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Memories Of The Future (1929)

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky(Favorite Author)

3.93 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1590173198 (ISBN13: 9781590173190)

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

NYRB Classics

review 1: I so, so badly wanted to like this book after reading an article a few years back about the rediscovery of Krzhizhanovsky's work. Heralded as a great surrealist, Kafkaean master in that piece and elsewhere, I was taken aback to find K.'s short stories pretty mundane and, well, not very good. The longest work, "Memories of the Future" is probably the best, the story of a young guy obsessed with time building a machine he calls the "timecutter" and then maneuvering through the nascent Soviet state trying to get sponsorship for it. But even this falls pretty flat. The opening story about a paste that makes a man's very small room expand exponentially was good, too, but the rest was shrecky. Also, some of the over-described stories from the back cover all occur in one particul... morear story, a little misleading. For instance, as awesome as it sounds there is no story about the "Eiffel Tower" running amok: that's part of another story and is of dubious worth.
review 2: Russian (actually Ukrainian of Polish parents) avant-garde with lots of originality, sweet aesthetics, and smooth ideas.....with several areas of seeming drag as well. Certainly see the connections to Kafka, Bulgakov, and Schultz that others have noted, and also agree that Mr. K's pieces here deserve high concentration and multiple reads. If I can commit to the latter at some point, perhaps I'll find this fine work at 5 stars instead of 4. In the meantime, I register this fellow under "originators" rather than "influenced by." less

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