Fiction Dead characters walking THE BIG GREEN TENT By Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated by Polly Gannon 579 pp. Picador Reviewed by Marty Carlock It appears to me that American fiction writers work to please their readers, while Europeans write to please critics. How else to explain the purple praise lavished on The Big Green Tent , a tome by “one of Russia’s most famous writers,” “a must-read,” “Compelling, addictive reading,” “never boring,” and “As grand, solid and impressively all-encompassing as the title implies”? List me among the ignorati: I can agree only with the first and last of these plugs. For 400 of its almost 600 pages I had to beat myself up to keep reading. Ulitskaya whimsically pursues a kind of anti-narrative, telling a character’s story to its end, killing him or her off – then in the next chapter or so: What? Here’s Olga or Ilya again, young and lusty, living another piece of his/her life. This is a lazy way to write. It relieves the author of the tedium of makin...
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