Tag: NYRB

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: Short Stories

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was a Russian writer, playwright, philosopher, and historian, and a man who is “known for being unknown”. This is because most of his work was never published during his lifetime, but only posthumously. Often linked to Bulgakov, with whom he shared certain autobiographical details, Krzhizhanovsky eventually became known for his fantastical, absurdist stories and parables that remind of the works of Borges, Gogol, Calvino and Kafka. In his stories, storytellers lose control of their characters (The Bookmark) or thoughts (In Line/The Life & Opinions of a Thought), for example, and body parts or clothes inexplicably run away (The Runaway Fingers/Comrade Punt).

Below, I have selected for review five stories from three short story collections published by the NYRB: Memories of the Future (2009), Autobiography of a Corpse (2013), and Unwitting Street (2020). Some of them reminded me of the short stories of Dino Buzzati – see my reviews of Catastrophe & Other Stories and The Siren, and Kōbō Abe (The Magic Chalk). Both authors were influenced by Gogol and Kafka, as was Krzhizhanovsky.

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Review: Miaow by Benito Pérez Galdós

Miaow [1888/2025] – ★★★★

This satirical novel introduces Ramón Villaamil, an honourable man and an ex-employee of the Ministry, who spends all his days petitioning hopelessly his previous employment and begging his friends for favours so he can get a job at the Ministry in any capacity. Living with him are his wife Doña Pura, her sister Milagros, his daughter Abelarda (the three cruelly nicknamed “Miaus” for their cat-like appearance), and his grandson Luis, the child of Luisa, Ramón and Doña Pura’s late daughter. As Ramón Villaamil doesn’t have a stable employment, the family is falling deeper and deeper into poverty and debt, especially since the women of the family are haughty, pretentious and do not manage their finances well. But then, on the scene comes the father of little Luis – the handsome, but wayward Victor Cadalso, and starts play-acting in pursuing Abelarda, while offering money to the family. That is trouble already, but then Villaamil also discovers that Victor is after a governmental post, too, and will exercise more ruthless methods to get what he wants. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920) is considered the greatest Spanish author after Miguel de Cervantes, and seems to have had a real talent for ascertaining where dramatic interest may lie and going there in his narrative. This is a novel of hope and the absence of it, of “keeping up appearances”, of people living in denial, and of daily cruelties and societal indifference.

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Review: The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis

The Murderess [1902/83/2010] – ★★★★ 

Alexandros Papadiamantis (1851-1911) was one of the most influential Greek authors, and also an eccentric, reclusive man who wrote about the lives of the poor. One of his best-known novels is The Murderess, a strange, but spellbinding offering. It is a dark fairy-tale-like story about a far-off community in Greece that is in a constant state of want and sorrow. At its centre is an ageing woman called Old Hadoula or Frankissa or Frankojannou, whose family is also mired in poverty and who increasingly sees all the little girls around her as a liability instead of living and breathing human beings. Papadiamantis paired a Greek pastoral fable with a disturbing character study, and the result is one horrifying, but riveting read.

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Ranking NYRB Classics (Ones I’ve Read So Far)

I have read a number of NYRB classics recently, and decided to compile this list, ranking my favourite and least favourite NYRB classics I have read so far from this series dedicated to publishing both fiction and non-fiction, unearthing forgotten or overlooked books and drawing attention to various gems of world literature. I put books into three star-rated categories, but their placements within each category are pretty much without any particular order. I excluded Russian titles, many of which I read in the original language, and such major works as Proust’s Swann’s Way and Dante’s The Divine Comedy (which are also available through this series).

🟥 5 – 4½ stars

The Seven Madmen by Robert Arlt
The Stronghold by Dino Buzzati
Stoner by John Williams
Don’t Look Now & Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier
The Liar by Martin Hansen

Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
Havoc by Tom Kristensen
The Gate by Natsume Soseki

The New York Stories by Edith Wharton
A Visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford
Skylark by Dezso Kosztolanyi
The Other by Thomas Tryon

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Review: Fear by Gabriel Chevallier

Fear: A Novel of World War I [1930/2014] – ★★★★

“Above all, I must not think…What could I expect? To die? I must not expect that. To kill? That is the unknown and I have no wish to kill…I have no hatred, no ambition, and no motivation. Yet I must attack…”

“…we only have one homeland: the world” [Chevallier/Imrie, 1930/2014: 70, 110].

Gabriel Chevallier (1895-1969) was a soldier in the World War I and this experience shaped his novel Fear, a story where nineteen-year-old Jean Dartemont is cleared by the medical committee to serve in the war against the Germans. Dartemont is curious, but highly sceptical about the war, which he, like everyone else around him, first treats like an exciting explorative adventure, but which soon unveils itself to be what it really is – absolute horror. Fear is a passionate anti-war account, which gets progressively harrowing as the events in Dartemont’s life unfold in a spiralling motion. At the core of the novel is one simple statement – war is not a glorious feat but a dehumanising folly.

