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SOURCE: "Correlation of Farces," in The New Republic, Vol. 201, No. 3896/3897, September 18 and 25, 1989, pp. 52-53.
In the following review, Howe lauds the farcical aspects of Say Cheese! but faults the novel's attempts at seriousness in the latter half of the book.
There's a lot of pleasure to be had from the first half of this novel, a satiric farce about the life of culture in Brezhnev's Russia. Vassily Aksyonov, an émigré Russian now living in the United States, writes with the happy abandon of a true farceur. He commands a taste for the ridiculous, cares little for cautions of verisimilitude, and has a ready supply of puns, jokes, and saucy footnotes. His episodic narrative might almost be taken for a picaresque tale, were its hero not deprived of the picaro's traditional freedom to roam and to poke about.
Say Cheese! draws upon Aksyonov's own experiences. In 1979 he was a...
This section contains 1,026 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) |
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