The Steel Flea

I picked up this little Penguin Classics short story at a campsite book exchange and read over an hour or so whilst lazing on a beach. It's a fun tale of national oneupmanship in which Russian craftsmen are set the task of bettering an English invention - a tiny lifesized steel flea automaton which jumps about when wound by a key. It's all quite silly and the narrative frequently wanders off at odd tangents as all good shaggy dog stories do. Especially worth noting is William Edgerton's idiosyncratic translation which I imagine echoes the original Russian text in that wrong words are substituted to humorous effect throughout the story. An entertaining short story and one which I think would benefit from being read aloud, performance style, to an audience.