this is the6-7 th time ive read this . excited... regarding the folks who feel uncomfy that hamsun was a nazi : stop. everyone you read has some ghast
this is the6-7 th time ive read this . excited... regarding the folks who feel uncomfy that hamsun was a nazi : stop. everyone you read has some ghastly ideas and prejudice and excuse murder, in some fashion: sartre hemingway paine jefferson byron koestler kis . the nazis arent the only gutter killers; i do find that they take the cake. The British in Ireland, americans re: the indians, communists etc.... all have committed genocide and have authors who go one more than an old norwegian. If he were young and glowing over the Fuhrer, than yes, by all means chuck his books aside. Again, he was old and doddering....more
I have read thousands of books mostly Russian. Platonov is in the top 5. Anyone who says he is " pro Soviet/ Stalin" must be shot, they are too idiotiI have read thousands of books mostly Russian. Platonov is in the top 5. Anyone who says he is " pro Soviet/ Stalin" must be shot, they are too idiotic to understand dark sarcasm. Irony. A man who had his 15 yr old son die from TB(and he in turn would contract it from his son, dying from it later) he contracted in a gulag did not love Stalin. A man who could not publish his work while Stalin was alive did not love Stalin. Are readers even educated anymore? Are they so uneducated from their hald educated Tea Party duraki that they cannot notice irony, sarcasm, very dark humor when they come across it? Yes, apparently so. The stories in this small collection are written by a man who saw his generation not self destruct by be destroyed by the ideals he once had, by a system he once supported. Once. Many authors were shot or worked to death in gulags.Platonov himself died in a closet. Yet, for all this his stories have a purity unmatched in any other writer I have read, in any language. There is something alien and jarring. My favorite story is River Potudan. The story of a man returning from WW2 is not unusual in Russia, millions did. They came back to villages that were empty of men. The small towns often had women running the show. A young man returns to look for his love, a girl who once played piano and lived perhaps slightly better than others, they had a composure , a gentility that made them stick out from others. He comes back to find them thin and wrecked, the war has destroyed them, poverty has pummeled them. How Platonov describes the young man, the village, the mindsets,nature can only be called strange, very strange. I see how some would throw it away. Russians tell me Platonov really is the hardest author to translate. Even in Russian he startles with his style. His is the prose of an angel who has come to the world in its whirlwind of violence and sadnesses we cannot comprehend. He keeps his composure, but barely. One gets the sense that his lower lip is trembling. At the same time, he describes commonplace emotions and scenes as if they had never been described before. Language was invented by him, he seems to be telling us. The world has never been described ...until now.The stories are sad, beautiful, dark. A pearl necklace with blood on it in the hand of a poor child. Or, something like that....more
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