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SOUL

Name: SOUL
Author: Andrey Platonov
ISBN: 1-84343-038-X

by Andrey Platonov & translated by Robert Chandler & Elizabeth Chandler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2003

A parable worthy of comparison with the work of Kazantzakis, Camus, and Par Lagerkvist. Platonov’s translators have...

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This is a lost treasure found: an allegorical masterpiece, written in 1935 (though unpublished in full until 1999), by one of the greatest modern Russian writers.

Platonov (1899–1951), a veteran of the Russian Revolution’s Red Army and a labor-camp survivor, worked as a war correspondent and an engineer before committing himself to the fiction that expressed—with lucid eloquence—his disillusionment with a social ideal that became the monolithic tyranny of Stalinism. Soul is closely related thematically to Platonov’s once-notorious anti-Stalinist satires Chevengur and The Foundation Pit, and its brooding, often poetically nuanced solidarity with humble characters’ lives links it with the highly praised short stories available in the English-language collection The Fierce and Beautiful World. The central figure, Nazar Chagataev, was born in the Central Asian desert region between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, abandoned for his own good by his impoverished mother, and educated at Moscow’s prestigious Institute of Economics. Upon graduation, Nazar is “assigned” to return to his homeland and “rescue” his people, a nomadic ethnic group called the Dzhan (“dzhan” being the Persian word for “soul”) by leading them to salvation through Communism. But this Moses is not embraced as the leader of his people—collectively characterized, brilliantly, as fiercely proud, resourceful, sexually potent, resolutely independent “souls.” Nazar’s unflappable idealism is (no doubt deliberately) reminiscent of the self-made “peasant” Lenin of Anna Karenina, and Platonov memorably dramatizes his simple goodness by showing it in action, in relationships with the rugged people whose integrity he respects, the pregnant woman he marries, her teenaged daughter for whom he assumes responsibility (and who comes to love him), and his aged mother, whose “sacrifice” of her son has led, paradoxically, to his mission and fulfillment.

A parable worthy of comparison with the work of Kazantzakis, Camus, and Par Lagerkvist. Platonov’s translators have performed an invaluable service.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2003

ISBN: 1-84343-038-X

Page Count: 208

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
CHEVENGUR
by Andrey Platonov ; translated by Robert Chandler & Elizabeth Chandler

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.