A school for fools
By: Sasha Sokolov ; translated from the Russian by Alexander Boguslawski
Contributors: Boguslawski, Alexander Prus, translator, writer of introduction
Series: New York Review Books classics; New York Review Books classics
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 191
ISBN-13: 9781590178461
Subjects: Boys; Schizophrenics; Life change events; Fiction
Work titles: Shkola dli︠a︡ durakov
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; in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, "an enchanting, tragic, and touching book."
Notes: Translation from Russian of: Shkola dlia durakov.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-191).
Table of contents: title: Nymphea; title: Now (the stories written on the veranda); title: Savl; title: Screak; title: Testament.