... to these five short stories lies in their language; its beauty casts a shimmer over the unsayable. Those who gladly fall in love with words will both find and lose their hearts here.
This is a literary work that delves ever deeper, drawing its readers into the role of spelunkers in search of meaning anew. At its core, however, it is a philosophical book. It renders ancient questions painfully tangible by giving them flesh and blood.

“The Machine in the Garden” places the Absurd at the heart of a paradisiacal dreamscape—a clearing among woods, where a steaming, hissing machine looms, entirely out of place. Its sheer size makes it impossible to ignore, especially for the father and son who have lost themselves in that landscape. In the real world, they encounter each other once again, bent over a clogged toilet. In both realms, the absurd towers over them, demanding repair so that the knot between them might finally come undone.

The second story gives the book its title: Purpose Machines. It’s a curious neologism, pointing to our relentless drive to generate meaning. Meaning isn’t found; it slips through our fingers as time goes on. And yet it is this wondrous power of sense-making that allows us to resist the encroaching void and perhaps, in doing so, to save ourselves from the abyss.

“The Great Silence” tells the haunting story of a war trauma whose shadow stretches across generations. Yet the tale goes far beyond the riddle of a single scarred soul. It reaches into the vast theme of nothingness, that very void Grandma Lump beheld in 1945, as Stalin’s katushkas howled in the East. While the great trauma spreads wildly through the decades, nothingness rises as a silent cure.

“The Mask” is a story of another kind. It casts a modern light on the myth of the Minotaur and revives the ancient dream of the homunculus. At the center of the labyrinth, a daughter must confront the monster. Her only path out. There, in the disorienting depths of the underworld, a red thread winds through the pages: beauty emerges as a moral imperative. What begins as a gripping narrative unfolds, almost imperceptibly, into a philosophical experiment.

“Taras” is a disciple of Pythagoras, 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece. He lives in an ordered world, where the cosmos obeys the laws of number and his master guides him along the path to wisdom. But on a sea voyage, that harmony fractures when a mysterious boatman takes the rudder and steers everything in a wholly other direction. This story distills religious vision: from the harmony of the spheres to savior figures and mystical experience. And again and again: the boatman. The Other. As if risen from the Styx.