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This book made me realize the way that satire, if taken to a linguistic (if not necessarily logical) extreme, can actually turn inside out and become a form of praise. Olesha's narrator keeps talking about how much he hates, but his language is so lively that eventually you come to see him as a creature posessed, not by anger, but by a strange and uncontrollable joy. He's a Mozart of hate: so excellent at it that the simple practice of his gift makes him smile despite himself. The record of his facility is a pungent, reeking monologue whose images have nonetheless been cleaned by their vitriol to a metallic shine. Also, on the short list of books that are actually funny.

(Another way to look at this book is to think of what Nathaniel West might have been like if he hadn't been Puritanically terrified of his own comedy. West's loathing remains, for me at least, loathing, untransmuted. But Olesha's book is practically a fairy tale.)