Book Review: Dead Souls

How about another book review?

Recently I finished reading the Russian classic Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol.

The story takes place in Russia during the mid eighteen hundreds, a time when the country was quickly making its way out of the Dark Ages and into the current era. However this was also a time when Russian society was at its most vain and hypocritical and the feudalistic style of government was still very much intact.

The novel follows Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov as he travels the Russian countryside. Essentially he is taking part in a con operation, attempting to buy up all the dead souls (or serfs) listed alive on the last census in order to mortgage them and make a profit. Throughout his episodic journey, Chichikov meets dozens of vivid, colorful characters that truly make up the heart of this wonderful story.

While Gogol can come across as excessively verbose and his sentences can sometimes take up an entire page, his storytelling is the work of brilliance. I often felt myself getting utterly lost in the story and marveling at the craftsmanship of the plot. The author often goes on long winded tangents, talks directly to the audience, and gives abrupt and extremely detailed backstories all of which would be absolutely unacceptable today, but I ended up really loving such eccentricities.

I also found myself loving the fact that Pavel Ivanovich is not the fautless hero that a lot of classic lit employs. He is sneaky and manipulative and selfish and also really real to the point where the author can make the point of “maybe we all know that there’s a little Chichikov in each of us,” or something to that effect.

My only severe complaint was that huge chunks of the manuscript were missing. And while I know this is nineteenth century classic literature and you get what you get, I couldn’t help but feel a little cheated. I know that Gogol could have provided a really impactful ending as well as write those holes in the story with the same raw, imperfect power that every other scene abounds in, and yet they were never completed.

If you couldn’t already tell, I would recommend this book. I am also quite surprised that it isn’t widely known. When people think of the Russians they think of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment. Dead Souls is a work of sloppy brilliance that truly deserves a place among the greats.

I don't have a title!

So sorry I didn’t post back on Thursday, but let me remind you that the dates are subject to change as long as I get my three posts in. Summer is crazy, and I love it.
So here’s your triweekly dose of pretentious literary attempts a la Jade.


You lie in sheets of glory
Echoing and sweating
The confetti of your superbowl victory
And notes of a jazz night triumph
Spilling from your saxophonic ears.
Cheers and hoofbeats
Reverberate just under a milling epidermis
As long as Apollo reigns
And China’s dreaming.
After two
When the heavens reflect soft charcoal
And your trophy wife
Croons fluttering German under down blankets.
The support groups
And sycophants dissolve in sweaty palms
Like oyster crackers,
Every facet
Specifically identical in lonesomeness
Like a pair of twins never were.
The bite-sized hours of the morning
Simply demand such inevitable nostalgia
In all its sorts.
Ghostly coos
And the pumping of your mind
Are the only sounds to
Ring out over the crooning German.

Double Dosage.

Both a poem and a people watching description all in one blog post.
I'm too kind, yes I know. ;)

He’s a stout new father who doesn’t quite know how to hold his daughter. Italian with a cheek-skimming beard and a graduated hipster affinity for pageboy hats. Heartbreakingly social and outgoing with a spontaneity that won him his beautiful wife. His daughter’s named something like Delilah or Isabella and he kisses her goodnight every night with a “Goodnight baby girl,” thinking about pastrami.

Drowning in a glass of water,
too cold for a schizophrenic
mirage in Flagstaff,
wishing for a double dose of
July and a dog snout on my cheek.
Nightmares like the
crazy love of a serial killer
and shattered ice melting in the
desert.
Careful, fake books and lamps and treasures.
I’m convinced they’re unconvincing.
Maybe not convinced but hoping.

Red, White, Blue, Brown.

Her knuckles were an iridescent white as she scrubbed out the pots in the sink. Tiny water droplets peppered her blue, cotton dress.

                Midmorning glinted off the silver body of a half-submerged saucepan while a continuous loop of shrieks and laughter wafted in from the open window. Children were starting to conglomerate on the streets playing, fighting, imagining. 

                The small joints in her fingers rejoiced as she relaxed them, finished with another round of scrubbing. She ran a hand through her red tresses and sighed, eying the work still left to be completed. 

