Contents
May holidays can be spent in different ways: in a noisy company of friends or with family. Find time to relax with a good book. Here are some options.
Overcoming
“Patrick Melrose” door Edward St. Aubin
Prose writers who write about the present are divided into those who diagnose society and those who diagnose themselves. Edward St. Aubyn’s five-volume Russian-language novel Patrick Melrose brilliantly does both. He turned his broken childhood, drug-addicted youth and years of struggle with internal demons into an emphatically English novel, riddled with poisonous irony.
In fact, already on the first pages, describing the relationship between the father of the protagonist, David Melrose, with his wife, five-year-old son and inner circle, Saint Aubyn gracefully and ruthlessly destroys what stiff Britain is proud of. Namely, comfortable screens of secular rituals, with their silent indulgence of evil, unwritten rules, according to which a satiated sadist with a title and money can do anything with impunity.
The brilliant aristocrat and intellectual David Melrose realized only one of his many talents. He became an excellent diagnostician, but not in medicine. Accurately identifying the weak points of anyone who happened to be nearby, he hit the pain points for the sake of pleasure. It is clear that little Patrick did not have a chance for a normal childhood. All subsequent years, the hero (as in reality and his author, Edward St. Aubin) collects himself bit by bit and fights with his father even after his death.
From draining drug trips to psychoanalysis, from denial to acceptance. Little Patrick’s fear of being alone with his father develops into an even more terrible fear – to become like his father. The five parts of the cycle are a difficult way to overcome this fear. Patrick Melrose sets himself an almost impossible task – to soberly look into the eyes of his inner monsters, overcome them and become an ordinary husband and father, not knowing examples of either one or the other.
From this insufferable material, Edward St. Aubyn creates a magnificent, stylistically flawless novel. Each installment is written differently, from a leisurely family saga to a grotesque black comedy, but with the same trademark English humor that holds the Patrick Melrose cycle together and makes it an integral part of the very British culture that St. Aubin dissects so masterfully.
“Patrick Melrose” by Edward St. Aubin, in 2 vols. Translation from English by Alla Akhmerova, Ekaterina Dobrokhotova-Maikova, Alexandra Pitcher. Foreigner, 480 p. each.
Introspection
“Nine Complete Strangers” by Liane Moriarty
In the new book, Moriarty uses the familiar genre of the psychological everyday thriller only as a springboard. She creates conditions for the heroes, similar to the reality show “The Last Hero”. Nine strangers arrive at a boarding house for a 10-day makeover course. An overweight woman at the onset of menopause, a couple who lost a child, a former athlete…
Someone expects to lose weight, someone just sleep. They will have to give up a lot and, moreover, become participants in the experiment that the hostess of the boarding house has conceived. Moriarty does not do special tricks with the characters: he does not compose a common past for them, he does not put a killer in a boarding house. It only gives everyone the opportunity to understand themselves. But this is the most exciting thing.
Translation from English by Grigory Krylov. Alphabet-Atticus, 576 p.
Sympathy
“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Otessa Moshfegh
About 15 years ago, with the approaching depression, the young ladies went to travel around Italy, do yoga in India, in order to eventually find love and harmony somewhere in Bali. In any case, in the manifesto of a whole generation, Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert was exactly that. Girls of the new century, according to Otessa Moshfegh, choose escapism. Here, for example, a 26-year-old employee of a fashionable art gallery in New York prudently pays bills, obtains prescriptions for sleeping pills and plunges into a somnambulistic state for a year.
The book of Moshfegh, of course, is not Oblomov of the XNUMXst century; for such a comparison, the novel lacks depth and internal integrity. It won’t get rid of depression either. But as a means to understand someone who feels bad; to get a feel for why “pull yourself together, rag” and other stupid advice does not work, it will fit perfectly.
Translation from English by Irina Gilyarova. LikeBook, 352 p.
Questions to the psychotherapist
“A good woman is a dead woman” by Rimma Efimkina
Her characters are ordinary people, more often women: wives, daughters, girlfriends, teachers, psychologists or their clients. But the situations in which the author finds them turn out to be borderline, they require a choice.
Psychologies: Did you write the book as a novelist or a psychotherapist?
Rimma Efimkina: I am interested in people at the moment when they are faced with an insoluble contradiction, when they have approached the line beyond which terra incognita begins. And none of the participants know what to do. And what will happen next? At this climax, psychotherapy and prose coincide.
Do you use real customer stories?
I didn’t write stories in the quiet of an office. It was like this: I taught counseling classes for psychology students and cited practical examples as illustrations (subject to confidentiality rules, of course). Gradually, the stories were polished, the excess flew off. The most recognizable remains. For example, the “List of Feelings” can serve as an algorithm for a classic psychotherapy session, and I ran hundreds of them before I realized that this was a finished story.
And yet: how does a psychotherapeutic story differ from an ordinary story?
In the same way that a conversation with a psychologist differs from a conversation with a friend over tea. So you complain about life: there is no money, your health has deteriorated, your husband drinks. And a friend advises: find another job, buy a new medicine … Together with a friend, you are trying to eliminate the inconvenience by changing the world outside.
The psychologist will move the focus of attention inward: how did you arrange this situation yourself? How is it beneficial to you? What is the message of your disease? You will discover within yourself the paradoxical world of the unconscious, which acts against your will. Your criteria for perceiving the problem will change. It is on this that the plots of psychotherapeutic stories are built: to show implicit motives and the hidden background of actions.
“A good woman is a dead woman”, Rimma Efimkina, Klass, 264 p.