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THE GALOSH

Name: THE GALOSH
Author: Mikhail Zoschenko
ISBN: 1-58567-631-4

AND OTHER STORIES

by Mikhail Zoschenko & translated by Jeremy Hicks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 17, 2006

Amusing, but mainly for Russian history- and literature-lovers.

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A new translation of stories by Zoschenko, a satirist who deftly took whacks at the Soviet regime before the hammer came down on such writing in the 1930s.

Zoschenko (1895–1958) was the perfect comic writer for a peculiar time in the history of Russia. In 1921, realizing that redistribution of wealth couldn’t happen without actual wealth to redistribute, Lenin launched his New Economic Policy (NEP), which promoted state-controlled capitalism. NEP was tangled up in contradictions—one of which being that it permitted a slew of satirical magazines that criticized the government, and Zoschenko ruled those roosts in his heyday . The stories are all brief—rarely more than a few pages long—and send up the perplexing new economic order with quick, simple jabs. In “Host Accountancy,” an accountant laments rising costs at a dinner party, then tallies up how much his guests cost him—prompting all of them to leave. In “Electrification,” the residents of a building finally get electrical wiring installed—only to realize the lights reveal their abject poverty. Zoschenko’s Soviet Russia is full of people living on top of one another in apartments (in “Crisis,” a man takes up residence in a bathroom), dealing with thievery (both from petty criminals and the “Nepmen,” or state-sponsored capitalists) and navigating Soviet bureaucracy (in “The Cross,” a man needs a pass both to enter and leave a building). Zoschenko was a populist writer—translator Hicks argues that he was one of the country’s most widely read authors of the ’20s—and, like most popular scribes, had a formula. Much like a stand-up comic, he’d introduce a familiar topic (say, long waiting lines), segue into a shaggy-dog story, then drive home the ironic twist in the final couple of paragraphs. Zoschenko’s shtick is obvious, but though these stories are primarily of historical interest, his humor occasionally survives eight decades and a communist regime.

Amusing, but mainly for Russian history- and literature-lovers.

Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2006

ISBN: 1-58567-631-4

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.

The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.

This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.