Admirers of Gogol and his odd sensibilities will devour this excellent gathering.
A new translation of nine Gogol stories, some of them among his best known.
Gogol is indisputably, as translator Fusso notes, “one of the greatest writers in the Russian language,” and, because of his rich, sometimes arcane vocabulary, one of the most untranslatable. She acquits herself admirably in this collection, which brings out Gogol’s playfulness and eccentricity. One of the stories, for instance, is “Viy,” one of his Mirgorod cycle, populated by Cossack characters—to say nothing of a witch who, beaten to death by a seminarian, exacts a terrible vengeance that might have been scripted in a 1950s vampire film: “He turned his eyes away and then turned toward the coffin in horror. She got up…she was walking around the church with her eyes closed, constantly stretching out her arms as if trying to catch someone.” “The Overcoat,” a sardonic masterpiece, addresses the travails of a bureaucrat so badly paid that he can’t afford the titular garment and is robbed of it when he does finally manage to buy it, catching his death of the St. Petersburg winter cold but then going on to exact vengeance of his own. That story is less bizarre than the one that gives this collection its name: A barber finds a nose that belongs to one of his customers, depriving its erstwhile owner of his sense of smell: “The room that was accommodating this whole company was small, and the air in it was extremely dense, but Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov could not catch the scent, because he had covered himself with a kerchief and because his nose itself was located in God knows what locality.” Compared to the errant nose, Mikhail Bulgakov’s gun-toting cat is as normal as Russian snow. An added virtue of this first-rate collection is the inclusion of “Rome,” a long story not often anthologized, in which the plot is thin but the imagery extraordinary, whether describing the beautiful Annunziata—“Everything about her recalls those ancient times when marble came to life and sculptors’ chisels gleamed”—or a sunset over the Alban Hills.
Admirers of Gogol and his odd sensibilities will devour this excellent gathering.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-231-19069-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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