Autobiography of a Corpse
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
An NYRB Classics Original
Winner of the 2014 PEN Translation Prize
Winner of the 2014 Read Russia Prize
The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky’s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room’s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist’s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man’s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of Autobiography of a Corpse, and the extraordinary spills out.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sly, vibrant, and often very funny, Krzhizhanovsky's stories, originally written in the 1920s and '30s (though virtually unpublished during the author's lifetime), are a joy. In "In the Pupil," the narrator's reflection in his lover's eye leads to all kinds of drama. "Postmark: Moscow" consists of 13 letters to a friend and gives a finely rendered sense of place and time: "Moscow is a mishmash of utterly unrelated (logically and optically) building ensembles..." In "The Collector of Cracks," a fairy tale leads to musings of great importance. The title story records a personal history related to a room. In "Yellow Coal," human spite is harnessed as an energy source. "The Runaway Fingers" provides both a lesson in the etiquette of proper inquiry and an investigation of artistry. The best of the many exceedingly fine stories here is "The Unbitten Elbow," in which a man's life's goal of trying to bite his own elbow leads to scarcely imagined changes in society. Full of precise detail, this book will instruct, delight, and then leave the reader pondering long after the reading is finished.
