WRITERS

Name: WRITERS
Author: Antoine Volodine
ISBN: 978-1-62897-040-1

by Antoine Volodine ; translated by Katina Rogers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 5, 2014

Many of Volodine’s writers inhabit a “post-exotic” world, in which they’re obligated to remember the atrocities and horrors...

bookshelf

A loosely concatenated series of seven stories, all focusing on writers in various and cunning guises.

The opening tale introduces Mathias Olbane, a suicidal writer and former inmate at a penitentiary now plagued with oncoglyphosis, a rare illness whose manifestation is a “retraction of the scalp,” a condition that torments him. Convicted of being a member of a terrorist organization, despite his emphatic denials, Olbane served 26 years—and came out with plenty of material. “Begin-ing” plunges us into a Kafkaesque world in which a man is being tormented into making a confession about almost anything—“that he has contacts with parallel universes, with aliens, that since his birth he has been a double agent"—although he professes that his mind is completely empty. Bruno and Greta, his incredulous interlocutors, turn out to be sadistic, murderous and insane. “Acknowledgments,” one of the few stories with a lighter tone, is in fact a delicious sendup of a writer’s elaborate appreciation for all the help he received in completing his novel, but also included is a list of those who did not aid the creative process, those whose “malicious critiques, mean-spirited little reviews, and unpardonable silences carried substantial weight towards my books’ lack of success.” In the futuristic “The Strategy of Silence in the Work of Bogdan Tarassiev,” the narrator explores an author whose career spans a period from 2017 to 2053 and whose periodic silences raise cryptic issues about creativity.

Many of Volodine’s writers inhabit a “post-exotic” world, in which they’re obligated to remember the atrocities and horrors of the 20th century—and to serve as repositories of a dark cultural memory.

Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-62897-040-1

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

- BOOK REVIEW
RADIANT TERMINUS
by Antoine Volodine translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

- BOOK REVIEW
BARDO OR NOT BARDO
by Antoine Volodine ; translated by J.T. Mahany

- BOOK REVIEW
POST-EXOTICISM IN TEN LESSONS, LESSON ELEVEN
by Antoine Volodine ; translated by J.T. Mahany

bookshelf

ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

bookshelf

A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

bookshelf

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990

bookshelf

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.