The Symmetry Teacher
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From one of the greatest Russian writers of the past half century comes a metaphysical mystery novel that defies categorization and confounds expectation. Andrei Bitov's The Symmetry Teacher presents itself as the "echo" of an older British novel Bitov once read and had long forgotten. Unable even to recall the name of that novel's author, Bitov reconstructs its literary vision through the fog of memory, creating a group of stories nestled together like a matryoshka doll. In doing so, Bitov evokes the anxieties of the late and post-Soviet decades, confronting urgent questions of conscience and self-deception through an innovative style that revels in paradox and sleight of hand.
Unified by the delightfully maddening search for the identity of a writer toiling in obscurity, The Symmetry Teacher takes us through a curious series of episodes: A man meets the devil on a park bench and the devil shows him photographs of the fall of Troy, Shakespeare's legs, and a terrible event that will take place in his future. A young poet fleeing his past is stranded on a windswept island and tormented by a lover and her shape-shifting evil twin. Three friends, unable to become writers, start a literary society where books and manuscripts are neither read nor returned and new members are accepted only if their work is unwritten. A king who reigns over all possible worlds and uses his power to remove stars from the sky turns out to be the compiler of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Writing with impish daring, Bitov crafts an enchanting fiction from interwoven fables. The result challenges the boundaries between life and literature, author and reader, and memory and imagination, exploring the sacrifices that a writer may make out of ardor for his art. Mingling fantasy and satire with moral concern, Bitov is a deserving heir to the tradition of Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bulgakov. The Symmetry Teacher showcases the work of a postmodern master at the height of his craft.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Blending elements of Nabokov, Calvino, and Percival Everett, Bitov's (Pushkin House) shape-shifting novel is not really a novel so much as a narrative puzzle that revels in its own language. The premise: the author, Andrei Bitov, remembers a novel he translated into Russian long ago while he was bored on a geological expedition; the book, by an obscure English writer named A. Tired-Boffin, is called The Teacher of Symmetry. The problem: he can't find the book anywhere. And so, the meat of this novel is not Bitov's translation of The Teacher of Symmetry, but simply his memory of The Teacher of Symmetry. In Bitov's recollection, the eight chapters in Tired-Boffin's novel may each be read as a standalone work. Each chapter echoes the others in both plot and theme (obsessions of various kinds abound), and one gets the sense, while following Bitov's winding remembered translation, that we are in the presence of one of literature's most formidable unreliable narrators. Chapters stop and start, as well as misdirect. In one, the peculiar friendship between a town idiot and a doctor in Taunus, Germany, is recounted for 50 pages; on the final page, the story is revealed to be the reason why the doctor later speaks out against the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. In another chapter, writer Urbino Vanoski (the main protagonist here, at least as Bitov remembers it) travels to an island inhabited by a dog named Marleen and by either one woman or a woman and her twin (one of the two might also be named Marleen). Bitov, a pioneer postmodern writer, packs physics-defying deaths, mysterious doorbells, and space aliens into this lively literary feat.