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For what it is worth, I would not revise toward being more respectable or more universally legible.
The book has a recognizable temperament. That is rarer than polish.
Trim repetition, yes. Check a few endings. Watch the places where narrator and author can be confused. But do not sand off the profanity, local references, sex, or bad behavior just because somebody might object
On the sexual material: mostly keep it.
There are places where the crudeness is absolutely voice, and cleaning those up would make the book less precise, not more tasteful.
There are also a few lines where I wondered whether the joke was doing anything beyond announcing that the narrator is crude. Those are the ones I would test
I also like that the institutions are not just scenery. They supply the ladders, labels and consequences.
But Dovlatov never settles for the easy explanation that the system simply made Borya what he is.
Same.
I can imagine readers loving the last beat and other readers feeling it takes over everything that came before.
I do not think that makes it wrong. It just means the ending is doing a lot of retrospective work
Giving us the destination first is crucial.
After that, the suspense is not really “what happens?” It is “why does this keep happening?” and the story refuses to give us the psychological answer we are trained to expect.
Translation question: do you hear the prose as flat or compressed?
I keep seeing “flat” used for Dovlatov and it feels wrong to me. The sentences are plain, but they are carrying pressure.
I agree with the direction, though not every detail. Keep records of decisions, but not dossiers. Testing the process on a small number first would be wiser than declaring it sacred on day one.
I think that is the useful distinction. We need to distinguish strange interests from hostile behavior.
Agreed.
A reader being briefly outside the center of the reference is not a defect. The book would lose texture if every unfamiliar thing arrived wearing a name tag and explanation
I read it less as fatalism than as a refusal to grant respectability any moral advantage.
The respectable path is not presented as the opposite of disaster. That is the sharper joke.
Public posts are useful evidence because they show how somebody behaves when disagreed with. Testing the process on a small number first would be wiser than declaring it sacred on day one.
I am now regretting saying it in public.
Right, and I’d add one thing. Do not make moderators search someone’s entire internet history. Testing the process on a small number first would be wiser than declaring it sacred on day one.
Exactly. Contact, not prognosis.
His skepticism is useful because it is so confident.
He keeps treating disbelief as intelligence, right up until disbelief stops being an available position.
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