Contents
Reading is a special kind of pleasure. We have selected four novelties that will surely appeal to those who like to spend an evening with a book.
Meditation. Lose time
“Stopped World” by Alexei Makushinsky
I know that reality offers us many entertainments. Reading is just one of them, and people who choose it understand what they are getting into. But still I will warn you: reading the Stopped World is not a vacation, but work. Makushinsky has never been a simple writer, but this novel is special. The author’s thought branches with associations and focuses on details, alternates between descriptions and memories.
In the first part, the hero-narrator talks about his Leningrad youth and acquaintance with Buddhism, in the second – about the love of his German friends, Tina and Victor, in the third – about Victor’s spiritual search, his finding a teacher – and disappointment. Makushinsky easily dedicates a chapter to how the woman opposite is eating a sandwich on the train, crumbs fall on a fluffy black blouse, and she picks out each of the villi. Time does not move in the novel, the cypress tree grows for several pages, the dove asks for crumbs for several pages, the Buddhist teacher gives a lecture – the same number.
Take my word for it: it’s not boring. This is wonderful. This is not how we live in our world. He is rushing past at a wild speed, or we are rushing past him. We are separated from other beings and seem to distinguish between the important and the unimportant. In the Zen Buddhist world of Makushinsky, everything is connected with everything, everything is equally important and at the same time it doesn’t matter, everything moves at the same speed and remains in place. It is indeed a novel-meditation, but also a novel-work. There are no simple answers and clear good and evil in it. Morality is our lifeline: do this and you will be fine. This text forces us to form individual ethics: with each paragraph, it puts a question before us, or rather, us before a question — and we close the book, feeling ourselves, doubting, double-checking. And that’s work.
Why stop the world and seek the truth, when there are many entertainments, and the truth is not final? I do not know. But I also don’t know of other ways to reduce suffering on earth – only searching, awareness and awakening. To meet a literary text of ascetic power is a great happiness. Alexei Makushinsky is a Russian writer and literary critic, author of two novels and poetry books, laureate of the Russian Prize (2014) for the book Steamboat to Argentina.
Eksmo, 572 p., 350 rubles.
Obsessions
“Can’t Stop” by Sharon Begley
Dynamic and mischievous sci-fi by American journalist and popularizer of medicine Sharon Begley about impulsive and addictive behavior, obsessions and compulsions. We get nervous and chew on the pen, run our hands through our hair, change rings from finger to finger. Frustrated, some wash the dishes – and they become calmer. In short, compulsions are our way of treating stress.
Whether impulsive pleasure will become an addiction, no one knows. Will the addiction become an obsession, even more so. But the more you become aware of your anxieties with the therapist, the less often you will check messengers and buy fewer blouses. Where do our concerns come from? One answer is fear of death. Speaking of this, the ironic Begley softens, and the book takes on existential heights.
Translation from English by Natalia Kiyachenko. Alpina non-fiction, 334 p., 459 rubles.
Love
“Three Versions of Us” by Laura Barnett
On a clear October day in 1958, a young Cambridge student, Eva, was carrying an essay about Eliot to the curator, but – a white spitz, a rusty nail, a cobblestone – she fell off her bicycle. Young Jim was on his way to a lecture on Roman law, but, like a gentleman, he offered to help Eve.
How this story will end, the young English writer knows no more than we do. And he offers three versions: they lived happily ever after, they met and parted, they lived lives full of completely different meetings. Joyful amazement: not successive stories, but simultaneous ones – the first three chapters, then the second three …
The debutante’s pen is lighter than a butterfly’s wing, and her novel is about the fact that small decisions and accidents add up the most diverse patterns of love – but they are all beautiful.
Translation from English by Mikhail Shevelev. Sinbad, 512 p., 440 rubles.
Three reasons to read
“Petrovs in the flu and around it” by Alexei Salnikov
1. New name. Aleksey Salnikov is a Yekaterinburg poet, he rarely writes prose. In 2005, he received the LiteratureRRentgen award, but few people remember this. A novel about a car mechanic Petrov, his ex-wife and their second-grader son was shortlisted for the country’s main literary award “Big Book” and has now become the winner of the jury of the critical community of the “NOS” award.
2. New time. Heroes live in the same time as us – today. And there is no other at all: no flashbacks to the twentieth century, no historical reflection. And Salnikov’s language is a match. It is poetic, but with a broken syntax and grammatical anomalies of street dialogues (these are ordinary people, and their consciousness is clouded by vodka and a cold), it is literary (Petrova is a librarian and admirer of Krapivin), but this is the language of today.
3. New meaning. Petrov is either drunk, or hungover, or tormented by a temperature. His insane wife needs to commit murder from time to time – she knows that she is sick, but is not being treated, but chooses various villains as victims. The son is in every sense their heir. The fact that everyone drinks and goes crazy, we have read a thousand times. I see the new meaning as follows: in grief and joy, marriage and divorce, sobriety and madness Petrova together. Salnikov wrote the former family – but described a fully functioning one. Salnikov wrote the momentary life of little people – and it turned out that they (we) are incomprehensible in their depths. We are, and it is so touching and stunning that it doesn’t matter at all whether we are good or bad, we drink or get sick, we are married or divorced – if only we were.
Edited by Elena Shubina, 411 p., 336 rubles.