Book Beat’s Reading Group Selection for January is Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s surreal The Letter Killers Club. The Reading Group will meet on Wednesday, January 25th in the Goldfish Teahouse (117 W. Fourth, in downtown Royal Oak) at 7pm. Books are discounted 15% at Book Beat (26010 Greenfield Rd., Oak Park, MI).All are welcome!

Set in an ominous 1920’s Russia, The Letter Killers Club is a secret society of self-described “conceivers” who, to preserve the purity of their conceptions, will commit nothing to paper.  The logic of the club is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday, members meet in a firelit room filled with empty black bookshelves where they strive to top one another by developing ever unlikelier, ever more perfect conceptions. The members of the club are strangely mistrustful of one another, while all are under the spell of its despotic President, and there is no telling, in the end, just how lethal the purely conceptual—or, for that matter, letters—may be.

“SK’s The Letter Killers Club is a monumental literary discovery, a gem buried in the Soviet Archives and only unearthed in 1976.  With its daring experimentalism and acid commentary on state power, the book still stands as a work of revolutionary power.” –full review from The Driftless Area Review

“I am interested not in the arithmetic, but in the algebra of life.”-Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

One of the best foreign translations of the year comes naturally again from the New York Review of Books. The Letter Killers Club will be our second book discussion on SK since his brilliant Memories of the Future short story collection.

“A Russian writer whose morbidly satiric imagination forms the wild (missing) link between the futuristic dream tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the postwar scientific nightmares of Stanislaw Lem… an impish master of the fatalistically fantastic.”
—Bill Marx, The World

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovky was the Ukranian-born son of Polish emmigrants. In 1920, he began lecturing in Kiev on theater and music. The lectures continued in Moscow, where he moved in 1922, by then well known in literary circles. While clerking for an attorney Krzhizhanovsky began writing, and would do so steadily for close to two decades. His philosophical and phantasmagorical fictions ignored injunctions to portray the Soviet state in a positive light. Three separate efforts to print collections were quashed by the censors, a fourth by World War II. He died in 1950, largely unpublished in his native country. Not until 1989 could his work begin to be published.

The Book Beat reading group will be discussing Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North at 7 PM, Wed. July 27th at the Goldfish Teahouse in Royal Oak. The reading group is free and open to the public. For more information, please call Book Beat at 248-968-1190. Copies of Season of Migration to the North are discounted 15% at the Book Beat.

“This story might seem like a village tragedy from the Sudan, the homeland of the writer Tayeb Salih, but its resonances carry far beyond the setting. Season of Migration to the North is a brilliant miniature of the plight of Arabs and Africans who find themselves no longer sustained by their past and not yet incorporated into a viable future. Swift and astonishing in its prose, this novel is more instructive than any number of academic books.” –The New York Times

“Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih, is an eloquent and restrained portrait of one man’s exile. It is a rare narrative in that it charts a life divided between England and Sudan. Without a doubt it is one of the finest Arabic novels of the 20th century, and Denys Johnson-Davies’ translation…does the original justice.” –Hisham Matar

An arresting work by a major Arab novelist who mines the rich lode of African experience with the Western world, Salih’s book charts the experiences of its two central characters-the nameless narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed-two generations of the European-educated Sudanese elite through the period of domination by the British and into the early years of self-rule. With echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness, emerging from Salih’s constantly evolving narrative is the clash between an assumed worldly sophistication and enduring, dark, elemental forces.