Confession of a Murderer: Told in One Night

Rating:
Summary: Incomplete but Compelling
Review: As I read this novel I couldn't help but ask myself, "What is missing?" There was some intangible quality - evident in other Roth novels - that was noticeably absent here. I came to realize that it was a sense of place: this is a story of international scope, bringing us from a peasant's hut in rural Russia to the cosmopolitan St. Petersburg to pre-WWI Paris, and yet none of these places come to life like the Vienna of "The Tale of the 1002nd Night," the Berlin of "Right and Left" or the tramp's paradise of "The Legend of the Holy Drinker." That said, the saving grace of this piece is the story itself, a chilling tale of obsession and murder purportedly told by the former Russian secret agent Golubchick; as he weaves his tale for a rapt audience, much like a ghost story around a campfire, we as readers are drawn into his futile quest to claim the noble name of his real father, his destructive love affair with the flighty Lutetia and his hatred for his half-brother, the rightful Prince. And then just when we have given over our sympathies to this defeated man we are forced to question our perceptions and our notions of the truth. Read this story and you will be enchanted along with the other drunks in the Russian restaurant in the small hours of the morning - that is the true power of this novel.

Rating:
Summary: Incomplete but Compelling
Review: As I read this novel I couldn't help but ask myself, "What is missing?" There was some intangible quality - evident in other Roth novels - that was noticeably absent here. I came to realize that it was a sense of place: this is a story of international scope, bringing us from a peasant's hut in rural Russia to the cosmopolitan St. Petersburg to pre-WWI Paris, and yet none of these places come to life like the Vienna of "The Tale of the 1002nd Night," the Berlin of "Right and Left" or the tramp's paradise of "The Legend of the Holy Drinker." That said, the saving grace of this piece is the story itself, a chilling tale of obsession and murder purportedly told by the former Russian secret agent Golubchick; as he weaves his tale for a rapt audience, much like a ghost story around a campfire, we as readers are drawn into his futile quest to claim the noble name of his real father, his destructive love affair with the flighty Lutetia and his hatred for his half-brother, the rightful Prince. And then just when we have given over our sympathies to this defeated man we are forced to question our perceptions and our notions of the truth. Read this story and you will be enchanted along with the other drunks in the Russian restaurant in the small hours of the morning - that is the true power of this novel.

Rating:
Summary: it was clearly one long night
Review: The premise of this novel offers so much - a taut murderous confession in one sitting by a man who still professes to consider himself "a good man". Yet given the narrator spends the rest of the novel berating himself or rather wallowing in his consistently evil conduct and repeated acts of atrocity, I never detected any conviction that he regarded himself as inherently good.

It can be difficult to really gauge a novel when not reading it in its first language - a gifted as the translator might be. I found this novella clunky and tiresome, with no pacing or suspense. The novel grinds towards the inevitable without engendering any sympathy for Golubchik or those who suffer at his hands.

I would not recommend this novel.