Nikolai Gogol The Overcoat and other Tales of Good and Evil (1842)
Gogol is one of those authors upon which I took a chance, despite having no strong reason for wanting to read his work beyond the vague possibility that it might be decent. I haven't read too many Russian writers, and nor am I excessively well read once those cinematic pages float up onto the calendar to reveal that we're now back in the nineteenth century; so I'm out of my depth here, and that itself is enough to inspire curiosity.
Happily, I've found that I like Gogol. His writing is funny without cracking jokes, jovial without any Stilgoe-esque nudging or winking, and the stories he tells are fucking peculiar with a gentle absurdity which seems to foreshadow Tony Hancock, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, Kafka, Dadaism and possibly even Reid Fleming - World's Toughest Milkman. His stories tend to be monologues, direct addresses given by the author and accordingly subject to the whims of idle conversation; so he'll change his mind, or tell you something didn't happen despite previous claims that it did, or not to worry if you don't understand the story because neither does he and he wrote it. His descriptions fly off down all manner of blind alleys to no obvious narrative purpose except perhaps for sheer delight in the absurdity of the appearance of a policeman somehow ending up as an anecdote about a neighbour's dog.
Having only a vague idea of what was happening with the novel during the nineteenth century, I don't really know where Gogol fits for sure, but I gather the folksy quality of his narratives may relate to a more general swing towards realism in literature, as distinct from tales of the comings and goings of Lords and Ladies. Indeed, Gogol's labouring over plausible itinerants, losers, and failures approaches grotesque levels of detail equivalent to the drawings of Hogarth, not least thanks to his apparent fixation on biological transmogrification, the old man scrunging into the sorcerer of The Terrible Vengeance, the roving eyes of The Portrait, or the star of The Nose which takes leave of its face to become an important man about town. It's satire which pushes and pulls at the limits of reality to see if it will break, and in doing so echoes our own unsteady relationship with those institutions which comprise society, but without sloganeering or, for that matter, the joyless grunting and grimacing of Dostoyevsky.
I liked both Dead Souls and The Nose, - which I have in the form of a chapbook - so it's good to know that they weren't in any way anomalous, and that there's a lot more where they came from, most of it seemingly at least as weird, perhaps even weirder.
Gogol is one of those authors upon which I took a chance, despite having no strong reason for wanting to read his work beyond the vague possibility that it might be decent. I haven't read too many Russian writers, and nor am I excessively well read once those cinematic pages float up onto the calendar to reveal that we're now back in the nineteenth century; so I'm out of my depth here, and that itself is enough to inspire curiosity.
Happily, I've found that I like Gogol. His writing is funny without cracking jokes, jovial without any Stilgoe-esque nudging or winking, and the stories he tells are fucking peculiar with a gentle absurdity which seems to foreshadow Tony Hancock, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, Kafka, Dadaism and possibly even Reid Fleming - World's Toughest Milkman. His stories tend to be monologues, direct addresses given by the author and accordingly subject to the whims of idle conversation; so he'll change his mind, or tell you something didn't happen despite previous claims that it did, or not to worry if you don't understand the story because neither does he and he wrote it. His descriptions fly off down all manner of blind alleys to no obvious narrative purpose except perhaps for sheer delight in the absurdity of the appearance of a policeman somehow ending up as an anecdote about a neighbour's dog.
Having only a vague idea of what was happening with the novel during the nineteenth century, I don't really know where Gogol fits for sure, but I gather the folksy quality of his narratives may relate to a more general swing towards realism in literature, as distinct from tales of the comings and goings of Lords and Ladies. Indeed, Gogol's labouring over plausible itinerants, losers, and failures approaches grotesque levels of detail equivalent to the drawings of Hogarth, not least thanks to his apparent fixation on biological transmogrification, the old man scrunging into the sorcerer of The Terrible Vengeance, the roving eyes of The Portrait, or the star of The Nose which takes leave of its face to become an important man about town. It's satire which pushes and pulls at the limits of reality to see if it will break, and in doing so echoes our own unsteady relationship with those institutions which comprise society, but without sloganeering or, for that matter, the joyless grunting and grimacing of Dostoyevsky.
I liked both Dead Souls and The Nose, - which I have in the form of a chapbook - so it's good to know that they weren't in any way anomalous, and that there's a lot more where they came from, most of it seemingly at least as weird, perhaps even weirder.
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