Harper's Magazine, November 1st, 2005
Jerome Charyn looks for himself, though he never quite comes out and says so in SAVAGE SHORTHAND: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ISAAC BABEL (Random House, $24.95). This contentious and engrossing hybrid of a book is part biography--of a Russian writer "with glasses on his nose and autumn in his heart," who was murdered by Stalin in January 1940 after eight months of torture and a twenty-minute trial. And part memoir--of the underappreciated but prolific Charyn, a Bellowing Heller sort of novelist, with Philip Roth's brains and Stanley Elkin's heart, who tracked down Babel's last mistress in Paris and ...
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