Life with an Idiot

Add a few parts Franz Kafka, some Fyodor Dostoevsky, a few pinches of Luis-Ferdinand Celine, then a dash of Le Comte de Lautreamont and stir. Simmer while continuing to stir; never let cool, and voila! you get Victor Erofeyev's Life with an Idiot. These are tales told inside the author's head; it only happens to be that you are reading them. His words read like the thoughts inside the fragmented mental meanderings of a well read man who's been `dragged through the mud' a few thousand times; they can fluctuate from formal, to slang, to nineteenth century, in a split blink of an eye; point of view, thought and dialogue sometimes blend and shift from sentence to sentence. (Truly shocking if one is too well oriented towards Dickens, but the reward of reading this tiny book is far, far from trivial.) It isn't to say that this book is surreal exactly, but I would consider it closer to a dream; if a caustic and violent, though hilarious, one. And just as one can reflect on a dream one can read this book and read it and read it and read it again and have different interpretations each re-read. The book also has the flavor of fables and/or fairy tales; the incredible -though all too real- imagery and scenes in the stories remind the reader of the brothers Grimm, but of course told from 1980's soviet Russia! But don't be fooled, the relevance of these stories to the contemporary human condition is not lost in the swashbuckling style of this word-slinger. As sited in the first paragraph, these antecedents of Erofeyev have paved the path for this new voice whose latter-day observations of this decaying world cannot do otherwise but reflect it. Buy it now, before it's too late!