A superbly written insider's look at the Russian revolution. Babel can convey the horrors of war with very few words. I enjoyed the best his sarcastic treatement of the bombastic communist rhetoric in such stories as "Salt" and "Treason" (maybe because I was exposed to it myself at one time).

I stumbled across Isaac Babel because of a single line quoted in Paul Johnson's "History of the Jews". And then I was forever hooked.

First, a caveat. Be sure you understand when reading Babel's short stories that you are not reading his autobiography or journal. He did in fact listen to our creative writing teachers; he wrote what he knew. He knew the Russian revolution. He knew the Cossacks. He knew war. He knew living inside and outside the pale. His world jumps off the page because he lived it first.

The stories contain autobiographical material, actively mixed with the yeast of fiction. Use this aspect of his writing to chase rabbits. Follow up this book with his biography or find out more about the Russian revolution. Both of those topics will make more sense after reading his collected stories.

As a writer, I stand in awe of Babel's stingy use of words. Some scenes are so hugely horrible that I would have been tempted to throw in appropriate adverbs and adjectives in an attempt to convince you, my reader, just how hugely horrible it really was. Babel simply tells the story, and you gasp when you are done, horrified when you peak through the keyhole (and I would have blasted a hole in the wall).

When you read Babel, you must be willing to go at the stories with an open mind, not expecting him to flatten the Commies, defend the Jews, or paint the picture the way you want him to. He will not do that, no matter how many times you try to make it so. You will hear no overtones of right or wrong, get no definitive answers about the people on either side of the Russian revolution.

For that, I am most grateful to Isaac Babel. Nothing about our world can be easily distilled into sharp black and white. His stories give us the real world in astounding color.

The frightfully ugly picture on the cover of this edition (what in the world were the publishers thinking?) might keep a lot of people away, but the few brave souls that look inside will find one of the great 20th century craftsmen of prose. I can't think of another writer than chooses his words more carefully, that can pack more into a single sentence. "Pierced by the flashes of the bombardment, night arches over the dying man." Single words can take your breath away - the choice of "arches" is the one that does it for me - but you'll probably have others. The brutality of the world he describes may seem foreign, but it never becomes oppressive, mainly because the writing is so good. The stories themselves are rather difficult to love - there is very little hope to latch on to, there are very few characters one can feel close to; there are very few real characters at all, except the narrator. Even under these horrific circumstances, though, Babel creates emotions than one can identify with - pride, love, lust, anger. He has a thorough understanding of human character. It is apparent that the circumstances of war don't create new emotions, they just amplify things we feel anyway.

This book is a necessary read for anyone that wants to learn how to write poetically without being florid, compress pages of description into a few words. This compression is one of the reasons that the stories stay in mind long after they've been read. Buy the book - or get the other edition in a used book store, so you don't have to look at that awful picture.

Many readers will think this book is a beautiful fable. Perhaps they are right, and perhaps I am too literal a reader, but I have difficulty being charmed by a novel in which nobody can be both content and alive. Mr. Sobin writes very well (if somewhat repetitiously--he becomes attached to certain adjectives and then uses them endlessly), and his use of Old Provencal is fascinating, but the book left me with a hangover. It was an intoxicating experience, but one that lingered in unpleasant ways.

Truffles can be said to be an obsession if only for the prices that people will pay to have them. Caviar is an inexpensive snack by comparison, I don't know what other product of Mother Nature competes. Part of the mystique that continues to surround this delicacy are the ways by which they are detected, and their elusiveness. In, "The Fly Truffler", the role of these buried treasures are an obsession, grantor of dreams, and ultimately destructive.

A professor loses the love of his life but he is not allowed the normal release that grief, mourning, and time allow. He finds that as he continues the elaborate ritual from detecting the tiniest insect clues, to the digging, and the ritual of bottling the truffle with eggs for days before eating, he dreams, without fail of his lost love. The metaphors that surround his activities are many, not the least of which is his digging of individual truffles from the ground that holds what he has lost, and their ability to offer a bit at a time an intensifying second chance relationship. His former mate appears to him and becomes increasingly aware of his presence and then tempts him with information she must share. The problem is that only the truffle can bridge this gap between his world and hers, and truffles are rare at the best of times and are present for only a portion of the year. A period that is maddeningly short as he is tormented by these nocturnal trysts.

An all consuming love can destroy a person's real world when all the participants are still amongst the living and can act as a painful reminder and tempting target for reconciliation or even retribution. In this tale there is no opportunity for either and the author takes apart this man's world with the same efficacy and devastation, even as he is alone. A love for one of nature's offerings becomes his obsession, as he attempts to unnaturally continue another love that nature has taken, what is gone, irrevocably.

This novel is written in four chapters - the second chapter, the story of a philology professor's romance with a student only justifies the cost of the book. Sobin's understanding of language - words as objects to be enjoyed, the importance of silence, of absent words - is remarkable. (You may note some similarities to Edmond Jabes.)

