piccoline's review against another edition
5.0
Powerful, puzzling, magnificent. Also intermittently terrifying and haunting. Lutz Bassmann is another one of [a:Antoine Volodine|261375|Antoine Volodine|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png]'s pseudonyms, and might by my favorite of his personae yet. While retaining the dark, mournful stance toward our declining reality, the stories here have a strange immediacy that some of the other Volodine/Post-Exoticist works choose to eschew. I might be saying this is a good place to start, though I might also be saying it is somehow not representative. But that isn't right. We have all the critique of the Way Things Are, all the strange twists and turns, the sad regret that we have in the end condemned ourselves to this selfish and petty end, and yet the whole time there are too the hints and whispers and ghostly hopes (or terrors) that there must too be something beyond this failed reality of ours.
I plan to re-read Volodine's Minor Angels later, once I've finished his other works in translation ([b:Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven|23282077|Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven|Antoine Volodine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1419320760s/23282077.jpg|42819936], [b:Writers|21563518|Writers|Antoine Volodine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1398351695s/21563518.jpg|14193601], [b:Naming the Jungle: A Novel|665676|Naming the Jungle A Novel|Antoine Volodine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328752380s/665676.jpg|651732]) because in retrospect it might be the other most powerful work amongst these masterpieces. It's hard to know now whether this one landed with such wondrous gravity thanks to the greater understanding of Post-Exoticism I have now. But I think anyone with a taste for adventurous fiction that engages these dark times will find much to like here. And a reread of other Volodine works is certainly something to savor rather than dread. (Or perhaps better to say one savors the coming dread.)
Really wonderful work.
I plan to re-read Volodine's Minor Angels later, once I've finished his other works in translation ([b:Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven|23282077|Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven|Antoine Volodine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1419320760s/23282077.jpg|42819936], [b:Writers|21563518|Writers|Antoine Volodine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1398351695s/21563518.jpg|14193601], [b:Naming the Jungle: A Novel|665676|Naming the Jungle A Novel|Antoine Volodine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328752380s/665676.jpg|651732]) because in retrospect it might be the other most powerful work amongst these masterpieces. It's hard to know now whether this one landed with such wondrous gravity thanks to the greater understanding of Post-Exoticism I have now. But I think anyone with a taste for adventurous fiction that engages these dark times will find much to like here. And a reread of other Volodine works is certainly something to savor rather than dread. (Or perhaps better to say one savors the coming dread.)
Really wonderful work.
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