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A review by glenncolerussell
Palisandreia by Sasha Sokolov, Sasha Sokolov
5.0
Exercises in Style, Sasha Sokolov style. This writin' Russian makes James Joyce read like James Patterson. That's not true; I take it back. But I'm assured you can assimilate the aforementioned assertion without additional amplification of anagrams, anastrophe, allegory, anadiplosis, antistrophe, aposiopesis or assonance actualized on almost all pages of Astrophobia.
Goodreads friend M.J. Nicholls on Astrophobia: “A rib-tickling Rabelaisian comedy, a frenzied pseudo-surfictional misadventure, abounding in punniferous wordplay, sumptuous anti-establishment satire, and fearless farce.” Thanks, M.J.! You said it all.
Sasha Sokolov, pugnacious punster and searing satirist that he is, receives the nod to end this short review with a direct astrophobic Astrophobia quote: "Damn that Conservatory! thinks the concierge as he hears the man who calls himself a piano tuner hawking his way up the stairs. Shock-headed, lewd-eyed, open-chested, he winds his emaciated body top-like to the fateful story, mentally gauging the distance to Garshin (whom he so admired as a man and a classic of Russian literature) Shaft. Now the instrument, as we have said, is wide open. And the score on that antediluvian piano, which rejoices in the four neurasthenic hands aching to b-flat on top of one another in a-sharp fugobac(c)hanalian frenzy, come to life."
Hey, Sasha deserves another quote, this time from his much more well known A School for Fools: “My love and my joy, if I die from illness, madness or sadness, if before the time allotted me by fate is up, I can't get enough of looking at you, enough joy in the dilapidated mills on the emerald wormwood hills, if I don't drink my fill of the transparent water from your immortal hands, if I don't make it to the end, if I don't tell everything that I wanted to tell about you, about myself, if one day I die without saying farewell—forgive me.”
If you can't put your hands on Astrophobia, please hunt down the author's classic A School for Fools. New York Review Books published a first-rate edition.