I just wrapped up The Slaughterman's Daughter, the 2015 novel by Yaniv Iczkovits which Santa got me for Christmas. What can I say, it's a very solid read, funny, humane, redolent of Gogol and surely a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten. Ultimately it's very positive.
But it's rare for a novel that clocks in at 500 pages but isn't genre fiction to have as little ambition as this one. It's ultimately just pretty much a lark, even if it's pages are filled with a little death and no little human excrement and it's fully shot through with anti-semiticism presented as just a humorous fact of life in the late 19th century pale of settlement. It is more often the stuff of the 250-300 page novel.
Not that it wasn't a pleasure to read the extra pages. It's just curious almost that the publisher let the author get away with them. I guess it is just that much more enthralling than your average lark.
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