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The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Simon Collinson on Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov), and published by New York Review Books.

Simon is a bookseller and freelance reviewer based in Adelaide, Australia, and has written reviews various outlets, including the Australian Book Review.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky���Ĵ�ý�in addition to having one of the coolest and most Z-heavy names I’ve ever seen���Ĵ�ý�and his Autobiography have been hitting a lot of the right button’s lately: in June, it was announced that Autobiography of a Corpse won the , and just a few weeks ago it was announced that the book won the . Congratulations again to everyone involved! And for everyone else . . . what more recommendation could you really need?

Here’s the beginning of Simon’s review:

One of the greatest services���Ĵ�ý�or disservices, depending on your viewpoint���Ĵ�ý�Bertrand Russell ever performed for popular philosophy was humanizing its biggest thinkers in his History. No longer were they Platonic ideals, the clean-shaven exemplars of the kind of homely truisms that might���Ĵ�ý�ve been found in commonplace books: they had become eccentrics, weirdos, freaks. This was a transformation Russell���Ĵ�ý�s readers might have felt privileged to witness. Then again, they might have been horrified.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has done something similar with ideas, both those belonging to Russell���Ĵ�ý�s eccentrics and those roaming about in other fields. Written between 1922 and 1939, the short stories collected in Autobiography of a Corpse wriggle into the liminal spaces between fiction, reality, and the world of ideas: in fact, there���Ĵ�ý�s even a story called ���Ĵ�ý�The Collector of Cracks.���Ĵ�ý�

Krzhizhanovsky is fundamentally concerned with how fiction and reality influence each other, and even though his work might reference a who���Ĵ�ý�s who of modern and classical philosophy���Ĵ�ý�Kant, Leibniz, Descartes, Hegel, Spinoza, Fichte, Berkeley���Ĵ�ý�he���Ĵ�ý�s anything but convinced of their ideas���Ĵ�ý� verity.

For the rest of the review, go here.