The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories is an anthology of thirty-six Dutch short stories spanning almost a century and edited by Joost Zwagerman. The majority of the stories appear in the English translation for the very first time, and I am reviewing five of them below.

The Opera Glasses by Louis Couperus (trans. Paul Vincent) – ★★★★1/2

This is a very well-written short story that keeps you on your toes throughout. It is about a young man in Dresden who decides to go and see Wagner’s opera The Valkyrie in theatre one night. He thinks he needs some opera glasses and hastily buys some heavy ones from one sinister-looking optician. What follows when he takes his theatre seat is one bewildering turn of events that even he cannot explain, and it concerns his sudden urges, obsessions and audience fixations. The object in his hands – those heavy opera glasses – may be the cause. Louis Couperus (1863- 1923), one of the renowned Dutch authors, weaves into this effective tale of a “haunted” object the themes of fatalism, premonition, and obsessive thought.

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