                Her son sat in the living room where she could see him. Content to play with his toys, Michael was uncharacteristically quiet this morning, enthralled in the train set his father had made for him, his pride and joy. Its track lay in a blocky, t-shaped fashion along the carpet and Michael loved to spend time with the shiny silver cars and bright red caboose. He loved to enthrall himself in the gleam of the polish, the intricateness of the design, the wholesome attractiveness of the set.

                The doorbell went off in the house with a resounding ding dong. Michael’s mother glanced up from the dishes and rung her wet hands out on a dishrag. Her bare feet padded on the floor as she went to answer the door on the east side of the house, shooting her son a smile on her way there.

                She opened the door to find a small, brown face looking up at her.

                “Hello Jay,” she said.

                “Hi ma’am,” returned the little brown boy with a little, toothy smile upon his lips.

                “Won’t you come in?” she asked, opening the door wider so that Jay could enter.

                “Michael,” his mother called into the house as her eyes took Jay in, standing quietly and reservedly in the corner of the rug. “Jay is here to play with you.” Her voice climbed in octave near the ends of her sentences.

                Michael quickly stumbled in from the adjacent room to greet this new playmate. Their initial greeting reminded her of a pair of dogs greeting each other for the first time, testing boundaries, establishing territories, exchanging high pitched small talk in place of explorative sniffs.

                In a matter of seconds, they scampered off to play and she slowly meandered back to the kitchen. The pots taunted her as she mused upon Jay’s influence over Michael. She’d heard enough of the neighbors talk about how his brothers had become somewhat of a terror in their neighborhood. The most infamous instance was purposely kicking over the beautiful mermaid fountain in Nina Ying’s garden. Still, it was not her place to judge Jay on the actions of others.

                As the day wore on, Jay and Michael seemed to be getting along fine enough.

                “Do you boys want a popsicle?” she found herself asking as they emerged from the backyard, rosy cheeked from exercise. Their small faces nodded in eagerness and she made her way to the freezer and pulled out a box. She reached a hand in only to discover only one icy package in the corner of the cardboard.

                “Oh,” she said, pulling it out by the edges of the white plastic, “I guess there’s only one, kids.”

                She looked at both boys, each already salivating at the thought of frozen cherry flavoring between their lips.

                “Well,” she screwed up her lips and then smiled at Jay.

                “Jay, would you like the last popsicle?”

This or That?

So this first poem is an original piece I had worked on and polished. And then afterwords I had a creative writing mentor look over it and make comments, so the second piece is my revisions based on his review. I'm not sure which one I like better.

Which is your favorite?

Seven basketballers plain and cloudless

Understanding the pull

And the twist

And the cascade of hormones on concrete.

It’s black today.

Falling into something like favorite jeans

That the world stains and satirizes and epitomizes.

Tomorrow is trying.

Taking Alka Seltzer

In air conditioned offices.

Tomorrow is maddeningly, incandescently jealous

Of the aqua promise of today.

Seven basketballers, almost an octet of sweat covered faces, plain and cloudless. Understanding things like pull and twist and instinctually feeling the cascade of hormones on concrete. It’s black today. There’s a collective trip, stumble and fall into favorite jeans, stained in world views like fry grease and blood lynched from human cracks. Satirized, epitomized.

Tomorrow is trying, toil, and discomfort. A swollen hand pops Alka Seltzer in air conditioned offices. Tomorrow is maddeningly, incandescently jealous of the aqua promise of today.

Wannabe Yuppies.

They’re not high class but something about the way they wear floral skirts and white capris and square-cut diamond pendants hints at husbands with important suit and tie kind of jobs.

                They gesticulate with splayed fingers circling around the point and discuss serious issues with dead eyes and grown up valley girl voices. That’s as close as they’ll get to truly feeling, their watered down words.

                They nod passively as if something is interesting, sipping cosmopolitans. They stand, say things like “Thank you ladies,” and “Please stay in touch,” collecting phones and sunglasses and purses, spouting off their hopelessly busy schedules, hoping with everything in them that busy equals important.

                Going home to their washing machines and getting drunk on the spin cycle of youth.

Get Me There.

Desert compulsion
Sucks
As life twists
Two hundred by two hundred.
A little box of bipolar
Weather
Bloated and lovesick with moisture.
Some various battlecries
Sing out through my pores
And toughen conjectures of
Five
Ten
Twenty revolutions.
Those Aztecs worshipped
The sun
While it baked them wholeheartedly into the ground.
Damn lucky, dusty souls.