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adamjcalhoun's review
4.0
Maxim Gorky's life kind of sucked, and was filled with terrible people. Maxim Gorky decided it would be a good idea to let everyone know about that fact. Maxim Gorky wrote a three book autobiography to tell everyone about it.
My Apprenticeship is the second novel in the series, exploring his adolescent years. We watch him travel around Russia performing various odd jobs, alternately working in an idol merchant's store, being "apprenticed" to his uncle who designed and built buildings, or going up and down the river on a passenger ship.
This is the book where we begin to understand where Gorky gets his interest in writing. He is disappointed in romantic novels that present an unrealistic portrait of life that seems so unlike his own. Instead he enjoys gritty books filled with orphans who are certainly never invited to fetes. Once his passion for reading is manifested, his knack with letters leads other people to have him read out stories to them, and then create stories for them. If you want to know what makes a great gritty realist writer, this book will tell you. The constant little vignettes will occasionally get wearing as they accurately follow the staccato beat of life that can be so disorienting in a novel.
My Apprenticeship is the second novel in the series, exploring his adolescent years. We watch him travel around Russia performing various odd jobs, alternately working in an idol merchant's store, being "apprenticed" to his uncle who designed and built buildings, or going up and down the river on a passenger ship.
This is the book where we begin to understand where Gorky gets his interest in writing. He is disappointed in romantic novels that present an unrealistic portrait of life that seems so unlike his own. Instead he enjoys gritty books filled with orphans who are certainly never invited to fetes. Once his passion for reading is manifested, his knack with letters leads other people to have him read out stories to them, and then create stories for them. If you want to know what makes a great gritty realist writer, this book will tell you. The constant little vignettes will occasionally get wearing as they accurately follow the staccato beat of life that can be so disorienting in a novel.
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