The Kiss of the Unborn and Other Stories by Fyodor Sologub
My rating: 4/5 cats
i can’t believe i just gave this as many stars as i gave proust2, but me and this book have come a long way. for the first few stories, i was unimpressed. maybe it’s just because greg gave it five stars and i wanted to be all cool or whatever, but i found it less mellifluous right after proust. which is totally unfair. but it’s pretty clunkily written in parts, and maybe this is just a translation thing, or maybe whatever i read directly after proust was bound to suffer by comparison. but i thought it was repetitious to no great literary end, and some of the endings seemed abrupt, to say the least. but then i got to “in the crowd” and that’s where it all came together. i have been wanting someone to suggest something that would terrify me for ages now. and this did. and i’m not even claustrophobic, generally. i would rather not be around…others…but i’m not afraid of crowds. but this story is so disgusting and scary and powerfully written (also the longest in the collection) and then of course i read the introduction only to learn that it is based on actual events. man, these russians are killing me. so after that story (to which i give a wholehearted 5 stars cats), i started loving the stories more and more. and then i reread some of the ones i was lukewarm about, to find my opinion changed. so—sologub is rescued from obscurity by greg, and if this weren’t his library book, i would totally keep it and tell him i lost it—oops—, but i suppose i should give it back to him to return to library. dammit.
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