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Reviewed by Carol Thompson for Readers' Favorite
You-Gin One-Gin: Sort of a Novel by Douglas Robinson is a reimagining of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin that moves between stage script, campus novel, and literary commentary. The book begins with a theatrical adaptation of Pushkin’s verse novel, presented as a college production that immediately foregrounds authorship, translation, and performance. From there, the narrative expands into a broader fictional frame that includes professors, students, the ghosts of writers, and the afterlives of literary texts. Pushkin appears not only as a source but as a character, while Nabokov’s presence hovers as both influence and interlocutor. Throughout, the novel invites readers to recognize echoes of literary history while also enjoying the sheer inventiveness of its premise. It is a book deeply aware of its sources yet committed to having fun with them, treating literature as something alive, disputatious, and communal.
Douglas Robinson’s writing is energetic and knowingly theatrical, with dialogue carrying much of the momentum. Readers who enjoy campus novels will appreciate the academic humor and sharp observations of faculty life, while those drawn to metafiction will appreciate the text’s commentary on its own construction. The prose is conversational and alert, often wryly funny, and comfortable moving between high literary references and everyday speech. You-Gin One-Gin rewards readers who like catching allusions, but it doesn’t require specialized knowledge to follow the action. What many readers will enjoy most is the sense of play, the willingness to let literature argue with itself across the centuries, and the way scholarship, storytelling, and performance intersect. This is a novel for readers who take pleasure in a story that knows it is being told and invites the audience to watch it happen. Robinson has penned a literary masterpiece.
