An English translation of Dada founder Walter Serner's first
collection of outlandish short stories
Walter Serner's first story collection, published in German in 1921,
brought to narrative form the philosophy of his earlier Dada
manifesto/handbook, Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist &
Those Who Wish to Be One--life is a con job and demands the skills of a
swindler. With its depiction of a world of appearances in which nothing
can be trusted, At the Blue Monkey helped establish the ex-doctor and
renounced Dadaist as a literary "Maupaussant of crime" and offers in
this first English translation 33 stories of criminals, con artists and
prostitutes engaged in varieties of financial insolvency, embezzlement,
sexual hijinks, long and short cons, and dalliances with venereal
diseases and drugs.
Told in a baroque, sometimes baffling poetry of underworld slang in an
urban world of bars and rent-a-rooms, these short tales are presented to
the reader like so many three-card Montes in which readers come to
realize too late that they may well themselves be the literary mark.
Walter Serner (1889-1942) helped found the Dada movement and
embodied its most cynical and anarchic aspects. After breaking with the
movement, he began publishing crime stories and the 1925 novel The
Tigress. Moving constantly across Europe, he eventually disappeared and
was rumored to have vanished into the criminal milieu he wrote about; in
fact he had returned to Czechoslovakia, married and become a
schoolteacher. In 1942, he and his wife presumably died after being
moved from a concentration camp, his books banned and burned by the
Nazis.
