Book 1977

A school for fools

A school for fools
A school for fools
Information
Title
A school for fools
Authors
Sasha Sokolov
Date of Publication
1977
Realm
Russian
Publisher
Ardis
Material Type
Book
Number of Copies
1
Format
Paperback
Illustrations
No
ISBN
882332481
OCLC Number
2905486
Signed or Inscribed
Yes
Provenance
Jane Taubman
Languages
English
Genre
Novel

By turns lyrical and philosophical, witty and baffling, A School for Fools confounds all expectations of the novel. Here we find not one reliable narrator but two “unreliable” narrators: the young man who is a student at the “school for fools” and his double. What begins as a reverie (with frequent interruptions) comes to seem a sort of fairy-tale quest not for gold or marriage but for self-knowledge. The currents of consciousness running through the novel are passionate and profound. Memories of childhood summers at the dacha are contemporaneous with the present, the dead are alive, and the beloved is present in the wind. Here is a tale either of madness or of the life of the imagination in conversation with reason, straining at the limits of language.