Product Description

This is a collection of short stories which captures tiny details of everyday life in contemporary St Petersburg. There's a Mafia shoot-out in a disco and three devils who appear for an evening at the steam bath. These stories capture emotions in prose that is a homage to great Russian writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #843222 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-10
• Original language: German
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Customer Reviews

Best fiction I read in ages
I read Schulze while I was living in St. Petersburg, and both my boyfriend and I were stunned. The book takes a surrealist tone, yet the more absurd it became, the more real it became. We both finished it thinking how disturbing it was that the only way to describe the things we were experiencing was through absolute absurdity. These stories really speak to just how powerful the seemingly 'meaningless' things in life's minutae really are. It's great stuff to think with, but also is possibly the one book I've read that manages to really make you feel as if you are in a particular moment in his place. I'm an anthropologist, so I know how hard this is to do. Well done, Schulze!

Impenetrable
I found this to be surreal, impenetrable tosh and a waste of an hour of my life - I gave up after reading 10 of the 33 short stories.

Despite the glowing reviews elsewhere, I found the stories nonsensical, bizarre and inconsequential and found myself more and more frustrated as each one finished leaving me wondering what it was about.

Maybe you have to have lived in Russia, maybe you have to be a German who has lived in Russia, maybe you have to understand the nuances of Russian classics? Since I don't qualify on any of these maybe I never stood a chance of enjoying/having the first inkling of what on earth was going on. Wish I'd known before I'd bothered starting though!

Be warned!