A parable worthy of comparison with the work of Kazantzakis, Camus, and Par Lagerkvist. Platonov’s translators have...
This is a lost treasure found: an allegorical masterpiece, written in 1935 (though unpublished in full until 1999), by one of the greatest modern Russian writers.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
BOOK REVIEW
A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.
The brutal murder of a 15-year-old boy during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising becomes the connective tissue between the isolated characters of this emotionally harrowing novel.
In May 1980, student demonstrations ignited a popular uprising in the South Korean city of Gwangju. The police and military responded with ruthless violence, and Han (The Vegetarian, 2015) begins her novel in the middle of a disorienting atmosphere of human-inflicted horror. While searching for a friend, a young boy named Dong-ho joins a team of volunteers who look after the bodies of demonstrators who were killed. He keeps a ledger with details on each corpse, pins a number to its chest, and keeps candles lit beside the ones with no family to grieve beside them. The details of this world seep off the page in a series of sickening but precisely composed images. Han’s evocation of savagery and grief is shockingly sensory and visceral but never approximate or unrestrained. Each character’s voice seems to ring in its own space, and though they are all connected by Dong-ho’s experiences in Gwangju, they exist in an uncanny isolation. The novel is divided into seven parts: six acts that each focus on a different character and an epilogue that pulls in the author herself. The parts shift in time from 1980 to 2013 and in point of view, making the reader intimate or complicit to different degrees with the voice of a dead person, a survivor of torture, a mother suffering from regret and memory. Han explores the sprawling trauma of political brutality with impressive nuance and the piercing emotional truth that comes with masterful fiction. In her epilogue she writes, “Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke.” Her novel is likely to provoke an echo of that moment in its readers.
A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90672-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
