The Bride from Odessa by Edgardo Cozarinsky

The Bride from Odessa

Edgardo Cozarinsky

If you read only one collection of short stories this year make it this one! They left me with a deep feeling of isolation and alienation - very impressive, rather bleak snapshots of life as an exile.

Extract
One day, he thought he had glimpsed in the gaze of his characters, his painted creatures, a mistrust and fear he had not seen in the models posing for him. The ambiguous distance, so beloved of Henry James, that art introduces between reality and its representation, in his case only seemed to add this look of suspicion, and it made his portraits unbearable by infecting them with a silent solitary unease: his own.
Parallels
  • The Lady with a Lapdog by Anton Chekhov
  • Collected Stories by Somerset Maugham

Late night blues