The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (New York Review Books Classics) Review

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The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (New York Review Books Classics) ReviewWhy is Vasily Grossman such a powerful writer? He is a realist, he is sincere, low-key, at times even stolid. His prose can be skillful, it can sometimes attain a startling lyricism, but he is no brilliant stylist, nor is he a revolutionary original like his friend Andrey Platonov. You could say that the power comes from the content (he is, after all, plunging us into the midst of war, genocide, and terror, even when he tells it slant), but this can't be the whole story. Grossman, it seems to me, just has a respect and love for the "mystery of the human soul" - and the animal soul as well: see the title story about a mule at Stalingrad. He is also disconcertingly good at portraying self-deception, as well as maternal love.
This is the third volume of Grossman's work that we owe to Robert Chandler and his various associates (the others are Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics) and Everything Flows (New York Review Books Classics). All of them are great, although I really think he excels at the story form: in the novels he can sometimes press a little hard on the reader. So if you haven't read Grossman before, I would certainly recommend this as the first thing to read. If you have read him, you don't need my recommendation to get this book!
A list of the works included (since you can't "search inside this book")
Part One: The 1930s:
In the Town of Berdichev, A Small Life, A Young Woman and an Old Woman
Part Two: The War, the Shoah:
The Old Man, The Old Teacher, The Hell of Treblinka, The Sistine Madonna
Part Three: Late Stories
The Elk, Mama, Living Space, The Road, The Dog, In Kislovodsk
Part Four: Three Letters
Part Five: Eternal Rest (on cemeteries: "The cemetery lives an intense, passion-filled life.")
Robert Chandler provides a characteristically sensitive introduction and prefaces to each part. His co-translators are Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Mukovnikova. Commentary and notes are by Chandler and Yury Bit-Yunan, and there is an Afterword (a reminiscence of the author) by Fyodor Gruber.The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (New York Review Books Classics) Overview
The Road brings together short stories, journalism, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman, the author of Life and Fate, providing new insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer. The stories range from Grossman's first success, "In the Town of Berdichev," a piercing reckoning with the cost of war, to such haunting later works as "Mama," based on the life of a girl who was adopted at the height of the Great Terror by the head of the NKVD and packed off to an orphanage after her father's downfall. The girl grows up struggling with the discovery that the parents she cherishes in memory are part of a collective nightmare that everyone else wishes to forget. The Road also includes the complete text of Grossman's harrowing report from Treblinka, one of the first anatomies of the workings of a death camp; "The Sistine Madonna," a reflection on art and atrocity; as well as two heartbreaking letters that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death at the hands of the Nazis and carried with him for the rest of his life. Meticulously edited and presented by Robert Chandler, The Road allows us to see one of the great figures of twentieth-century literature discovering his calling both as a writer and as a man.


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