Fate with a document? A rare combination

Mikhail Bulgakov is one of my favorite authors. His best known work, The Master and Margarita, has remained my number one favorite book for years. The Fatal Eggs is a lesser known work of his; my dad picked this up overseas and gave it to me. It is about the same length as his Heart of a Dog, which I reviewed early last year.

There are a lot of similarities between The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog. Both are about scientists that perform controversial experiments that go horribly wrong by going right. In The Fatal Eggs, our scientist, Persikov, discovers a ray of light that increases growth in frog eggs exponentially. Frogs the size of cats are hopping around his laboratory. Persikov is a character that can't see the larger implications of what he is doing and is very annoyed when anyone asks him to think about them.

Because this takes place in communist Russia, the government, represented by Comrade Alexander Semyonovich Faight, takes the ray into their own hands. Faight does this because all of the chickens in Russia have died off from some unknown illness and the other countries are laughing at Russia. However, what hatches from Faight's eggs is not quite the Frankenstein chicken I expected. It's better.

"Alexander Semyonovich brought the flute up to his lips, have a horse squeak and, gasping for breath at every second, started to play the waltz from Eugene Onegin. The eyes in the greenery immediately began to burn with an implacable hatred for that opera."

I thought that this book was very good. This book seemed to have more direct government influence than Heart of a Dog and in this book the scientist doesn't learn anything from his actions. This edition of the book has a great foreword by Doris Lessing and is translated by Hugh Aplin. Normally I am a bit of a snob when it comes to Russian translations and like to stick with Pevear and Volokhonsky, but I thought that Aplin's translation was well done. There were some footnotes that were helpful, however to get a full understanding of the work I think you need at least a basic understanding of what was happening at Russia during this time.

"All Moscow rose, and the white sheets of the newspapers dressed it, like birds."

This is a quick read, only about a hundred pages. If nothing else, it teaches the importance of reading the shipping list on all packages delivered to you, especially if you are a crazy scientist.

IV

The first Klosterman book I read was Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, purely because Seth Cohen was reading it on the O.C.

IV starts off with mostly interview pieces of rock starts and other famous people. Some of it is a little dated, but all of it is interesting. The middle section is more social commentary and the end is a fiction piece. I enjoyed the middle section the most. The last part was really interesting though; he has since written a fiction book called Downtown Owl: A Novel. It'd be worth checking out at least.

I like Klosterman because I can related to the things he's writ ting about. Music, drinking, relationships, the perils of buying an outfit from the Gap, and more music. He writes one piece about going into a store and buying a complete outfit that a mannequin is wearing and how that changes the perception people have of him.

He talks about the difference between a nemesis and and archenemy and why it's important to have both. He writes about eating nothing but McDonalds' chicken mcnuggets for something like a week.


A quote from the first section:

"The dumbest guy in Radiohead is still smarter (by himself) than all three members of the Beastie Boys and two-fifths of the Strokes.”

And my favorite quote from the book:


"In November 2000, the United States held a presidential election and nobody knew who won, so we just kind of made up an outcome and tried to act like that was normal. Less than a year later, airplanes flew into office buildings and everybody cried for two weeks. And then Enron went bankrupt, and then the U.S. became a rogue state, and then The Simple Life premiered, and then gasoline became unaffordable, and then our Olympic basketball team lost to Puerto Rico, and then we reelected the same unqualified president we never really elected in the first place. Later, there would be some especially devastating hurricanes and the release of a horrible movie titled Crash.

Things, as they say, have been better."