Contents
As always, we’ve pre-screened and recommend 4 new novels to add to your bookshelf. Reading them will give you pleasure on cold autumn evenings and cloudy weekends.
“Permafrost”
Viktor Remizov, Frontier
“Permafrost” by Viktor Remizov is a powerful, historically honest 800-page epic with multifaceted characters and a single storyline. It begins and ends with ice drift on the Yenisei: in 1949, the tugboat “Polyarny” takes barges with prisoners to a grandiose construction site to the village of Ermakovo, and in 1953, immediately after Stalin’s death, the ambitious project is frozen – and the same barges take the rest back.
Between two ice drifts, the crushed fates of thousands of compatriots and two personal stories: a former geologist, and now a camp paramedic, Georgy Gorchakov, and a young river captain, Belov, whom the system will drag in and maim, is scary and pointless. Belov has to go through a difficult path from sincere faith in the wisdom of the leader to the realization of the essence of what is happening.
Just as the strong Yenisei “ruthlessly but honestly” breaks the ice, so Remizov directly poses damned questions and seeks answers, inheriting Varlam Shalamov in artistic truth. Viktor is from a different generation and relies not on his own experience, but on the documents of the era: on the memoirs of the prisoners of the Yermakov camp, the book of memory of the Yenisei Shipping Company, the archives of Memorial. Time distance gives the necessary objectivity and courage to write.
Remizov publishes a complete list of construction projects on the Great Stalinist Mainline. This makes a stunning impression. It’s as if the author gives us binoculars with high magnification and then turns them over – and each situation described in the novel becomes just one of many.
“Permafrost” is difficult to read. Fortunately, Remizov has a surprisingly calm, transparent manner of writing. Perhaps this is the only way – in a balanced way, without forcing – and you can talk about the years of agonizing terror in order to feel its absurdity and cruelty. This is a test that is worth passing in literature in order to prevent it in life.
Victor Remizov – Russian prose writer, philologist, author of several books, finalist for the Russian Booker Prize and twice for the Big Book Prize (including for the novel Permafrost).
“Jealousy” and other stories”
Yu Nesbø, ABC
In each of the collection’s seven stories, Scandinavian film noir master Jo Nesbø explores the nature of jealousy and its incredible power over people. She even makes one of the heroes an outstanding investigator – having survived the betrayal of his girlfriend, he began to recognize someone else’s jealousy by the slightest signs. Suspicion deprives peace, common sense and poisons life, and sometimes it is not a figure of speech. Let’s not forget that Jo Nesbø is the best detective in Norway. The outcome of his crime stories is unpredictable. But when you know that this painful feeling is involved in the case, solving tricky puzzles is a little easier.
Translation from Norwegian by Daria Gogoleva and Anastasia Naumova.
“Good dogs don’t get to the South Pole”
Hans-Olav Tuvold, Phantom-Press
A heartwarming story told by an observant dog named Slapper. When his beloved master, Major Thorkildsen, dies, Slap and Mrs. Thorkildsen are left alone. Before they treated each other with doubt, but now they find a common language. They study with interest the history of the Amundsen expedition and find out: the research feat was actually performed by dogs, and people appropriated their victory. Tuvold writes a real saga about the heroism and devotion of our pets, and then he allows Slap to show the same qualities when the widow’s son intends to send a woman to a nursing home.
Translation from Norwegian by Anastasia Naumova.
“Burnt Sugar”
Avni Doshi, Inspiria
37-year-old Avni Doshi wrote a distinctive yet universal text about the painful relationship between mother and daughter. Avni is a man of two cultures. She grew up in New Jersey, the son of Indian immigrants, and studied in Manhattan and London. But at the same time, she often visited Pune, her mother’s native, a large Indian city where the action of “Burnt Sugar” takes place.
The story of how an adult daughter is experiencing her mother’s progressive Alzheimer’s, Doshi pondered for many years, sketching out eight (!) different options.
The result is a biting and hurting novel about the place of a modern woman in a patriarchal society and about family values that become a heavy burden. About the daughter’s acute need for motherly love and hatred as its underside, and also about the impossibility of cutting the umbilical cord, even (or especially) when your mother is already losing touch with reality and ceases to recognize you.
Realizing the onset of maternal dependence and her own eternal vulnerability, the heroine over and over again tries to win back, and forgive, and gain freedom. But is it possible to free yourself from toxic relationships that not only bind and stifle, but also keep you afloat?