A School for Fools

By turns lyrical and philosophical, witty and baffling, A School for Fools confounds all expectations of the novel. Here we find not one reliable narrator but two "unreliable" narrators: the young man who is a student at the "school for fools" and his double. What begins as a reverie (with frequent interruptions) comes to seem a sort of fairy-tale quest not for gold or marriage but for self-knowledge. The currents of consciousness running through the novel are passionate and profound. Memories of childhood summers at the dacha are contemporaneous with the present, the dead are alive, and the beloved is present in the wind. Here is a tale either of madness or of the life of the imagination in conversation with reason, straining at the limits of language; in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, "an enchanting, tragic, and touching book."

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 11/17/2015
ISBN: 9781590178461
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.00w x 0.50d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 03/23/2015