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Askold Melnyczuk
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What Is Told Kindle Edition

by Askold Melnyczuk (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 8 ratings
See all formats and editions
What is Told is a masterful novel that sprints across generations, centuries and continents. In a spirited narrative that travels from old Ukraine to New Jersey, Askold Melnyczuk follows his character through the betrayals of war and the promises of marriage.

Zenon and Natalka Zabobon marry the day Archduke Ferdinand is shot in Sarajevo. When Natalka wins the battle of the bedroom, Zenon throws his energies into making sure his country doesn’t completely disappear from the map. His brother Stefan, meanwhile, renounces the abstractions of nationalism for the certain pleasures of Paris and his two mistresses, a mother and daughter.

Transplanted to the strange soil of the new world by the upheavals of World War II, the family finds itself unprepared for the subtle sabotages of peacetime suburbia. With the ghosts of their extraordinary past never far away, the voyagers resort to the strategies learned in the struggle again the Tartars, Nazis, and Communists. The results are as comic as they are unexpected.

In What is Told, Askold Melnyczuk reinvents with humor and compassion, the story of a people long hidden behind the Iron Curtain. His novel is a reminder that history is not something that happens only to others.

Seamus Heaney called it "A great novel of unresentful sorrow and half-requited loss."

“[Melnyczuk’s] blend of myth and realism — punctuated with violence and comedy — recalls Garcia Marquez,” wrote Philip Patrick of The Boston Globe. And, Alida Becker, of The New York Times Book Review, said, “To fall in love with Melnyczuk’s voice is no trouble at all….”
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  1. Print length
    135 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publication date
    June 16, 2011
  5. File size
    300 KB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
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  8. Enhanced typesetting
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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The novelist, a first-generation American of Ukrainian heritage, begins his story just after the turn of this century, but most of the action takes place after World War II. His characters, who come from two generations, flee war in Europe only to enter long-ensuing personal battles in New Jersey as cultures clash and family friction ebbs and flows with the struggle against the "subtle Sabotages of the seemingly peaceful suburbs." Intertwined with the living characters are dead legends, the gods credited with the early, more spectacular origins of the family back in Tartar times. Treating the dreams and aspirations and loves of immigrants, this unusual novel seeks in an imaginative manner to integrate legend with reality. Melnyczuk, a poet, translator, and short story writer as well as a novelist, has produced a novel worthy of purchase.
- Olivia Opello, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Askold Melnyczuk has taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, Harvard, and Boston University.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00572BBYK
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ PFP (June 16, 2011)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 16, 2011
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 300 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 135 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 8 ratings

About the author

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Askold Melnyczuk

Askold Melnyczuk

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Askold Melnyczuk's most recent book is a collection of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow (2021). Other books include The House of Widows, an Editor's Choice selection of the American Library Association's Booklist, Ambassador of the Dead, a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2002 and What is Told, a New York Times Notable Book. He has also published a novella about Rimbaud titled Blind Angel.

He has published essays, reviews, poetry, and translations in The New York Times, The TLS, The Boston Globe, The Paris Review, The Antioch Review, The Harvard Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. His essays have been listed as "Notable Essays" in the Best American Essays, as well as "Notable Fiction" in Best American Stories. He received a three-year fellowship in fiction from the Lila Wallace Foundation, as well as numerous grants from the NEA for his work as editor of AGNI magazine, which he founded in 1972. In 2001, Melnyczuk received the Magid Award from PEN which described AGNI as "one of America's, and the world's, most significant literary journals." He has also received the George Garret Award from AWP for his "service to literature."

Founder of Arrowsmith Press, he has edited seven books, including three volumes in Graywolf's Take Three Poetry Series, an anthology of writing from Ukraine, From Three Worlds, a volume on the painter Gerry Bergstein, a book of essays about Father Daniel Berrigan, and most recently Oksana Zabuzhko's Selected Poems. He translated Girls, a novella by Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine's leading novelist and poet, as well as a selection of poems, Eight Notes from a Blue Angel, by Marjana Savka.

He has taught at Harvard University, Bennington, and Boston University. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
8 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

D. J Penick
5.0 out of 5 stars An Extraordinary Book of Wonder
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2019
WHAT IS TOLD a a rhapsody that winds from pre-history through a history that sweeps a family from the Ukraine to the USA. It is the song of people's lusts, interests, fears, desire not just to dissolve, all shaped by inner imagery they can neither choose nor abandon.

Here, for instance, is an old man, once an avid and careless lover of women, walking in the woods:

"The world hovered near his eyes. For the first time he was seeing things as they really were.
"Stefan came out when the sun was blazing lower in the sky...
"Walking Stefan felt the old world burning away like mist. All those women- sweat with sweat, kisses, lips- fading, and the only reason any of it happened was so that he could keep alive a few names and memories, pass something on.. (p.164)

This book offers so much and so many kinds of extraordinary moments
One person found this helpful
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Jayfred
2.0 out of 5 stars Not quite good enough.
Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2017
It is very weird. I finally gave up.
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