Золотой теленок (The Golden Calf)

Starred review from October 26, 2009
A hilarious blend of absurdist, futurist and surrealist sensibilities, this new (and only complete) translation of Ilf and Petrov's novel following The Twelve Chairs
, first serialized in 1931, is a highly animated tale of a con artist's journey through the cities and hinterlands of Soviet Russia. Part anarchist, part Quixote and part jester, “grand strategist” Ostap Bender, along with his lackeys, rides through the country in a yellow jalopy in search of the elusive “secret millionaire” Alexander Koreiko. Along the way, a superabundance of wild, arresting images and uncanny scenarios materialize, from an elaborate bureaucracy housed in a former hotel where the “white bathtubs were filled with files,” to the introduction of a puzzle maker attempting to make a riddle out of the word “industrialisation”; from the sight of doormen “selling white-striped watermelons by their doorways” to the use of a telegram machine missing a letter. It's an invigorating journey through innumerable paradoxes, dreams and burlesque routines, and though it's intensely chaotic (at times to dizzying effect), this is a finely translated edition of a triumphant literary experiment.