Last Notes

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta. He is co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, author of The Salvation Army and
the Public, and editor of “Improved by Cult

The 10 brilliant stories in this collection range from pure pathos to
subtle satire. In “Tales of Hungarian Resistance,” for example, the
line between heroism and cowardice in a wartime crisis—the inability
to define either after the fact or to know the truth of another’s
actions when there is no corroborative evidence or when love clouds the
issue—is explored and vivified in the later relationship between
grandfather and narrator as one version of the past conflicts with
another. In “Four Uncles” and “The Inert Landscapes of Gyцrgy
Ferenc,” both equally poignant, the psychological dislocation of exile
is graphically portrayed: “This was their paradox: that when they left
[Hungary], they did not go for reasons of a better life, elsewhere, but
because dissent demanded it, because they wanted to strike some kind of
blow, even while knowing that exile was a relinquishing not only of a
country but also of a life that mattered.” In these, and in such
stories as “Last Notes,” we are seriously led to consider issues of
artistic madness, temporal and spatial exile, and human responsibility
in the face of such traumas. At the other extreme, in the very funny
story “Into the Ring,” we are offered a satiric “blow-by-blow”
description of a failing marriage revived by settling differences in a
boxing ring.

Dobozy can switch from the pathetic to the gently ironic without
disturbing the reader’s sensibility. Witty, profound, sometimes
absurd, and always stylistically entertaining, he is a writer not be
missed.