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Writer's pictureAndré van Loon

Deceit (book review)

Review of Deceit, by Yuri Felsen, translated by Bryan Karetnyk, published in Review 31


Deceit is a ruminative and slow-burning novel that reveals as much as it conceals. Written in the form of diary entries by an unnamed narrator, the first impression is of a great candour, even pedantry at getting things exact on the page. The writer, a Russian who has fled the Bolsheviks to live in exile in Paris, begins by unfolding his thoughts with a Proustian languor: paragraph-long sentences; an array of commas and semicolons; strings of adjectives and adverbs. But soon, a sense of anxiety, uncertainty and ultimately of falsehood spreads beneath the words.



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