halcyon_nights's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Wow. What a punch in the chest the last piece, In a Boat Scratched on a Wall, was. Perfectly arranged to leave the most powerful, lingering impact.
I checked out the reviews on this collection before starting and as I was reading the first couple of pieces and a lot of reviewers referenced the earlier stories and essays in the collection as the highlight of the book. I felt slightly put off when I'd read that. How could the collection peak within the first third, when I'd found it middling to my tastes?
The second half of the collection, starting from Nabokov's Inkblot, delivered great emotional beats, reminiscence, and introspection. If I go by this collection, it seems Shishkin's nonfiction work might be more to my taste. I did not enjoy the experience of reading a story that was narrated by multiple people with no clear markers or punctuation. I respect that other people might appreciate more experimental styles but I prefer stories to be experimental in different ways, I think. In the end, the story's impact is muffled by the confusion of trying to figure out what was happening until the end. This was the case in particular with both the titular story, Calligraphy Lesson, and The Blind Musician.
Be aware that one piece, Of Saucepans and Star-showers, contains a brief but graphic description of the author's dead father. I visualize when I read so that was a shocking visual image that I did not appreciate.
I checked out the reviews on this collection before starting and as I was reading the first couple of pieces and a lot of reviewers referenced the earlier stories and essays in the collection as the highlight of the book. I felt slightly put off when I'd read that. How could the collection peak within the first third, when I'd found it middling to my tastes?
The second half of the collection, starting from Nabokov's Inkblot, delivered great emotional beats, reminiscence, and introspection. If I go by this collection, it seems Shishkin's nonfiction work might be more to my taste. I did not enjoy the experience of reading a story that was narrated by multiple people with no clear markers or punctuation. I respect that other people might appreciate more experimental styles but I prefer stories to be experimental in different ways, I think. In the end, the story's impact is muffled by the confusion of trying to figure out what was happening until the end. This was the case in particular with both the titular story, Calligraphy Lesson, and The Blind Musician.
Be aware that one piece, Of Saucepans and Star-showers, contains a brief but graphic description of the author's dead father. I visualize when I read so that was a shocking visual image that I did not appreciate.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent
Moderate: Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Alcoholism
yanulya's review
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
3.75
merixien's review against another edition
5.0
Mihail Şişkin ile Mektupların Romanı ile tanıştım ve hayran oldum. Açıkcası öykülerini okumadan önce biraz tedirgindim zira aynı tadı bulamamaktan korkuyordum . Ancak hem öyküleri hem de hayatından izler taşıyan denemeleriyle bu alanda da muazzam bir yazar olduğunu gördüm. Yakın takibindeyim artık. İzmail’in Fethi de Jaguar Kitap tarafından yayınlanacakmış, büyük merakla bekliyorum.
alexlewis's review
reflective
relaxing
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
maich's review
informative
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
erinbottger's review
5.0
When you read the 8 stories in this book, you enter another world, Shishkin's, where language is the key to communication or, the inverse, the obstacle to understanding.
In "Calligraphy Lesson" the narrator takes testimonies and records crimes for the police (and teaches calligraphy on the side). He longs to elevate his art but what he must write is so sordid:
"At work I deal with stories you could never even imagine, but you know I've gotten used to it and I do my job. One man, for instance, quarreled with his wife and slaughtered her and their two children with the bread knife. The older was four and the younger was an infant. Then he came to his senses and started to slit his own veins, and while he was bleeding, he set fire to the apartment and jumped out the window... You wake up, have breakfast, get ready for work, and you already know what's going to happen. One man choked his own mother with a stocking and carried the body to the outhouse piece by piece, and I said to him, "Please sign here." And so it goes, day after day, year after year. If it's not Peter, it's Nikolai; if it's not the doting father, it's the loving son. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, a hundred years from now. The words, even those are the same: I didn't see it. I wasn't there. It wasn't me...
They do things even they can't imagine, and I tell them, Write, now, to keep from losing your mind, write a final word not in some lapidary cursive font but, say, an elegant bubbly Rondo, in blurred letters that repeat, but the verdict is in littera fracture with flourishes, or Gothic logjams, or Batard, or Coule, or whatever strikes your fancy, one page like this, another like that. Even if you only write one word, to say nothing of a page, make it harmony itself, so that its regularity and beauty offset that whole crazy world, that whole caveman mindset."
In "The Blind Musician", Shishkin takes on the perspective and sensitivities of a blind man, Roman.
"Getting oriented in the so-called visible dimension doesn't necessarily mean seeing. I assure you, Evgenia Dmitrievna, any blind person orients himself as well as you can. That's not the main thing, you know, it's trivial. It's much easier than you think. After all, no two doors sound and no two rooms smell alike. Believe me, all it takes is a rustle, the creak of a floorboard, a cough, to know the size of a room, if it's a strange one, and whether anyone's in it, if it's your own. Empty and filled spaces sound different."
He later admits: "Naturally, Evgenia Dmitrievna, there are definite drawbacks to any situation. I don't like street orchestras. Drumming is to me what a thick fog is to you. Or a snowfall, for instance. Then it's like even the streetcar's wearing felt boots. Or new shoes-- that's a torture only the blind can understand... I'll admit, I don't find the way you slip me thicker, sturdier dishes so I won't break them very nice., Evgenia Dmitriovna. On the other hand, believe me, the nonsee-er has his advantages. Why else would the philosophers of antiquity have blinded themselves? Evidently, they understood that your visible world, which you treasure so, is no more than tinsel, smoke, zilch... Of course, it's easy to cheat a blind person, but you can't fool him... Words lie, the voice never."
One story I really enjoyed was "Nabokov's Inkblot" where the needy emigre intelligentsia translator in Switzerland is paid well to escort a family of New Russians to Nabokov's hotel, the Montreux-Palace. Of course, the trip has a completely different purpose and meaning for the two men.
