Secret Grass. They’re great.

• I bought the first two books through the Kobo bookstore, but the others aren’t available. All four can be found on bookshop.org, albeit with DRM⁴. I ended up reading the third book on a sketchy website that would probably be covered in sketchy ads if I didn’t run Pi-hole, and I borrowed the fourth book from the Internet Archive.

• I’ve mentioned the overlap between the first and third stories in the second book multiple times. Here are the things that happen in both stories. SPOILERS AHOY!

  1. Zombies that are actually helpless pawns of some magician.
  2. The antagonists—Red Jiffa and the Tipfinger—turn out to be relatively blameless for their actions. Max frees them.
  3. Melamori sees Max disappearing into the Corridor between Worlds.
  4. Max uses his old trick to remember his dreams, only to be crushed by his memories.
  5. Max gets lost travelling between Worlds (or different places on Earth) until he feels like he’s done.

  The first story is all about the Robin Hood storyline, and Max’s travels between Worlds is handled in three quick paragraphs. In the third story, Max’s experiences back on Earth are half of the chapter. They’re very different stories. But once I noticed the parallels, I couldn’t unsee them.

… Longest blog post ever, y’all.