β Scribed by Zalman Shneour
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Zalman Shneourβs inaugural novel: a story of suicide in the form of a diary
In a Yiddish take on Notes from Underground, a dark love affair develops in an unnamed Eastern European city between the young, impoverished, violently self-loathing teacher, Shloymeβand a hungry, spiteful and unsettlingly sensual revolver. Ostensibly purchased to protect Shloyme from the pogroms sweeping the empire, the weapon instead opens a portal to his innermost demons, and through it he begins his methodical mission to eradicate any remnants of life and humanity in him and pave the way for his self-destruction. A Death takes the form of a diary that follows the Jewish calendar.
Written in Yiddish in 1905 and published with immediate success in Warsaw in 1909, A Death utilizes the influences of Dostoyevsky and Schopenhauer to depict a distinctly Jewish experience of uprooted modernity, and presents a lesser-known strand of Jewish decadent literature. This translation of his inaugural novel is Schneour's first appearance in English since 1963. Its exploration of alienation, mental health, toxic masculinity and violence is remarkably contemporary.
Born in Shklow, Zalman Shneour (1887β1959) was one of the major figures of Jewish modernity, and was the most popular Yiddish writer between the World Wars. He wrote poetry, prose and plays in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Like many of his generation, his life was spent moving from city to city in search of literary community or escaping political turmoil: from Odessa to Warsaw to Vilne, and on to such Western cities as Bern, Geneva, Berlin, Paris, New York (where he died) and Tel Aviv (where he is buried).
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
I'm not crazy. I don't see what the big deal is about what happened. But apparently someone does think it's a big deal because here I am. I bet it was my mother. She always overreacts. Fifteen-year-old Jeff wakes up on New Year's Day to find himself in the hospital. Make that the psychiatric ward.
The story of John Self and his insatiable appetite for money, alcohol, drugs, porn and more. Ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage, it is a tale of life lived without restraint; of money and the disasters it can precipitate. "From the Trade Paperback edition."
**One of \*Time*****s 100 best novels in the English languageby the acclaimed author of***** Lionel Asbo: State of England *****and***** London Fields**\* Part of Martin Amiss London Trilogy, along with the novel *London Fields* and *The Information*, *Money* was hailed as "a sprawling, fierce, vul
### Amazon.com Review Absolutely one of the funniest, smartest, meanest books I know. John Self, the Rabelaisian narrator of the novel, is an advertising man and director of TV commercials who lurches through London and Manhattan, eating, drinking, drugging and smoking too much, buying too much sex