Felsen shares with Proust his fascination with the workings of jealousy and desire, as well as lengthy sentences, many of which extend over several hundred words. Here, however, the similarities end ... In Felsen’s work, there are few unexpected comparisons of the sort to be found in that of Proust; the similes are tame ... Felsen’s prose is striking for its lack of detail and characterization ... Karetnyk has done an excellent job of reproducing the obsessive rhythm – the difficulty – of Felsen’s prose. At times he adds an extra touch of metaphor ... My only quibble is Karetnyk’s anachronistic use of “gift” as a verb, which seems more of the current century than the middle of the last one.
Readers expecting a Russian version of Remembrance of Things Past will be disappointed. Proust, as capable of looking outward as inside, draws his readers in with what Nabokov termed “the transmutation of sensation into sentiment”, whereas Felsen’s preoccupations with the inner workings of his psyche can be more alienating than inviting and his characters often little more than vehicles for philosophising. Yet his tortuous style paradoxically beguiles, and, in the detailing of his inner world Felsen frequently elicits profound truths about human nature and its motivations.
Throughout the diary, Karetnyk’s seemingly effortless translation captures Felsen’s wit and comic timing perfectly ... Karetnyk’s careful handling of Felsen’s intricate sentences is to be not only commended but relished ... Timely, relatable, and thoroughly absorbing, if Deceit proves anything, it is how little both our interior and exterior lives have changed over the span of a tumultuous century.
Deceit is heavily autobiographical; the unnamed narrator, a Russian writer in exile in Paris, is effectively Felsen himself—an obvious point of resemblance to Proust. Another is the novel’s meticulous, agonizing analysis of sexual jealousy ... Jealousy, solipsism, obsession, sadism—these are all among Proust’s themes, and it’s a tribute to Felsen that he handles them with something of Proust’s complex, unsparing insight. By the same token, however, a reader of Proust will find many things in Deceit familiar. Ironically, the things only Felsen could have showed us—the way Russian exiles lived in Paris in the 1920s—appear only fleetingly and in the background.
Felsen has been described as the Russian Proust, and his intensely layered psychological self-scrutiny is comparable to the French great, although without Proust’s rich imagery. We are trapped in the narrator’s head as we’re trapped in our own consciousness; this is Felsen’s power ... Felsen is a master of human expectations and the subsequent accommodations of those expectations. When he does focus on an object, he works it beautifully ... Yet despite all his cynicism — he asserts that 'It is impossible to love without deceit' — he continues to offer up his 'dwindling strength to the cruel ... whims of love’s divinity.'
... scintillating ... Felsen shows why his peers called him the 'Russian Proust' with the narrator’s tortured account of his love and perceived betrayal ... It’s a fittingly volatile record of ruinous desire.
