Books for September: Psychologies Selection

Hold on to the present

“Parting. My Struggle by Carl Uwe Knausgaard

This often happens with world bestsellers: rumors about a cycle of novels by the 50-year-old Norwegian Knausgaard reached Russian-speaking readers before the book itself. Experimental prose, automatic writing – as soon as it was not dubbed. The work turned out to be deep, but at the same time stylistically transparent.

The writer Karl Uwe’s father died, he suffers from a creative stupor and family routine (the hero-narrator is as identical as possible to the author). There are no cruel dramas or fantastic adventures in his life, but in the narration itself, which instantly draws you into the space of someone else’s life, there is an element of magic, magic. Reading the novel, you understand: it is for you and about you, because it is written about the most universal thing – about human fragility, about how to accept the fact of one’s own mortality.

Memento mori are just words, but often the longer we live, the more fear intensifies. It interferes with a fulfilling life: achieving goals, taking responsibility, having fun. The fight against the horror of death is the fight of Knausgaard. Like his, apparently, conscious literary ancestor Marcel Proust, he leads it with the help of a literary text.

But if Proust brings back the past, the Norwegian author strives to keep the present. And the past becomes a tool to better understand yourself and your existence here and now. Therefore, times are closely intertwined, rhyming through images and motifs.

The writer’s memoirs about his father, stern, but not cruel, and the fatherhood of Karl Uwe himself, who loves his children and at the same time is angry with them. The narrator’s youth is an absurd first love, teenage dreams, first parties with alcohol – and his farewell to his father, who actually killed himself with alcohol, was left without a dream and survived his last love.

Thus, a coherent philosophical novel grows out of the supposedly chaotic auto-description, the main message of which is: time is defeated when you become aware of its flow and catch its individual moments like photographic frames.

Approximately as Knausgaard writes in the last lines: “… Death, which I have always considered as the most important component of life, dark, enticing, was nothing more than a pipe, a branch broken by the wind, a jacket that fell from a hanger and lay on the floor.”

The publishers promise to release the second volume by November.

Translation from Norwegian by Inna Streblova. Sinbad, 464 p.

Portrait

“Rurik” by Anna Kozlova

She is one of the few Russian authors who manages to accurately convey the intonation and language of modernity. Already the debut book of a graduate of the journalism faculty of Moscow State University “Cry-Baby” so impressed one of the founders of the publishing house with the pragmatism and frivolity of the heroine that he ordered to destroy the printed edition. But the surviving copies received excellent reviews from critics.

Then there was the collection “Hail to the Winner” with caustic stories about prostitutes, women in labor and mores of the bohemian, followed by the script for the series “A Short Course in a Happy Life” and, finally, the naturalistic novel about schizophrenia “F20”, which brought Anna the National Bestseller Award.

The lively speech of Kozlova’s heroes, where there is a place for slang and obscene vocabulary, as well as her all-pervading look at everyday life, is sometimes mistaken for cynicism. In fact, only the text without retouching is sometimes able to open spiritual wounds so that they do not fester. Such is Rurik, an action-packed and highly social thriller, the name of which was given by the image of a parrot driven into a cage and embittered, deprived of care.

The main character, seventeen-year-old Marta, is also Rurik in a way. She escapes from a boarding school for rich children and goes in search of her unknown mother.

Escape becomes the property of Internet discussions, more and more people with their own goals and problems are looking for a girl. Non-random accidents lead the heroes to a remote reserve, in fact, a Dante’s gloomy forest, the only way to escape from which is to face their own painful past.

Surprisingly, the harsh text leaves a feeling of reconciliation with reality.

Phantom press, 288 p.

Опыт

“Self-development according to Tolstoy” by Viv Groskop

British journalist and stand-up comedian Viv Groskop extracts practical advice from Russian classics with humor and thoughtfulness. How not to be your own enemy? Try to give up arrogance, Evgeny Onegin tells her. What will get rid of the feeling of “it’s good where we are not”? Conscious personal goal – suggests Chekhov.

Viv Groskop’s view of Akhmatova, Dostoevsky and Bulgakov is not obscured by the school curriculum, her essays are captivating, and at the end you want more. Referring to the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy, the British woman also recalls her unrequited love, family and internal conflicts, compares and analyzes.

Her main conclusion: the book will not replace personal experience and will not get rid of mistakes. But literature has another merit – it helps to see the benefit and beauty in failures.

Translation from English by Dmitry Shabelnikov. Individual, 248 p.

Love

The Stieglitz Fly by Arina Obukh

The sketches of the St. Petersburg writer and artist Arina Obukh, a graduate of the Mukhinsky School, are as imaginative and concise as possible. Under the enchanted gaze of the author, the real and everyday world is transformed. The models become caryatids, the clothes moth becomes a February butterfly, and weaving workers are able to control destinies, like the Slavic goddess Mokosh.

Whether it’s a relationship with a mysterious person from Skype or a story about a fish forgotten in an aquarium, the admiration of everyday life, as if seen for the first time, is felt everywhere down to the smallest detail. It leaves no chance not to fall in love again with simple things, the beauty of which we so often forget.

Edited by Elena Shubina, AST, 352 p.