Incidences

Reviews / Votes

?Luminous fragments of the avant-garde? Times Literary Supplement ?Just one tip: Don't read this book if you're normal - you won't like it. Honestly. If you drive a Volvo, watch Eastenders, listen to Jamie Cullum or shop at Debenhams, you'll be baffled by this book. You stick to John Grisham; you'll be safe with him? Amazon.co.uk customer review ?A puzzlingly beautiful monument to a minor master? Booklist ?With remarkable precision and fluid language, the stories capture everyday tension in a land where an innocent knock on the door might mean entrapment in a bureaucratic maze or even death at the hands of the military? New York Times Book Review ?Brilliant, paranoid parables of the Stalin regime? Guardian ?Very short, often hilariously funny but dark and seemingly illogical stories? Very little of his work ever made it into print; the fact that enough of it survived either by word of mouth or in carefully guarded manuscripts makes this wonderful collection something of a miracle? Think of Beckett, only with sharper humour? Or, the best of Kafka distilled into the smallest possible space? Independent ?Kharms? prose miniatures are of the highest quality and offer despairing commentary on Soviet life? Scotland on Sunday ?A Shape-shifting collection of stories and fragments? Kharms? dislocated hallucinatory vision of a St Petersburg where the fantastical sits side by side with the mudane is an evocative response to a totalitarian state, yet it also recalls Gogol?s equally contorted, agonised view of his native city ? and, like the latter, is steeped in a rich, uncanny humour? Metro ?The only way to survive in this world is to laugh. The worse it gets, the more you laugh. Kharms is the master of dark laughter, of the laughter of relief as you realise the events he describes can?t possibly be true? a celebration of meaninglessness? Marina Lewycka, Daily Telegraph