By Sasha Sokolov
Through turns lyrical and philosophical, witty and baffling, A university for Fools confounds all expectancies of the radical. the following we discover now not one trustworthy narrator yet "unreliable" narrators: the younger guy who's a scholar on the "school for fools" and his double. What starts as a reverie (with widespread interruptions) involves appear a type of fairy-tale quest now not for gold or marriage yet for self-knowledge. The currents of attention operating in the course of the novel are passionate and profound. stories of formative years summers on the dacha are contemporaneous with the current, the useless are alive, and the cherished is found in the wind. here's a story both of insanity or of the lifetime of the mind's eye in dialog with cause, straining on the limits of language; within the phrases of Vladimir Nabokov, "an captivating, tragic, and touching book."
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Extra resources for A School for Fools
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Whenever they played for the workers, which they did frequently, the couple always closed by playing the Internationale. Always the audience would rise and cheer, even those who were not Communists; for, whatever their creed might be, they knew that this hymn meant battle against the oppressors. These New York Jews wanted to fight Hitlerism with any and every weapon they could lay hands upon. Lanny had first seen her in the midst of World War, and she had been welcoming him to the land of his fathers.
Johannes would have turned anarchist if he had thought that was a way to bring justice upon the heads of those Nazi barbarians who had murdered his son and come so near to murdering himself. Johannes would pour it out in floods, and would have been greatly pleased if he had known what use was going to be made of it. They had been mixed up with all the European tribes for a thousand years, but alas, it hadn’t done them any good. Hansi Robin, tall and dark-haired, might have stepped out of any of the books of the Old Testament; he stood before them, grave and priestlike, playing the Jewish music that he loved: Kol Nidre and Achron’s Hebrew Prayer, and Ernest Bloch’s Nigun, from the Baal Shem suite.
R. And suppose the great man happened to be too busy to see him—what then would become of an art expert’s bright dream of changing world history? “Put not your trust in princes,” the psalmist had advised, and Lanny was not heeding the warning. They wanted to make the world safe for democracy, and at the same time to keep the country out of war. When they discovered that these aims were incompatible, they were in a predicament, and what wonder if their words one day contradicted the words of the previous day, and if their actions were not always in accordance with the campaign platforms of their party?