The Fifth Corner of the Room

By Izrail' Metter

Book Overview

Boria, the narrator of this lovely novel, is a superfluous man fated to play a marginal role in society--Soviet Russian society. The son of a small Jewish businessman, his petit bourgeois origins... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374154872
• ISBN13: 9780374154875
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Length: 181 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

EXCELLENT NOVEL OF THE SOVIET EXPERIMENT

EXCELLENT novel by Israel Metter chronicling collective aspirations of "the silent majority" of ordinary Soviet citizenry following the Russian revolution whose grief over Stalin's crimes was embittered by their own complicity. Not merely historical drama nor political analysis, Metter's FIFTH CORNER OF THE ROOM is instead a brief, piercing meditation on the sorrow of self-knowledge and the double-edged blade of memory. Through a romance that spans a lifetime and encompasses ordinary behaviors throughs which people struggle for hope and accept grief (as in Garcia Marquez's LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA) the FIFTH CORNER OF THE ROOM struggles against denial and willful forgetting toward deeper self understanding; and most unlikely of all, it does so with self-deprecating humor and a real generosity of spirit toward all its diverse characters. In the darkest of situations, this book seeks to shed some light. It's true that the translation is clunky, marring the effects of an interpolative narrative that moves back and forth across the 20th century fluidly, moving in and out of the narrator's complex relationship with Katya at the same time, toward its inevitable end. This writer deserves more notice.