The Bride from Odessa: Stories [Hardcover]

Edgardo Cozarinsky (Author), Nick Caistor (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 2004

Set in Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Vienna, Budapest, and Odessa, both before and after World War II, the eleven stories in The Bride from Odessa belong to a great Argentine cosmopolitan tradition: that of the uprooted exile, the plaything of history, who sets down in a strange but proud land and looks back nostalgically to the Europe of his ancestral memory.

Edgardo Cozarinsky's characters are writers, lovers, scholars, artists, and dreamers. An ambitious young Jew, about to marry and embark for a new life in Argentina, is accosted by an unknown woman who departs with him to Buenos Aires; a pianist in a Buenos Aires nightclub finds himself drawn back to Germany in 1937; an Argentine-American Jew travels to Lisbon to unravel the threads of his grandparents' wartime affair. The Bride from Odessa describes a secret land without borders--it is provocative and mysterious fiction of the highest order.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Cozarinsky, born in Buenos Aires, has resided in Paris for three decades. In other words, he is familiar with two of the world's most cosmopolitan cities; his obvious worldliness is not only a major ingredient of the dozen short stories in this marvelously evocative collection but also their chief attraction. The stories reveal the author's keen sense of history and of personal and geographic displacement, which is not surprising, since his homeland of Argentina is traditionally viewed as the stopping place of the transplanted individual but then inevitably becomes the permanent home of the wistful immigrant. In the title story, set in 1890, a young Russian Jewish man waits at the port of Odessa for his departure to Argentina, where he knows he will become a new man; while waiting, he meets a young Russian Orthodox woman, with whom his destiny will be immediately and almost breathtakingly intertwined. Characters in all the stories are subtly constructed, eventually demonstrating strong emotional constitutions. The stories' formal structure and language nevertheless exude a beguiling sensuality. For lovers of the form and fans of Latin American fiction. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Elegant, cool, precise...Any examination of the past is necessarily incomplete and Cozarinsky has found the perfect form in these fragmentary stories." - -The Times Literary Supplement

"A profound knowledge of the cultures of Mitteleuropa, of the literatures of France, the United States and Britain gives Cozarinsky's narratives a fiery intellectual strength and a powerful originality. The Bride from Odessa, in its deceptively quiet manner, belongs on the same shelf as those other sceptical masterpieces, the novels of Joseph Roth and the memoirs of Julien Green." -- Alberto Manguel

"[The Bride from Odessa is] a collection of short stories so finely conceived and wrought as to be simultaneously works of art and yet apparently as natural as breathing...These stories sing, all of them, laments for the cruelties and disappointments of life. But they also speak, wonderfully, of the courage that men and women bring to the business of just keeping going." --Alan Massie, The Scotsman

"Cozarinsky achieves more in a few pages than most writers manage in three or four hundred." --Josh Lacey, The Guardian

"Brilliant... This book is a collection of strange fragments, disturbing fables rich in the sensual detail of places." --Matthew Reisz, The Independent

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (August 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374116733
• ISBN-13: 978-0374116736
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,970,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant collection of stories, January 3, 2007

By 

Benjamin Runkle (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bride from Odessa: Stories (Hardcover)

This collection of stories is excellently written, addicting to read, and takes you on a ride across several continents in its exploration of Jewish migration during and following World War 2. Its range of subject matter is impressive -- the book has stories set in different time periods & places, each with different and unique goals. Cozarinsky's style is metropolitan and compelling and the use of style to convey points is well done -- for example he uses excerpts of letters and other historical documents to call into question the truthfulness of memory. The stories are a quick read but made me want to read more, and I am eager to return to the book to catch all the details I missed the first time through. I highly recommend this book.