Book 1977

A school for fools RU

A school for fools
Sasha Sokolov
A school for fools A school for fools

 

Information
Realm
Russian
Author
Sasha Sokolov
Title
A school for fools
Place of Publication
Ann Arbor
Publisher
Ardis
Date of Publication
1977
Material Type
Book
Format
Paperback
Number of Pages
228
OCLC Number
2905486
ISBN
882332481
Language
English
Genre
Novel
Translator
Carl Proffer

 

Description

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.