Strange ... Displays the way that Platonov’s fiction pulls in different directions at once. The earnestness with which the characters take revolutionary slogans at face value can quickly send their aspirations for earthly bliss sliding toward sarcasm ... The bumptious and harrowing music of the novel’s first two sections is already enough to make Chevengur one of the more amazing works of twentieth-century fiction. In the third and final part, however, the work becomes less an ordinary novel, of whatever extraordinary kind, than a different genre of writing entirely.
Read Full Review >>