Remarkable stories, threaded through with a bleak humor, describe life in the provinces of a Russia attempting to contend...
Stories about the absurdity, corruption, and daily mundanity of modern Russian life.
In his native Russia, Osipov, in addition to being a writer, is a cardiologist, an activist, and the founder of a small publishing company. His first book to be published in the United States is a marvelous collection of short stories in which not very much happens. One story follows a doctor on one of many uneventful trips to the U.S., where he escorts patients, for reasons unspecified. He makes money this way. On his way back to Moscow, a customs official will ask, “What are you traveling with?" and he’ll just say, “ 'All kinds of crap.’ They’ll smile as best they can—one of ours, on you go.” In another story, a geologist decides to join the priesthood despite the fact that “he didn’t even have a decent beard.” Even worse: “He couldn’t sing for his life. And a priest had to sing well.” Osipov clearly carries the weight of Chekhov’s and Bulgakov’s influence not only in his mix of professions, but also in his sense of humor—which is, to say the least, deadpan. Like Chekhov, too, many of Osipov’s stories meander along without a clearly delineated plot or, in the end, a sense of resolution. He is clearly concerned with Russia’s place in the modern world. Several stories, including the one about the airport-hopping doctor, comment on the way that Americans, at least superficially, seem to be driven by rules and regulations, a need for order. Back home, all those things have a way of going to hell. What matters to that customs official is not that the forms have been correctly filled in but that the doctor is “one of ours.”
Remarkable stories, threaded through with a bleak humor, describe life in the provinces of a Russia attempting to contend with the modern world.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68137-332-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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