Novels Without Food

There probably is a way to read the Soviet novelist Andrey Platonov and come away from the experience with something, but I didn’t find it. I read four of his bright dark works in English (it took me ten months), and I have next to nothing to say about them. They might as well have been written in some other alphabet for all the good I got out of them. (They were.—Ed.) My progress was painfully slow; two pages a day was about my limit. Even that was enough to exhaust me, and to color the days. There went 2024. Platonov wrote his books faster than I could read them. Still, some fossilized sense of duty, presumed long extinct, kept me going. I blamed my circumstances. It was the chair. It was my reading glasses. It was the light. Actually, it was the books.