Customer Reviews

Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain (Words Without Borders Anthologies)

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This is an anthology of 31 short pieces and a section of 10 photos. Small photos are also interspersed throughout the pieces, often either randomly, having little if anything to do with the piece, or connected to something addressed in a piece, but adding little to the written piece. For example, several photos of typed pages in a language other than English. This is a book of English translations, so what is the point of these photos?

Of the pieces themselves, many are excerpts from novels, and the four to eight page excerpts are too fragmentary and often insufficiently tied to the central concept of the book to be of much interest. I found the essays and autobiographical pieces more interesting, particularly those by Masha Gessen, Vladimir Sorokin, Peter Esterhazy and the always wonderfully grumpy Dubravka Ugresic. Uniformly excellent translations, or to be more honest, I should only say that none read as though they were translated from another language.

My main frustration is that there is no cohesion between any of the materials in the book, and while Keith Gessen makes a half-hearted attempt to weave the material into a cohesive whole in his introduction, it isn't convincing. Instead the reader merely hears thirty-one voices saying thirty-one different things about the Soviet Union before during and after 1989. Too big a subject, not much new being said.

Keith Gessen is a member of the increasingly well-reviewed literary journal N+1, so I do want to read this. He felt that his great novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, was upstaged by Sloan Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake, also a good book in a much different way, which caught more heat, critically, than Gessen's did, for lacking ethnic and economic diversity. The critics are extremely tough on new novels,, e.g., Indecision: A Novel, also of the N+1 crowd, and I dare say the writing world still discriminates more towards women.

Anyway, I love what WordsWithoutBorders.org is doing, translating foreign literature from behind various curtains in many parts of the world! Will update if and when I do read this. But all their other books have been good so far:
For example, Literature from the "Axis of Evil": Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations: A Words Without Borders Anthology [LITERATURE FROM AXIS OF EVIL]

For undergrads, N+1 released a special pamphlet: P.S.1 Symposium: A Practical Avant-Garde (Research Branch Pamphlet Series), which is simultaneously hilarious and a must-read, as a guide to studying literature in your H.S./college years.