Another of special note was "The Bell Tower of San Marco" of two lovers, medical students, the Russian Lydia Kochetkova and the Swiss Fritz Brupbacher, who met in 1897 in Zurich. She was a radical revolutionary and soon converted him and together they committed themselves to the cause. They married, remained celibate and then separated, she back to rural Russia and he to practice medicine and organize in Switzerland. The rest of the story is told via their exchanged letters and short and cantankerous annual meetups. Before long, Lydia loses her enthusiasm for winning over the peasantry and becomes disgusted with the coarseness and cruelty of Russian life. Over time she loses faith in even the revolution, visits a sanatorium on Lake Boden and is arrested on her return to Russia in July 1909. In exile, she c0ontracts typhus and Fritz travels to her but, it turned out to be the turning point for him. He, finally tells her he wants a divorce as he has no more illusions about their future together. She continues to write to him until war breaks out. It's a tragic and telling tale of revolutionary zeal and wasted potential and of idealistic foolhardiness.
Shishkin writes brilliantly by creating characters and situations that allow him to play and reveal truth with his prose. Working with universal themes, he captures the particular through shifting narrative styles and perspectives within a text, yielding a patchwork compilation whose whole is more than the sum of its parts, coming together through language. He, himself, had broad experience translating for Russian emigres moving to Europe and he is here ably served by four translators.
I look forward to reading and enjoying much more of his prize-winning fiction.
In "Calligraphy Lesson" the narrator takes testimonies and records crimes for the police (and teaches calligraphy on the side). He longs to elevate his art but what he must write is so sordid:
"At work I deal with stories you could never even imagine, but you know I've gotten used to it and I do my job. One man, for instance, quarreled with his wife and slaughtered her and their two children with the bread knife. The older was four and the younger was an infant. Then he came to his senses and started to slit his own veins, and while he was bleeding, he set fire to the apartment and jumped out the window... You wake up, have breakfast, get ready for work, and you already know what's going to happen. One man choked his own mother with a stocking and carried the body to the outhouse piece by piece, and I said to him, "Please sign here." And so it goes, day after day, year after year. If it's not Peter, it's Nikolai; if it's not the doting father, it's the loving son. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, a hundred years from now. The words, even those are the same: I didn't see it. I wasn't there. It wasn't me...
They do things even they can't imagine, and I tell them, Write, now, to keep from losing your mind, write a final word not in some lapidary cursive font but, say, an elegant bubbly Rondo, in blurred letters that repeat, but the verdict is in littera fracture with flourishes, or Gothic logjams, or Batard, or Coule, or whatever strikes your fancy, one page like this, another like that. Even if you only write one word, to say nothing of a page, make it harmony itself, so that its regularity and beauty offset that whole crazy world, that whole caveman mindset."
In "The Blind Musician", Shishkin takes on the perspective and sensitivities of a blind man, Roman.
"Getting oriented in the so-called visible dimension doesn't necessarily mean seeing. I assure you, Evgenia Dmitrievna, any blind person orients himself as well as you can. That's not the main thing, you know, it's trivial. It's much easier than you think. After all, no two doors sound and no two rooms smell alike. Believe me, all it takes is a rustle, the creak of a floorboard, a cough, to know the size of a room, if it's a strange one, and whether anyone's in it, if it's your own. Empty and filled spaces sound different."
He later admits: "Naturally, Evgenia Dmitrievna, there are definite drawbacks to any situation. I don't like street orchestras. Drumming is to me what a thick fog is to you. Or a snowfall, for instance. Then it's like even the streetcar's wearing felt boots. Or new shoes-- that's a torture only the blind can understand... I'll admit, I don't find the way you slip me thicker, sturdier dishes so I won't break them very nice., Evgenia Dmitriovna. On the other hand, believe me, the nonsee-er has his advantages. Why else would the philosophers of antiquity have blinded themselves? Evidently, they understood that your visible world, which you treasure so, is no more than tinsel, smoke, zilch... Of course, it's easy to cheat a blind person, but you can't fool him... Words lie, the voice never."
One story I really enjoyed was "Nabokov's Inkblot" where the needy emigre intelligentsia translator in Switzerland is paid well to escort a family of New Russians to Nabokov's hotel, the Montreux-Palace. Of course, the trip has a completely different purpose and meaning for the two men.
Another of special note was "The Bell Tower of San Marco" of two lovers, medical students, the Russian Lydia Kochetkova and the Swiss Fritz Brupbacher, who met in 1897 in Zurich. She was a radical revolutionary and soon converted him and together they committed themselves to the cause. They married, remained celibate and then separated, she back to rural Russia and he to practice medicine and organize in Switzerland. The rest of the story is told via their exchanged letters and short and cantankerous annual meetups. Before long, Lydia loses her enthusiasm for winning over the peasantry and becomes disgusted with the coarseness and cruelty of Russian life. Over time she loses faith in even the revolution, visits a sanatorium on Lake Boden and is arrested on her return to Russia in July 1909. In exile, she c0ontracts typhus and Fritz travels to her but, it turned out to be the turning point for him. He, finally tells her he wants a divorce as he has no more illusions about their future together. She continues to write to him until war breaks out. It's a tragic and telling tale of revolutionary zeal and wasted potential and of idealistic foolhardiness.
Shishkin writes brilliantly by creating characters and situations that allow him to play and reveal truth with his prose. Working with universal themes, he captures the particular through shifting narrative styles and perspectives within a text, yielding a patchwork compilation whose whole is more than the sum of its parts, coming together through language. He, himself, had broad experience translating for Russian emigres moving to Europe and he is here ably served by four translators.
I look forward to reading and enjoying much more of his prize-winning fiction.
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