THE CATHAY STORIES AND OTHER FICTIONS ...

THE CATHAY STORIES AND OTHER FICTIONS by MacDonald Harris (Story Line Press, 325 Ocean View Ave., Santa Cruz, Calif., 95062: $16)

The theme of these witty and whimsical stories is well captured by the title, for Cathay was not so much China as Marco Polo’s vision of China: a mingling of facts and fantastic fictions that became the definitive Western account of the Orient for nearly six centuries. In these tales, which are reminiscent of Borges’ meditations on the illusory nature of reality and Nabokov’s word games, Harris (“The Little People,” “Glowstone”) suggests that we all have our Cathays, fictions that help us understand our world and our selves.

Harris satirizes those who would believe otherwise, such as “Dr. Pettigot,” who concludes, after 25 years of research in a lab empty but for a mirror, that “the face is the chief window of the soul.” Harris’ intent is not to skewer the scientific establishment, however, for he believes that his mad characters are no more crazy than the rest of us.

While Pettigot’s work says little about the soul, Harris suggests, it says a lot about Pettigot, just as our own obsessions, the fictions we create in daily life, reveal elusive truths about ourselves and affect others in elusive ways. As Harris writes in a brief afterword, “Before Proust we could not have Proustian experiences; before Kafka our modern bureaucracies could not be Kafkaesque as they have since become.”