I've talked about the wealth of books that I culled from the Northshire Bookstore's New York Review of Books (NYRB) corner. Last night I finished another of them: Sigizmund Krzhizhanosvky's Autobiography of a Corpse, a collection of short stories. Like the vast majority of the NYRB books that I purchased, I really liked, bordered on loved, Autobiography of a Corpse. True to the mission of the NYRB collection, Krzhizhanosvky is an author I'd never heard of (another gaping hole in my witless Hoosier education). All the stories are clever, although not so clever that you find yourself thinking, "OK, now you're just trying to be clever." The stories are clever, but there's also an edge, and I would argue an odd humanity to them. Take for example this little portion from the short story "Seams":
Indeed, the only way I can write is bit by bit, in a break - along a seam. My thinking, too, feels short of breath: inhale - exhale, exhale - inhale. It's hard to finish a thought. Take today. I sat down on my usual bench on my usual boulevard and looked about. People were walking by - mincingly and swaggeringly, from right to left, from left to right, in ones and two, and in groups. First I thought: Who are they to me and who am I to them? Then I just stared. One they went, mincingly and swaggeringly, from left to right, from right to left. Again I thought: Man is to man a wolf. No, that's not true, that's sentimental, lighthearted. No, man is to man a ghost. Only. That's more exact. To sink one's teeth into another man's throat is at least to believe - and that's what counts - in another man's blood. But there's the rub: Man cased to believe in man long ago, even before he began doubting God. We fear another man's existence the way we fear apparitions, and only very rarely, when people glimpse each other in the gloaming, do we say of them: They're in love. No wonder lovers seek out a nighttime hour, the better to envision each other, an hour when ghosts are abroad.
I also enjoyed the story "In the Pupil," where a group of souls who had looked into the same woman's eye and said the same thing to her while she said the same things to you (that is, the usual lies that you tell each other), are trapped in a room that is clearly her eye with the pupil as a ceiling, condemned to hear her hear and say that same things to later men - and "Yellow Coal," based on a scientist inventing a new way to harvest an abundant energy source, human spite.
Highly recommended.
