Soul

Soul by Andrey Platonov is a strange, beautiful, politically driven collection. There's the novella that shares the title of the book, then seven short stories. All take place in the USSR in the early 20th Century, all are sympathetic to communism in a complicated way, and all contain bizarre characters making surprising actions. A protagonist might marry a woman he just met, only to fall in love with her daughter, and then abandon them both, all in the span of three pages. In a way, he's like Flannery O'Connor, but in the Soviet Union, and with communism standing in for Catholicism. On balance, I liked the collection. It was interesting. I may never read as much about Uzbekistan, and the text spanned issues as wide-ranging as Zoroastrianism or the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The collection was, for lack of a better term, somnolent. Characters were constantly falling asleep, or otherwise exhausted, and the whole thing felt hazy and dreamy. I'm thinking through the effect that had on the themes of the text, and it's escaping me now. But I will say that reading Soul, after nights of poor sleep tending an infant, during a repetitive quarantine period, lulled me as much as anything I've ever read to sleep, where'd I'd dream of Uzbek camels, peasant farmers, and big trains heading east through dark forests.