Contents
When autumn is outside, there are fewer and fewer sunny days, and we increasingly have to give up walking. However, we offer you an alternative – to spend the evening with an interesting book.
Becoming: Living Your Own Way
“City of Women” by Elizabeth Gilbert
Frankly, when 13 years ago the novel-manifesto of the journalist Elizabeth Gilbert “Eat, Pray, Love” was published, it was not clear whether Gilbert would remain in literature or not. It’s one thing to write a witty, inspiring memoir in the wake of your own difficult divorce; it’s another thing to write fiction. But Gilbert succeeded. The new novel proves it again. A sparkling plot from the theatrical life of America in the 40s with parties, cocktails and burlesque stars grows into a historically accurate, deep novel about growing up and gaining inner freedom.
Carefree 19-year-old Vivian Morris, expelled from a prestigious college, ends up with her aunt in Manhattan and enthusiastically plunges into a new life. The dilapidated Lily Theatre, run by Aunt Peg and her friend Olivia, becomes her home and school at once. Vivian has an innate sense of proportions, she perfectly knows how to turn old curtains into an evening dress, so during the day the girl sews costumes for performances, and in the evening she conquers New York at night with showgirls.
Vivian learns to live, regardless of external conventions and other people’s expectations, and inevitably makes mistakes – betrays, flees, toils with guilt. But Gilbert’s line is not the only one. At the very beginning of the book, already 90-year-old Vivian Morris receives a letter from a certain Angela with a request to answer who Vivian was for her father. And according to the plot, the novel becomes an answer to Angela’s question, but in fact – to the question that Gilbert herself has long worried about the right of a woman to happiness.
Throughout their lives, Vivian and other key characters of the City of Women – from the optimistic Aunt Peg to the extravagant Marjorie Lutskaya, the girl selling fabrics – are ahead of their time. Bright, independent, internally whole, they do not judge others and do not allow themselves to be judged. Vivian’s parents expected her to finish college, have a decent marriage, and go racing on Saturdays. She dropped out of school and chose partners for sex herself, did not strive for marriage, although all her life she successfully sewed wedding dresses for others, her friend’s son became her family and heir, and the closest person was a man with whom they only walked and talked.
In the ability to accept yourself and others, live the way you want, and be in harmony with your inner “I”, the heroines of the “City of Women” have no equal. At the same time, none of them “challenges society”, does not “defend the rights of women” and does not wave banners. Elizabeth Gilbert does not talk about feminism at all, she writes a novel about theater, war and growing up, which is why it turns out to be such an inspiring hymn to personality, friendship, optimism and freedom.
“City of Women” by Elizabeth Gilbert, translated from English by Yulia Zmeeva, Ripol Classic, 416 pp.
Portrait
The Rosie Project, The Rosie Effect, Rosie’s Triumph by Graeme Simsion
He was a database modeler and at 56 wrote a novel that was immediately sold to 40 countries. Within a couple of weeks, the retired geek turned into one of Australia’s most successful writers. Graham Simsion approached the matter thoroughly – he went to study the skill of the writer. And at the very first lesson, he came up with a plot: he remembered a friend who, at the age of 40, decided to look for a wife using a questionnaire, and realized – here he is, a hero.
Project Rosie is a romantic comedy based on that story. Genetics professor Don Tillman compiles a 30-page questionnaire and sends it to women. And meets the one that does not match any item.
The reader will find that Tillman exhibits symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. Don himself, like his author, does not think so. But when Project Rosie came out, Simsion received a lot of kudos from people on the autism spectrum for accurately conveying the hero’s worldview.
In The Rosie Effect, Graham set out to prove that Don and Rosie can be happily married, and in Rosie’s Triumph, to show how they raise their son, who faces the same problems as his father. Simsion writes tactfully, yet desperately funny, about how autism does not define who we are. Everyone has their own “cockroaches”, and any relationship is a story about how to get along with “cockroaches” of strangers. Graham, happily married to psychiatrist Ann Buist for 30 years, writes about it just fine.
The Rosie Project, The Rosie Effect, Rosie’s Triumph, Sinbad, translated from English. Irina Litvinova, Mikhail Shevelev.
Today
“Former Lenin” Shamil Idiatullin
The winner of the “Big Book” Shamil Idiatullin is also a newspaper journalist. Knowledge of the facts with which he is accustomed to working at Kommersant is superimposed on an excellent sense of language and is transformed into a story about us today. The city of Chupov, where the former promising politician lives, and now just a tired official Daniil Mitrofanov, is suffocating from a garbage dump, the discontent of the Chupovites is growing.
Daniil is mired in apathy, his wife Lena has pushed all interests for the sake of her husband, and the death of his mother completely breaks something in the fragile family mechanism. The author masterfully combines social and personal dramas with topical environmental fantasy. According to Idiatullin, there is only one way out of all conflicts: the conditions in which it is impossible to remain must be changed. It’s hard not to agree. The question is how?
Edited by Elena Shubina, 448 p.
Responsibility
“Hard and Gloomy” Andrey Rubanov
The heroes of Rubanov’s new stories are hard and laconic men. A businessman who went to prison for financial fraud, a screenwriter who seeks to catch time, a husband and father looking for the meaning of love – this is both Rubanov himself and the heroes of his time, whom life tests for strength. Rigidly and gloomily conquers with the accuracy of the style, sober self-irony and … unexpected lyricism.
These gloomy men who are responsible for their actions and do not change their rules could become the heroes of Jack London or Hemingway. But Rubanov wrote about them, managing to show their (and his) vulnerability and tenderness. Such courage in exposing vulnerabilities is perhaps the strongest evidence of genuine masculinity, which is not so common.
AST, 120 p.