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New York Review Books has an interesting set of reprints of books from the forties through the eighties, which went more or less unnoticed after an initial hoo-ha at the time of release, but later acquired a reputation for varied reasons. These are all available online.

White Walls

Tolstaya’s stories are intense: they appear to scratch away a layer and reach their sting to parts of one’s reading self that are unprepared, unschooled. These stories are all a curious mixture of the most realistic physical details and the most fantastic emotional nuances. The combination is lethal because one is so taken in by the light note of irony and clinical self-observation of the characters that one is completely knocked out by the sudden explosion of uncontrolled feeling, not just of the characters, or of the author, but of the reader as well. It’s difficult not to be charmed by the people in Tatyana Tolstaya’s stories, because they are charming, doing things that many dream of doing: giving themselves completely to love, to the idea of finding love, making extraordinary gestures of companionship, finding grace in dreary/squalid living, oh the things they do!

Absolutely riveting reading, the translation works very well and one can taste the original through the new language.

The Slaves of Solitude

Patrick Hamilton

“The Slaves of Solitude” tells the stories of Miss Roach and her fellow boarders at a boarding house in the England of World War II. The terrible stifling that the heroine experiences permeates the novel oozing out of every situation, till it becomes a bit thick and one has to put the book down.

Not something I would recommend.

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