A School for Fools [Paperback]

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.” A work of genius voiced by a narrator and his double — simultaneously. It’s a Joycean work that unravels in fits and starts, but always beautifully....[by] one of the great living Russian writers. —Flavorwire

“Sokolov’s A School for Fools should be considered one of the finest 20th-century Russian novels.” —Harvey Pekar, The Washington Post

“If Joyce had written the last chapter of Ulysses in Russian it would have sounded like this. —Vladimir Markov

“[Sokolov] develops ideas and techniques from Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Joyce, to name a few predecessors—but he uses themes like doubling, madness, and sexual obsession in a way that is his own and feels completely new. . . The hero of the book is language itself, and I’m happy to say that the previous inadequate translation has been superseded by Alexander Boguslawslcî