33 Moments of Happiness: St. Petersburg Stories: St Petersburg Stories Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

33 Moments of Happiness: St. Petersburg Stories: St Petersburg Stories Book

Ever since the 1830s, when Pushkin immortalized St. Petersburg in "The Bronze Horseman," the city has been the capital of the Russian imagination. It also seems to have exerted a powerful influence on the young German writer Ingo Schulze, who celebrates this swampy metropolis in his English-language debut, 33 Moments of Happiness. Not that the author is invariably enchanted by his subject. His 33 slices of Slavic life include some definite downers, not least a bloody (yet oddly comical) shootout in a disco. For one of Schulze's narrators, in fact, St. Petersburg encapsulates all the defects of an entire nation: "Russians in general seem to have been so conditioned by some lifelong experiment that apathy marches in step with an astounding ingenuity for humiliating others. Everything is contrived to cause people the greatest possible unpleasantness, whether it's a lack of benches, mirrors hung too low, repairs that go on for years or the shopping, which requires standing in line three times for a pat of butter." Still, many of the characters manage to grasp some genuine bliss, even if it's simply the scent of an imported perfume or a poppy-seed pastry. These minor ecstasies--and the sizzling, sardonic pleasures of the prose--ensure that the reader's happiness will be anything but momentary. --James MarcusRead More

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  • Product Description

    An enchanting, fabulously bizarre and intriguing book of short stories by a prizewinning new German writer.

    Each episode in this dazzling debut collection captures the spark in some tiny detail of everyday life in contemporary St. Petersburg and fans it into a story that flares with comedy, surreal passion, heartbreaking indifference and mad Russian excess.

    There's a Mafia shoot-out in a disco, as told by a gun-toting Walter Mitty simultaneously thrilled and horrified by the carnage he is creating. There's a returning exiled writer so desperate to keep his reputation alive, now that he is no longer a professional dissident, that he will do anything to hold the interest of his retinue of reporters and cameras. There are three devils who appear for an evening at the steam bath, their revelries ending in cannibalism--or is the watching manager just mad? St. Nicholas comes back as a rich American. There is a gallery opening that gives new meaning to the term "installation." And on and on...

    These are sad, whimsical, macabre, bleakly funny stories, all told in a playful and voluptuous prose that is itself an homage to the great Russian masters whom Schulze is honoring--from Gogol to Pasternak, from Chekhov to Nabokov.

  • 037540029X
  • 9780375400292
  • Ingo Schulze
  • 28 August 1998
  • Villard Books
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 303
  • 1st American Ed
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