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The Return and Other Stories
- Default Title
Description
People are on the move in all ten stories in this collection coming home as in "The Return" leaving home as in "Rubbish Wind" travelling far away from their country as in "The Locks of Epiphan" trying to improve their lives and those of others running away searching fleeing. Their journeys are accompanied by two motives which characterize the writing of Andrey Platonov: optimism and faith in the goodness of humanity and abject despair at the cruelty randomness and apparent senselessness of our existence. The protagonists are torn between these poles and sometimes a synthesis shines through the mists of the apparent naivety of faith and the blackness of despair: the hope against hope that a better life is still possible.
Though Russian readers and critics have come to look on Platonov as among their greatest prose writers of this century he has yet to enjoy a parallel international reputation - mainly because much of his best writing was suppressed for more than 60 years. Combining a realism inspired by his work as an engineer with poetic vision and the deceptively simple language of folk tales Platonov sets his stories alight by using language in a way that renders it unfamiliar makes the ordinary seem unusual and the extraordinary logical. This translation is the first to present the full range of Platonov's gift as a short story writer to an English-language readership showing why it is that Joseph Brodsky regarded Platonov as the equal of Joyce Kafka and Proust.
"...strange almost abrupt a hallucinatory nightmarish parable of hysterical laughter and terrifying silences" - Eileen Battersby Irish Times - in reference to The Foundation Pit
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
242
Release Date:
2009-05-25
Publication Date:
2009-05-25
Publisher:
Harvill Press
Languages:
Original:
English
ISBN10:
1846553385
ISBN13:
9781846553387
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
Weight:
334 g
Height:
135 cm
Width:
216 cm
Thickness:
14 cm
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