Not emotional, not intellectual, but a physical feeling of a thick text that you can’t read with your eyes, but as if you are eating like autumn honey, with difficulty turning a spoon. Ludmila Ulitskaya has always written high-density prose, and this novel is no exception.
In 2011, Lyudmila Evgenievna found the correspondence of her grandparents, from which she made a largely autobiographical “Jacob’s Ladder”. Her heroine Nora, after the death of her grandmother, also finds correspondence, notebooks and diaries of her grandfather Yakov. Lyudmila Ulitskaya unfolds a grandiose canvas of the history of six generations of the Ossetsky family from the end of the 30th century, from the Kiev Jewish pogroms to the present day and beyond, to the XNUMXs of the XNUMXst century. So there is little sweetness in this honey.
Fates and eras are intertwined, the third person is replaced by the first, the canvas turns into a detailed statement that closes the main theme for Ulitskaya, the family.
In the biblical text on the stairs, Jacob, the son of Isaac, sees God and is blessed by all his offspring. Ulitskaya weaves proof of what invisible threads make a family a family – moreover, how much in common between all people who were, are and will be: “One hundred thousand entities, connected in a certain order, form a person, a temporary abode of all personalities. This is immortality.” The connection of generations, the feeling of belonging to a common past, relatives behind our backs like an endless wedge going into the sky – is it not the foundation and soil that is sorely lacking in the modern world of singles? “Everything ends well: a happy ending is followed by death. Everything is accepted in the end ”- and peace of mind sets in, without fuss and passions, such a moment in life when with respect and understanding you see your ancestors three knees back and with tenderness and love – two descendants, and if you’re lucky – three knees forward . Appeasement is the main feeling of the novel. The first and, it seems, the last.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya, one of the most famous writers in Russia and translated abroad. Author of six novels, collections of novels and short stories. Winner of many awards, including “Russian Booker” (2001) and “Big Book” (2007).