Memories of the future
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Memories of the future
(New York review books classics)
New York Review Books, c2009
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
"Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull"--Cover
Description and Table of Contents
Description
A man lives in a tiny apartment, engulfed in the noise of his neighbors' lives, squeezed in among his few possessions, hardly able to move. A mysterious figure turns up at his door, offering a tube of a substance that will, he assures our hero, allow him to enlarge-"biggerize"-his living space. "Why not?"-but clumsily he spills the stuff on the floor. When he wakes the next morning his apartment has begun to grow exponentially, and with it his troubles. What if people find out? He'll lose his apartment. He must keep everyone at bay, stay to himself. Meanwhile his furniture drifts into the distance. He is lost in the infinitely expanding space of his own loneliness.
Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s--but deemed too subversive even to show to a publisher--the seven tales presented here attest to Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absent-minded passenger boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day, nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn't join it as there's no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future...Like Poe, Krzhizhanovsky takes us to the edge of the abyss and forces us to look into it. "I am interested," he said, "not in the arithmetic, but in the algebra of life."
by "Nielsen BookData"