Latest Review: "The Bridge Over the Neroch & Other Works" by Leonid Tsypkin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is from Vincent Francone on Leonid Tsypkin’s The Bridge Over the Neroch & Other Works, from New Directions.

My apologies to Vincent for posting this so late—he had it ready for us almost a month ago—but it’s never too late for a Russian classic. Great Russian works can sometimes be hard to get in to, but even the heavier Russian works have their merits, and their beauty, as Vincent points out in his review. Here’s the beginning of his piece:

Not long ago, Nick Laird wrote an interesting article for The Guardian on the Slow Food Movement, an idea sprung from modern dissatisfaction with fast food. Participants gather to enjoy homemade meals cooked for as long as necessary. The emphasis is on the experience, not merely the consumption, of food. From this, Laird argues that poetry may be the antidote to Twitter and Facebook, both preaching the value of immediacy while encouraging reaction over contemplation. Whereas a Tweet is limited to a small amount of characters and is meant to be read quickly, a good poem is as long as it needs to be and asks to be digested slowly. Laird calls this the Slow Language Movement.

Leonid Tsypkin may not have written poetry, but his collection The Bride Over Neroch would certainly fit in with Laird’s idea. The prose is dense, detailed, and impossible to skim. It requires patience and tries its best to fuse many details into one enormous paragraph (and sometimes into one sentence). The book ought to be the perfect response to a world consumed with social media and instant connection. But this is part of the problem. The writing, while precise and complex, doesn’t always challenge one the way in which poetry, or rich prose, does. This may be a fault of the translation, but midway through the title piece I was wondering if the disconnect I felt was due to Tsypkin’s writing or due to my dwindling attention span. Both, maybe? I have no problem with a dense book, but I do ask that the author give me something to hang my hat on other than seemingly arbitrary observations of mountains. Though it is unfair to compare Tyspkin to other writers, while reading Tsypkin I thought of Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose My Struggle books are not short of mundane detail yet manage to be thoroughly engrossing, and László Krasznahorkai, who spins unwieldy sentences that demand close reading and grant significant rewards. Conversely, Tyspkin’s titular novella, a meticulous story of many generations of a Russian-Jewish family, sweeping though it may be, feels overstuffed and wearying.

For the rest of the review, go here.