Without Lifting A Finger

Probably posted something to this effect on the first reading: Perhaps the best story in the collection is the true story of Fritz & Lydia, though I also enjoy the Nabokov story and the story about his father very much. On to another reread: Frisch's Man in the Holocene . * The chance to be rid of one’s ego, to give it up, to meld into a great communal endeavor, gave meaning to her existence. She thought she had found what she was striving for all these years. “My family is my comrades. No matter where I am, I’m part of one great family—the Party. Most likely in this sense of belonging, of kinship, I’ve finally discovered what I was looking for all my life.” As had Fritz, she compared this experience to a religious ecstasy. “Yes, indeed we truly resemble first century Christians—the same firm faith in the approaching, joyous salvation of the world, the same readiness to sacrifice, the same denial of the ego, of the philistine, of material things, of children, of everythi...

Rereading "selectively." * I was amazed at how lovingly Alina looked at her husband. You can’t fake eyes like that. The riddle of Eva Braun. How can women sincerely love criminals, crooks, and ruffians? Will anybody ever be able to explain this?

Their correspondence broke off during the First World War. Nothing is known of Lydia Petrovna Kochetkova’s death. This is from the last available letter. “My darling! Do you know what I regret most of all? I could have given you all the fullness of my love, but I gave you nothing but pain. Forgive me, if you can. And my heart cries out at the thought that my highest calling was just that—to give you my affection and tenderness, but instead I squandered my worthless life on phantoms.”

Alexander Leonidovich Goldstein ( Russian : Александр Леонидович Гольдштейн ; born ( 1957-12-15 ) 15 December 1957, Tallinn , Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic — 16 July 2006 ( 2006-07-16 ) , Tel-Aviv , Israel ) — was a Russian writer and essayist. He was awarded the Russian Little Booker Prize , the Anti-Booker prize and the Andrei Bely Prize (posthumously, in the category for prose ). Biography and Work Alexander Goldstein was born in Tallinn, the son of Leonid Goldstein, a man of letters. From his early childhood on, he lived in Baku , where he later studied literature at Baku State University . From 1991 he lived in Tel-Aviv. Goldstein worked as a journalist for the newspaper Vesti , as well as other Russian-language publications, and sat on the editorial board of the Russian-Israeli journal Zerkalo . His articles were published in the books Расставание с Нарциссом ( Parting from Narcissus ) and Аспекты духовного брака ( Aspects of Spiritual Matrimony ). The first of t...

Mikhail Pavlovich Shishkin ( Russian : Михаил Павлович Шишкин , born 18 January 1961) is a Russian writer. Biography Mikhail Shishkin was born in 1961 in Moscow . Shishkin studied English and German at Moscow State Pedagogical Institute . After graduation he worked as a street sweeper, road worker, journalist, school teacher, and translator. He debuted as a writer in 1993, when his short story "Calligraphy Lesson" was published in Znamya magazine. Since 1995 he has lived in Zurich , Switzerland . [1] [2] He averages one book every five years. [3] Shishkin openly opposes the current Russian government, [4] calling it a "corrupt, criminal regime, where the state is a pyramid of thieves" when he pulled out of representing Russia at the 2013 Book Expo in the United States [5] Shishkin's books have been translated into more than ten languages. [6] His prose is universally praised for style, e.g., "Shishkin's language is wonderfully lucid and...

Coffee & Mikhail Shishkin ( The Light and the Dark ). Shishkin led to Goldstein (not even translated into English yet) led to led to ... And at some point I found Sasha Sokolov's A School for Fools (next in my Kindle carousel). *