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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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