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A review by piccoline
Bardo or Not Bardo by Antoine Volodine
5.0
This guy, this Volodine. It's quite a run, or anyway seems to be from the English-speaker POV. I haven't really dug in to see whether these are being released in anything like the order AV wrote them.
This one felt like it might not quite pack the punch. Still good, still funny and strange. But somehow it wasn't quite pushing the same buttons in quite the same perfect way. Then, somewhere around the end of the 4th story, when you started to realize (just like in the middle of [b:We Monks and Soldiers|13594210|We Monks and Soldiers|Lutz Bassmann|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1352204692s/13594210.jpg|19182428], just like with [b:Writers|21563518|Writers|Antoine Volodine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1398351695s/21563518.jpg|14193601]) how the structure of the thing is doing its work on you, that this isn't *just* a collection of stories, and suddenly its doing its palindromic work on you and everything just starts resonating?
This guy, this Volodine. Wow.
This one felt like it might not quite pack the punch. Still good, still funny and strange. But somehow it wasn't quite pushing the same buttons in quite the same perfect way. Then, somewhere around the end of the 4th story, when you started to realize (just like in the middle of [b:We Monks and Soldiers|13594210|We Monks and Soldiers|Lutz Bassmann|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1352204692s/13594210.jpg|19182428], just like with [b:Writers|21563518|Writers|Antoine Volodine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1398351695s/21563518.jpg|14193601]) how the structure of the thing is doing its work on you, that this isn't *just* a collection of stories, and suddenly its doing its palindromic work on you and everything just starts resonating?
This guy, this Volodine. Wow.