Short Story Collections (Single Author), Jewish Fiction & Literature, Russian Fiction, Character Types - Fiction

Mind the Doors: Long Short Stories

Name: Mind the Doors: Long Short Stories
Author: Zinovy Zinik
ISBN: 9781893956049

by Zinovy Zinik

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Overview

Zinovy Zinik finds the spiritual, the comic, the tragic, the romantic, and sometimes the perverted in the westward wanderings of Eastern Europeans since the fall of communism. His novellas are unique explorations of the world beyond the Iron Curtain, the imagined paradises and grand cliches in the emigres’ dreams of freedom. These stories transport readers into the psyche of one such emigre who is not obliged to leave his native Russia but nonetheless wanders onto new paths previously untrod under the cloud of communism and finds himself in one weird situation after another. While the reasons for the narrator’s displacement in the post-communist world are a subject of sober discourse, he is a playful, sardonic character, a sharp observer of both himself and those around him. Praise for Zinovy Zinik: “His insights into the pains of statelessness are poetic and powerful.” — The New York Times

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A Russian migr currently living in Great Britain, Zinik (The Mushroom Picker) deals with the immigrant experience in five stories set mostly in contemporary London. Zinik specializes in delightful images and outrageous puns, with echoes of such master writers as Chekhov and Kafka. However, he is less successful when it comes to the development of plot and character. Several stories begin promisingly but degenerate into farce, and the protagonists are often melancholy, whiny and self-absorbed. In "No Cause for Alarm," a rumbling stomach sets off Soho burglar alarms, while in the title story a man afraid of being mugged for his raincoat flirts with self-fulfilling prophecy when he gets the coat caught in the door of a subway train. In the first story, "A Pickled Nose," hard-drinking barflies try to outdo one another with shocking tall tales about a dead, disfigured bartender as they while away their time at the Colony Room, Francis Bacon's "favorite watering hole (little water, much whiskey)." This story effectively and humorously demonstrates why drunks are only interesting to other drunks, and even then, not very. "A Double Act in Soho" tells of an older Russian immigrant fascinated by a young woman of Russian extraction who is doing a survey of London porn shops. A couple of the translations seem creaky, especially "The Notification," which was published in an earlier collection and is the only story set outside London but often enough, the language crackles and delights. (May) Forecast: While Zinik's work is both popular and critically lauded in Russia and England he writes for the TLS, and The Mushroom Picker was made into a BBC film this collection may prove a difficult sell for a wide American audience. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.