Sobin's understanding of a person's rootedness in place and the effects of loss of place is another thread expression through the professor's estate of many generations, his cousin's emigration and his wife's orphanhood.

At one point, the plot of the novel fails, becoming contrived but the grace and depth of the prose makes a reader ready to forgive the slip.

An enjoyable novel with depth.

Sobin is an excellent poet, a poets' poet rather than a people's poet. His form exudes incredible control of language at its most basic element - syllable (not phoneme if that is what you anticipated). His poems encourage, even require, multiple readings - to savor the sound, the untwine the meaning. His language is comparatively complex, using unusual words to build his layered meaning. Many of the poems explore words, non-existence, ... Here and there he reminded me of a reverse Jabes - concerned with the present rather than the absent, despite Sobin's concern with non-existent.

Examples: "... scriptless wasters, there / where the parched lips, irremediable, had/ gone un-/lettered ..." or "the resuscitation of so many suppressed ur-words by the bias of a yet-to-be articulated grammar."

So why have I given the book a mere three stars? Some of the poems are excellent but others have perfectly controlled forms but with meaning either too difficult to tease out or apparently unclear in the mind of the poet. These poems sometimes come across as intellectual pride ... that to me is a fatal flaw in poetry.

In The Name Of The Neither is a compendium of poetry that clearly establishes Gustaf Sobin as a master of worded thought and structural presentation that cannot fail to elicit a response within the heart and mind of his readers. Libretto: hardens to the spill of/so much soft/ambivalent breath. fits twisted about each successive ex-/halation. aren't we, in fact, for working our-selves out-ward,/sipping one another into the utterly un-//differentiated? knot and/tug, pull and/slip, aren't these the tiny, augmentative gestures we'd drawn/from that illegible libretto? for here, where the//room, the/very walls have lost all/substantiality, the mirrors in/swelling blossom. blossom vacuous. yes, here, as our mouths//break open, and our lashes/clamp shut against that very acceleration, we, at/last, massed, culminant, might arch and, in/arching, un-/happen

The book was a good sci-fi book but it also can be looked at in a realistic point of view. It is a definite buy.

Although I found the subject matter and the ideas explored in this novel to be intriguing, oftentimes I found them to have been presented somewhat unevenly. The accounts of Mauritz Stiller and Greta Garbo are written fluidly and recounted with a certain grace and attention to detail. At times, the language is very beautiful- Gustaf Sobin is a poet, and it is very often apparent in his writing. However, most markedly during Philip Nilson's narration, the tone seems somewhat contrived, forced- the conclusions and analyses drawn by the narrator come out in a stilted manner. Perhaps this is because he seems so self-aware that I got the impression that he believed that what he had to say was exceedingly significant. The tendency of the narrator to appear so self satisfied in his pursuit for what he seems to see as being so *very* profound, exploring ideas that "[touch] upon the very meaning of existence" (from the blurb on the back of the book) was slightly irritating for me while I was reading this book. Nevertheless, I felt that this could have been easily improved upon: especially because this is such a slim novel, and loosely written at that (134 pages, spaced more widely than most books), I can't help but feel that since there were so many wonderful ideas and language in parts of this book, Sobin could have expanded on many aspects of the novel. I believe that the most significant parts of this novel exist in the scenes recounting parts of Garbo's life, when Sobin examines the crucial moment when she makes the transformation from an innocent child into a star.

While I do agree that this novel was "large in scope if not in words," I think that as a whole, it could have been presented in a more effective manner if the character of Philip Nilson was elaborated on in a more fluid manner. Also, the author had a propensity to explain things to the reader, when it generally was not necessary. But all in all, I feel that this book was worth reading- I'm just not sure if it was worth *buying*.

I haven't read the book, but caveat emptor! The book is smallish and only 134 pages, not the 192 listed above. And while it's very beautifully designed and produced, the type is fairly spaced out so that you could read it easily in an hour and half. So, despite the cover designation "A Novel" it's really a novella.

This short novel is a gem -- large in scope if not in words. A script writer is dying of cancer. His double, a producer and second husband of the writer's ex-wife, offers him a project -- a gift to keep his mind on things other than dying. The book narrates the film script he is writing - a film on Greta Garbo centered on the event that turned her from another good actress to the film goddess. As he researches and writes the script, the writer comes to terms with his own elusive (illusive) love for a half-sister, to terms with living as a passive canvas versus living with self-understanding.

The book is exquisite - well researched and perceptive of people and their idols, the effect of time on changing idols. If you read for action, this is probably not to your liking. If you read to expand your understanding of humanity, this belongs on your "must read" list.

The backflap compares Sobin's style to Barthes and more than one reviewer calls his prose poetical, so that may be warning enough. It's too bad, because the book's digressions and excursions through the more mundane fields of history are really quite engrossing. Sobin really does have a way of making you see through the otherwise overlooked object into the past, then making it reflect the present as well. By the end, while his stylistic tics had become maddening, I felt oddly informed about the various tides of history to have washed over the Provencal region, and the jetsam they left in receding.