"Fedorkin bent close to the doorpost - besides the same unceasing drone behind the door, the old lady's voice could be distinctly heard as if she were talking on the telephone, which made sense since her telephone was located in the foyer by the door - she was going on and on, without pausing in her expressionless, monotonous, o-ing way of speaking, as if she were reading a lecture."
Leonid Tsypkin was a doctor and writer living in the Soviet Union up until the early 80s. His style of writing could be described as modernistic, and he incorporated a lot of his Jewish heritage into his fiction.
In "The Bridge Over the Neroch" a man contemplates his life, his heritage, and the fate of Russia following the Nazi occupation. In tone this story/novella reminded me a lot of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and I liked it about as much. The paragraphs that comprise this story take up pages and pages of small print, and it requires a lot of concentration on the reader's part.
In "Norartakir" a Russian man and wife visit Armenia (I think). They experience several misadventures while in that country, and eventually return to Russia, where their son plans on moving out. Where "The Bridge Over the Neroch" looks back toward WWII, this story looks back toward the Crucifiction. My favorite parts of this story were the ironic observations on how Jesus' doctrines were interpreted by later generations.
Several other stories close out this collection, but none of them are really long enough to bear commenting upon. Tsypkin was an interesting writer, but I found his continual failure to arrive at any kind of point/conclusion frustrating in the extreme. I did like the last story in this collection, "The Cockroaches," but it only takes up a small fraction of this book.
Related Entries:
"The Sea, the Sea" by Iris Murdoch (1978)
"The Power and the Glory" by Graham Greene (1940)
"Stamboul Train" by Graham Green (1932)
"Suttree" by Cormac McCarthy (1979)
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