Only read the first two stories so far but I'm really not convinced on this. They're both really heavy handedly "philosophical" but the whole story doesn't connect together well, thematically or plot wise. I'm probably missing a lot of important stuff (my standard disclaimer when I read "literary" fiction I don't like - I know i'm not as good a reader as I should be) but I just wasn't enjoying myself. He introduces surreal stuff but doesn't really do anything with them - for example "0.6 of a man" in the first story doesn't actually connect to the story and I really couldn't connect it to the other themes (the first story has a lot of strange stuff none of which seems to actually connect to each other). The second story has the somewhat interesting/semi funny concept of a miniature you entering another person's eye when you fall in love but it doesn't do much with it - it's just used again as a basis for some heavy handed but not very interesting philosophising on love. I dunno. Just felt flimsy. I can see how these might have been much more interesting if he'd had the benefit of an editor or simply more chances to be publicly criticised, learn from past experience, get better, etc but because all this stuff was never published while he still wrote it doesn't have that benefit. It's a shame. ( )

This is the second book by Krzhizhanovsky that I have read, and while I can see that he is a fascinating, imaginative, and thought-provoking author, I have decided that he is not really an author for me. The stories in this collection are highly philosophical and fantastic, but I just found them too cold and abstract to be enjoyable.

Krzhizhanovsky explores not only reality and unreality, but the perception of reality and unreality, how words and themes make or don't make reality, whether an object creates the shadow or the shadow creates the object, what is the reality of the crack in a rock or a street and in time, and so on. Some stories are more physical, as in one where a man finds himself inside his lover's eye along with all her previous lovers, or one in which a man tries to bite his elbow (based on a Russian proverb which essentially translates as "almost, but not quite"), or one in which a pianist's hand drops off and runs away on its fingers, but most are much more abstract. For example, there is one in which Krzhizhanovsky explores the Land of Not, where the Nots, who are the opposite of us (the Ises) live, and one in which a man dreams -- or is he dreaming? -- of a toad which emerges from the mud of the River Styx to propose creating a bridge between the living world and the world of the dead, or one in which a man a lot like the author sends letters postmarked Moscow, referencing many authors and philosophers, to an unnamed friend in the provinces who then sends them back to a publisher in Moscow. There is also a lot that is metafictional in many of these stories, as the protagonists muse about themes and other topics.

I found this book difficult to read, not only because it requires close attention, but also because I realized I kept putting it down to read other books. In this NYRB edition, there is a helpful introduction and there are helpful notes at the end, but the endnotes are irritatingly referenced only by page number and not footnoted in the text, which led me to look for notes that weren't there and miss notes that were there.

All in all, I admire Krzhizhanovsky, but I don't particularly enjoy reading him. I have one more of his books on the TBR, but I don't think I'll be getting to it any time soon.

There's a crack in everything...

"The Autobiography of a Corpse" is concerned with seams, cracks, and gaps. Krzhizhanovsky’s characters perceive the gulfs between 'I' and 'not-I', between 'here' and 'there'; they see the cracks in reality, cracks which (pace Leonard Cohen) let the darkness in. This is a world in which nothingness is tangible.

Many of the stories in this collection combine philosophy with fantastic scenarios to create an often difficult but invigorating read. These scenarios include a handful of runaway fingers, a man whose life's mission is to bite his own elbow, a world literally fuelled by spite, the fate of Judas's thirty pieces of silver, and a 'pitiable pupil manikin' which resides in a lover's eye. A deep pessimism underlies the black humour, lush description, and prose scattered with neologisms.

Most of Krzhizhanovsky’s writings were not published during his lifetime, largely due to the Soviet system he lived under. Life under this regime informs these stories: Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) may write of the surreal and fantastical, but at times reality was not much different. The final piece 'Postmark: Moscow' consists of a series of letters written to a friend in the provinces. In them the writer describes his wanderings in Moscow's tangled streets and reflects on the city's past and new communist present. These letters are filled with that philologically-inspired philosophy which suffuses the book's other stories.

This NYRB edition contains an introduction by Adam Thirlwell and notes which elucidate the many historical, philosophical, and literary allusions.

[I was given a free download of this book by the publishers for review.] ( )