What to read?

Raised in suburban Baltimore, Philip Mayer is 41 years old and The Son, nominated for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, is his third novel. The first he wrote at the age of 20 on the table, but the second, “American Rust”, was enthusiastically received by critics. This is a powerful, dramatic story about the test of strength that fate throws up to two young people in the conditions of a dying American city eaten away by poverty and despair. Meyer’s pen has been compared to the titans of American literature, such as: “John Steinbeck is alive and well and his name is Philip Meyer.” The novel has received numerous professional awards and has been translated into 11 languages. However, it was not published in Russia, so it is “Son” that will be the debut for our readers. Here, the formation of characters is shown already on a national scale – through the history of six generations of McCullough living in Texas from 1811 to the present. Difficult relationships between family members and between generations (great-grandfather, grandfather and granddaughter) take shape against the backdrop of wars, the conquest of dry, barren land and the development of oil wells … People of exceptional strength and endurance, they build a city from scratch, creating something from nothing, and for the sake of this act of creation live. Mayer is grandiose in a good way: broad strokes, a rich gallery of steel characters, the grandeur of the idea, the cruelty of the flywheel of history, which subordinates everything to its movement, a healthy epic pathos. Almost mythological and inspiring prose.

Translated from English by Maria Alexandrova, Phantom-Press, 569 p., 2015.

“Married to a Cloud” by Jonathan Carroll

Fans of magical realism are celebrating the release of the complete collection of stories by American Jonathan Carroll, and those who, like me, are indifferent to this genre, are lucky to discover impeccable prose. Reading Carroll is like chewing on a montpensier: one melts in your mouth, your hand reaches for the next until all 38 stories are over. Pure style, furious speed of narration, exceptional knowledge of souls and characters, deafening finals and real command of gods, imaginary friends, angels and the dead – and it is not clear how we managed without Carroll before. His stories, simple and scary in their realism, are permeated with an implicit mystical feeling, a sense of the irrational, with which the mind is not able to cope. Like scary tales, they stage our unconscious fears – madness, death, loneliness, betrayal – helping to realize them and, in part, even overcome them.

Team of translators from English.

Azbuka, 544 p., 2015.

The Childhood of Jesus by John Maxwell Coetzee

A man named Simon meets a strange boy on a refugee ship who has lost his parents, and is looking for a mother for him in a new country. Only now the city in which they, settlers, migrants, get, turns out to be almost a Kafkaesque world, distilled and soulless. The sixteenth novel of the Nobel and twice Booker laureate John Coetzee can be perceived as a dystopia, a philosophical dispute, a biblical parable. Simon and a father who is looking for a suitable mother for his unborn son. He and the Adult looking for a mother for his Inner Child – in reality or in his memory. A father looking for Mary among the people for Jesus. And a couple of hundred interpretations of who they are and what they are doing in a nightmarish alien world (which resembles purgatory, only not after death, but before birth) are also possible. But the “Childhood of Jesus” would have remained only a beautiful matryoshka-möbius, all-in-one, a toy for intellectuals, if it were not for the strong emotions, from anger to surprise and delight, that the dense, lively text of Coetzee evokes.

Translation from English by Shasha Martynova.

Eksmo, 320 p., 2015.