Reviewed by Tristan Foster

The fulfillment of desire is a theme which unites all the stories in Anne Serre’s The Fool. “I have the demon of love in me,” Maman says in “The Wishing Table.” In each text, the main characters do as they please — maybe as they must — despite everything. The Fool disrupts. The Narrator narrates. The family in “The Wishing Table” do, for better or worse, what they hunger for. On the opposite side of this, either on the other side of the walls of the house in which the fiction takes place, or outside of the book, in the real world, is the normal, the expected, the proper. The place where longings of a certain kind are necessarily tucked away, out of view. Until, of course, they aren’t…