On "Eirene" by Robert Wexelblatt (8271 words) ***

This tale is strangely mesmerizing. I kept thinking--and I'm sure there's a deliberate connection here (I just haven't read the play in too long a time)--of Ibsen's The Doll House. Only this is a tale about a girl whose father leaves and who is left with her mom and brother and what she does with the doll house she's been given by her dad. But really, that's just the start. This is a story about a play. It's a story about sex. It's a story about literature and philosophy. Wexelblatt throws everything at the reader, and perhaps that's how he keeps the reader reading on with such enthusiasm even on a screen. There's a voice here. And there's education. I said Ibsen, but when I got to the end of the story, I was really thinking more about Kundera, one of those writers whose education runs across the tales he tells, whose story is as much a philosophical query and a literary meditation as any kind of romp. Read the story here at Tryst.