This is the third Bitov book to reach us in Susan Brownsberger's exemplary translation (the novel Life in Windy Weather and short-story collection Pushkin House)—and just how shaggy and exhilarating an encyclopedia of Russian literature Bitov is becomes more and more manifest: He's like an anti-Nabokov. The Caucasian regions have been a staple locale of Russian classics since Pushkin: Tolstoy, Lermontov, Mandelstam—all of them found in the foreignness of the Caucasus the place out of time that ratified their artistic intuitions that writing renders both space and time suspect, that it is an activity that doesn't quite belong to either. On the face of it, Bitov is writing a ravished account of Armenian and Georgian integrities and natural beauties (such as the hewn-from-a-rock-face Armenian church, Geghard); as travel writing, the book has a subjective, swoony/goony quality that's appealing. But the literary echoes, and the very phenomenology of being in one place and not another, quickly develop into an argument for the writer as traveler even when sitting in his chair at his desk—without any real idea of what he's encountering, nor the absolute command of language to describe it. This sense of mysterious, giddy provisionality is both very Russian and deliciously individual in Bitov.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-11883-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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