Really sophisticated stories. Makes me think of Richard Powers.
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(10) These stories were really weird. Although this author is a colleague of mine, I do not know him - saw this in a used book store and thought I would give it a try. I thought it would be little Doctor stories - like Kitchen Table Wisdom or shortened versions of Verghese's Cutting for Stone. Boy, was I wrong. While I could not say in any real way that I was enjoying reading them - I did find myself compelled to go back and re-read passages and sometimes almost whole stories. Aurora and Eurydice are the two that began to really perplex the hell out of me, but intrigue me as well. Very surreal and haunting but oblique to the point of being inscrutable.

I think - but I could be wrong - that the stories are about death. Impending death, what happens after death, consciousness after death, transcending death. I don't know - something intriguing, bleak, compelling - but definitely not enjoyable and I think a bit too clever.

Anyway, I am in awe of someone who could write in such a way and also be a physician. However, my favorite part of the book was the 'about the author' part at the end where he notes that being a physician and writing for him were two ways of doing the same thing - 'being intimately involved with the limits of human existence - of life, of compassion, of our capacity to understand ourselves in the world.' Now that is someone who gets the 'art' of medicine. . . ( )

A great collection of surreal short stories. The stories are a little difficult to describe, which is not that surprising given the influence of authors such as Kafka and Borges. There is a certain heaviness to the influence, which sometimes takes a little from the stories, obscuring Holt's own authorial voice.

For me the best of the stories are the title story and the three stories preceding it. These three stories strike me as the most clearly science-fictional in nature, and the use of language and distance and a certain sense of chilliness really seemed to shine through with a voice of their own, something in the tradition of Phillip Dick or Stanislaw Lem, yet they weren't specifically like either of those two authors. Similarly, the title story, in which an Egyptologist searches for the tomb of a pharaoh whose very name has been wiped from history. I could think of many antecedents or other authors which I was reminded of by the story, yet it clearly seemed Holt's own.

In these stories, one of the themes that really comes out is our relationship with language and how language mediates our relationship with everything else: other people, our environment, our pasts, our own sense of who we are. It's a double-edged sword, as language can conceal as much as it reveals, a sort of tragic underpinning to the nature of our relationships. It's sometimes a little bit chilly within the confines of Holt's stories, but the value of the struggle to connect and understand still shines through.

Considering the sort of fiction Holt is writing here--conceptually heavy, surreal, sometimes plotless--I think this little volume is quite an achievement. It's definitely not for everyone--it's chilliness might give you frostbite, but when Holt's voice comes through, there is a transcendent beauty to his ice storms. ( )