The Bound Man and Other Stories

The Austrian Jewish author Ilse Aichinger is best known for her Kafkaesque allegorical short stories, ten of which are collected in the newly reissued The Bound Man and Other Stories. Originally published in 1953 and translated into English in 1955 by Eric Mosbacher, they are better described as metaphysical fables or parables, in which meanings are elusive and surreal circumstances are absorbed quickly and without much surprise by characters. Aichinger’s themes have to do with her reaction to fascism and WWII. Although she and her mother survived the war, her grandmother and all of her maternal aunts and uncles were murdered in concentration camps by Nazis working under Hitler’s so-called “final solution.” After the war, Aichinger looked down on the way emerging postwar society focused on money and status. Instead, her stories revolve around issues of instability, the slippages and inadequacies of language, and the tenuous status of the aesthetic.

In the title story, a man wakes up tied at the ankles and wrists after being robbed on the road. He notes the beauty of nature all around him, struggles to his feet, quickly learning to hop within his new limited physicality. A circus owner sees him and is delighted enough to offer the man a spot in the show. Soon, the man is the circus’s main attraction, people marveling at the grace with which he moves within his bonds. The only person that seems bothered by all this is the circus owner’s wife, who sometimes touches the man’s chafed wrists and ankles. A wolf menaces the countryside, killing livestock. No one can find the predator, so the circus agrees to help. The bound man goes up a hill, where the wolf attacks him – but amazingly, the man kills the wolf in hand-to-hand combat. However, the villagers don’t believe that he could have done this, so the circus captures another wolf and tries to recreate the event on stage. The man and the animal face off, but the owner’s wife jumps in at the last second, cutting the man’s bonds to help him. Not knowing how to move without the ropes, the man is unable to defeat the wolf, and instead just shoots it with a gun. The audience turns on him, and he flees as both circus performers and villagers chase him. He is free, and he soon forgets everything about this part of his life.

“The Opened Order,” is about a soldier tasked with delivering a sealed letter with secret orders inside. Unable to resist, he opens the letter and finds out that it says that the letter’s bearer is supposed to be shot. Panicking, he wants to kill the driver of his jeep to leave no witnesses. However, he is hit by a stray bullet and passes the letter to the driver, assuming that this driver will now be the one shot as the order demands. The driver takes the man to a hospital. He recuperates in fear for his life, and for the driver’s until he is told that the order was actually just an encrypted message with a different real meaning.



In “The Advertisement,” a man putting posters on the wall of a railway station tells himself “You’re not going to die” as he balances on a tall ladder. The station is almost empty, except for a mother with a young girl on the far end of the platform. The poster is an ad for the seaside featuring a little boy with his mouth open in a big grin. Somehow, the poster boy hears the words the man says and starts thinking about them, wondering what dying means. Diving into the sea? Jumping out of the poster? Or maybe having another poster stuck overtop of you? Meanwhile, the little girl breaks away from her mother and accidentally falls on the tracks. At the same time, the poorly glued poster rips off the wall. A passing train tears it up as it speeds down the track.

In the fourth story, “The Private Tutor,” an hour-long babysitting session goes off the rails. Mother and Father leave their little boy home alone, telling him not to open the door to anyone except his tutor. The tutor arrives, and he and the boy read for a while and then decide to play a game. The more the tutor loses at the game, the more he starts losing his cool, and then his marbles. Just as he is about to completely go insane, the little boy’s parents arrive home.

“Angel in the Night” is about the relationship between two teenage sisters. The younger one claims that when she is alone, she sees amazing angels – something she says her sister could never see. Annoyed, the older sister snaps, yelling, “They don’t exist! They don’t exist! You lied to me!” This subdues the younger sister, who meekly submits instead of arguing. However, later that night, the older sister realizes that her angry outburst has destroyed something beautifully creative in her younger sister. She decides to apologize the next morning. That night, it snows, and the older sister either actually sees or dreams she sees one of the angels that she’s heard so much about outside. She rushes to her younger sister’s room to tell her the good news but finds that her younger sister isn’t in her bed. She is in the yard, dead under the newly fallen snow.



“Story in a Mirror,” the sixth and most famous of all the stories in the collection, is told almost like a set of orders to the reader, who is asked to imagine being dead and then able to move backward through life. It opens with a burial, as the pastor is saying his last words. But then, a mirror turns right into left, and the story starts to run backward, with the deceased being shown exactly what has led to the grave in reverse order, all the way back to birth.

“Moon Story” is about a famously beautiful girl who wins a beauty contest titled “Miss Universe,” but she can’t claim this title until the contest’s organizers at least make a show of looking for contestants off-planet. Everyone flies off to the moon, expecting it to be empty and to present the contest award to her there. Nevertheless, nothing goes to plan. On the moon, they meet Ophelia, a seaweed covered woman who is even more beautiful than the original contest winner. Ophelia tells them that she is lonely, ready to come to Earth, and happy to leave the other woman on the moon in her place. However, the Earth woman refuses to stay behind. Instead, she tries to kill herself by jumping into a river. After she is rescued, she claims that she wants to die because now she knows that she is ugly.

A nosy woman stares out of her window hoping to see anything interesting in “Window Entertainment.” She sees an old man across the way, who at first seems to give her a series of friendly gestures – nodding, waving, etc. – to which she responds. Then, he starts performing a series of increasingly bizarre maneuvers: waving scarves around, standing on his head, winking, wearing a sheet like a cape. The woman calls the police. They arrive as the man laughs, then mimes catching the laugh and throwing it across the street. As they laboriously climb the stairs and strain to get into the apartment, the woman follows behind. The man doesn’t open the door when they knock, so they break the door down just in time to see the man miming going to sleep on a pillow. As they look past him, they see a small child in the window of the apartment just above the woman’s. The child laughs, then catches his laughter, and throws it to the police, the woman, and everyone else gathered behind the old man.



“Ghosts on the Lake” describes those trapped in never-ending vacation mode in the afterlife: a man whose motorboat engine can never stop running, so he can never land; a woman who is scared that taking off her sunglasses will mean fading away; and three teenage girls who are doomed to forever giggle at a buff deckhand.

In the final story, “Speech under the Gallows,” a condemned man tells a crowd his last words. He berates the audience for their hypocrisy, saying that unlike them, he knows what his crimes have been. Sure, he has set fire to their haystacks and barns and has thus been convicted of arson, but it is they who will eventually die for no reason at all.