Set against a backdrop of the emancipation of the serfs, touching on the (assumed) backwardness of rural Russia and the role...
Russian author Khvoshchinskaya exposes class differences and hypocrisies in this rediscovered novel translated into English for the first time.
A self-effacing widow of the rural gentry named Nastasya Ivanovna and her 17-year-old daughter, Olenka, receive an unexpected visit from a well-traveled, self-regarding aristocrat neighbor. Long absent from his estate, Ovcharov has negligently allowed it to fall into disrepair. Determined to spend the season in the country for his health and the purported education of his peasants, he throws the women's household into chaos by asking to rent their bathhouse. Meanwhile, a spiteful cousin with religious pretensions has arrived for an indefinite visit, taken over Olenka's room, and begun turning Nastasya Ivanovna's serfs against her. Ovcharov pens articles about the changing state of Russia and the important role enlightened nobles like himself must play. "Benefit to society—that is our watchword; and we must insist on this benefit, sternly insist." The machinations of a local aristocratic busybody—who wants Olenka to marry her protégé so that she can continue an adulterous affair with him—further complicate the situation. Khvoshchinskaya mocks the pomposity of interfering snobs who expect unquestioning obedience from their social "inferiors" with a light, ironic touch reminiscent of Trollope ("may heaven forgive him the frivolity of his thoughts....And in forgiving Ovcharov may heaven above forgive us all!"). But in her sympathetic depiction of the central mother-daughter relationship Khvoshchinskaya stakes her own territory and widens the boundaries of the 19th-century Russian novel. We learn early on, in an aside, that Olenka was born after "the untimely deaths of eight infants." Worried about her only daughter's potential marriage and "what kind of a fellow" the groom will turn out to be, her fretful mother thinks, "They all seem fine before the wedding."
Set against a backdrop of the emancipation of the serfs, touching on the (assumed) backwardness of rural Russia and the role of its elite in political reform, the book at its heart is the story of two country women asserting their independence.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-18302-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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