Themerson Stefan

When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's back yard--paralyzing the professor and killing his guest--the "mystery of the sardine" begins. Its solution will involve such unwitting detectives as a twelve-year-old mathematician, his mother, his beloved, a palmist named Miss Prentice, and a bureaucrat dubbed the Minister of Imponderabilia. The clues they unearth--drawing on logic, the occult, intuition, and everything in between--lead them far away from the tiny seaside town where they begin. We follow them to Majorca, Rome, Warsaw, and London, but in the end, the solution lies beyond even the furthest and most magical reaches of reason.

Hobson's Island (so called because Mr. Hobson bought it, or did Mr. Hobson buy it because it was so called?) enjoyed decades of isolation in the Atlantic Ocean. For years, the caretakers lived there peacefully, with only a cow for company and an empty house to care for. But all is suddenly disrupted when a wave of unusual visitors arrive: a deposed African king fleeing a revolution, a Hobson descendant claiming ownership, government agents eyeing the nation-less real estate, and scientists looking to test a dangerous new invention. In typical Themerson fashion, the comic is wound up with the serious and let go to devastating effect. A clever and apt parodying of Cold War power plays and twisted science, Hobson's Island is a strangely touching, sympathetic, and emotional account of the families and individuals brought together and broken up by Hobson's Island.

At times in his life, Tom Harris is a dull schoolboy, an apprentice barber, a delinquent husband, an old man with a monkey who drinks at the Green Man Pub, "il professore Harris" at the University of Genoa, and possibly a murderer. But the question of who the elusive Tom Harris really is, and what crimes he has really committed, obsesses the narrator of this novel. Tom Harris can perhaps be described as a sort of philosophical detective story, ingeniously plotted and wittily told with a stylistic virtuosity on par with the most playful works of Raymond Queneau.