Markus Orths Fluchtversuche (Attempts at Flight) Schöffling & Co., August 2006, 168 pp ISBN-13: 978-3-89561-098-1/ ISBN-10: 3-89561-098-4 Struck by the similarity of a stranger's gesture to that of a neighbour, a man sets off on a mission to understand the world by comparing the behavioural characteristics of everybody he meets until even his mother appears to have become the doppelgänger of his father. A girl on her way to school to make a presentation relives her walk of the previous day when she visited her amnesiac great aunt, finally becoming the childhood dog that the old lady cries for in her confusion. A writer is persuaded against his will to write a story about a man who splits in two - then, as he finishes his story, he finds himself in the role of the other man. Markus Orths' latest collection of short stories pulls the reader into these kinds of odd philosophical explorations with elegance and dark wit. What is individuality? How does memory act on the present? What happens to the choices we don't make and the people we could have been? The author plays with these questions through characters and scenarios that become increasingly bizarre as each story progresses. Like many surrealist works, Fluchtversuche has a taste of Kafka and Borges, and a little of that self-referencing of the act of writing found in many modernist short stories, but also reminded this reader of Roald Dahl's adult shorts. One of the best pieces in the collection is Vom Töten ('On Killing'), about a film star obsessed with the art of killing and the rituals of death. Another gem is Konrad spricht ('Konrad Speaks'), in which a woman, enduring a detested visit by her ex, has a surreal vision of his new wife coming in and splitting his head open with an axe. These are tricky plot lines to pull off, but Orths manages them well, making his stories nastily funny, thought-provoking and creepy all at once. This book is a great read and translation should present no problem - indeed some of Orths' earlier stories have already been published both in Britain and the USA. This book should follow them. It would come as a splendid surprise to anyone who has not read him before.