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Review: Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Cassandra at the Wedding [1962] – ★★★★

Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student who is supposed to be finishing her thesis and enjoying her student life. Instead, she is an emotional and mental mess, a state that no one sees and only her twin sister Judith guesses. When the date of Judith’s wedding approaches near, Cassandra drops everything and goes back home to attend the event, but the homecoming is not altogether joyful as Cassandra (packed with her bitter-sweet memories, unrealised hopes, deep attachments and her neurotic fears of betrayal) starts to spiral out of control. Judith’s impending wedding may be a catalyst for Cassandra’s final unravelling. Baker’s novella is direct and unrelenting; a book that examines closely one unbreakable bond and one fractured mind, all from the point of view of one subversive, unforgettable narrator.

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Review: Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum

Grand Hotel [1929/2016] – ★★★★★

Like Vera Caspary’s Laura and Luigi Bartolini’s Bicycle Thieves, Grand Hotel is yet another novel that is likely best known as its ecranisation – the 1932 Oscar-winning film Grand Hotel, starring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore and Joan Crawford. And, indeed, the story is cinematic. Austria-born author Vicki Baum puts at its centre one of the most intriguing tourism inventions of the late nineteenth century – a grand hotel that, in its heyday, was the pinnacle of travelling luxury, providing all kinds of exclusive comforts for its rich clientele under one roof, creating “a home away from home”, and catering for each of their guests’ whims, rather than passively accepting them into the accommodation. Into this already intriguing institution, Baum puts the most diverse characters, from one capricious aging ballerina to a lowly bookkeeper suffering from an incurable illness who just so happens to find himself amidst all the luxury thanks to his life savings. Together, this cast of curious characters presents a microcosm of the Berlin society of the mid-to-late 1920s, a roller-coaster period of changes characterised by the questioning of moral norms and the gender roles shift. By juggling her colourful characters and their situations so skilfully in the novel, Baum delivers one of a kind, part tragic part comic exposé of lives lived.

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Review: The Liar by Martin A. Hansen

The Liar [1950] – ★★★★1/2

You say the most important thing as indirectly as possible in your story, and that is how you truly capture the attention and interest of your reader. In this classic novel by Danish author Martin A. Hansen (1909-1955), our narrator is schoolmaster Johannes Vig (Lye) living on one very small Danish island of Sandø  – “a molehill in the sea”, and we all become “Nathanael”, an imaginary addressee of the schoolmaster’s sporadic diary-entries. While teasing and taunting his reader, Johannes details the natural beauty of the island and comments on its most illustrious inhabitants and their relationships. Local beauty Annemari wants to break off from her long-term beau Olaf, who is now away from the island. Olaf has been involved in a tragic boat incident some years previously, where one man died, and is apparently not the same anymore. Meanwhile one engineer Harry takes Olaf’s place in Annemari’s life, but the situation appears complex as Olaf’s return is imminent. As the novel so insidiously progresses, the question becomes: what is the place or role of our narrator, mysterious Johannes Vig, in all these happenings? Is his narrative reliable?, and if not, can we differentiate truth from fiction? While evoking the best of the epistolary literary tradition, notably George Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest and Hjalmar Soderberg’s Doctor Glas, Hansen penned an existential novel about the gradual finding of meaning in the fleetness of life, and coming to terms with the passage of time in a remote place where time has stood still.

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Review: Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante

Lies and Sorcery [1948/2023] – ★★★★

“Look in my face; my name is Might-have been;/I am also call’d No-more, Too-late, Farewell;/Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell/Cast up thy Life’s foam-fretted feet between;/…“The House of Life: A Superscription by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The first lines of this famous poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti may be best in capturing the rich and sensuous spirit of Elsa Morante’s debut – novel Lies & Sorcery, first published in Italian in 1948. It is a highly ambitious coming-of-age/multi-generational family saga at the core of which are such themes as love and abandonment, romantic longing and self-deception, parental attachment that verges on obsessive devotion and the ultimate disillusionment. The main, larger-than-life characters are shy Anna, capricious Edoardo, downtrodden Francesco and voluptuous Rosaria, while Anna’s parents Cesira and Teodoro also figure in this story. The narrative is from Anna’s daughter Elisa, who, in her confessional tone, weaves a story-tapestry on which her relatives are forced to repeat the same mistakes from one generation to the next due to their inability to learn, adapt and make peace with the past. The result is ambitions gone astray, opportunities squandered, and life and love being constantly replaced by unreachable dreams, illusions and elaborate fantasies.

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Review: Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant

Alien Hearts [1890] – ★★★★

Known primarily for his short stories, French author Guy de Maupassant (1850 – 1893) nonetheless wrote some novels, and Alien Hearts (Notre Coeur) became his last. This is one unexpectedly riveting foray into matters of the heart, centring on two people – “talented and astute, but lazy” André Mariolle and beautiful and charming, but proud Madame de Burne – who become romantically involved. Since both are intelligent, witty, rich and free, the question is: what can possibly go wrong when these two start their union? It turns out – much, since people do not exist in a vacuum, and love without self-interest and vanity is rare, apparently and at least in the highest echelons of the Parisian society frequented by Mariolle and de Burne. Maupassant’s short novel is a delicate study of falling in love, enjoying its bliss and then being tortured by love’s poisonous darts. Subtle in its contours, but bold in its themes, this tale of being at cross-purposes with one’s beloved must be one of Maupassant’s finest literary achievement.

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