Contents
A good book will help brighten up a winter evening. We have selected three novelties that will keep you company in February.
Just life
“My Motherland, Automobile Plant” by Natalia Kim
This is a story about the inhabitants of the Avtozavodskaya district, not the most central in Moscow, made up of stories and tiny sketches. Natalia Kim remembers those with whom she grew up, paints the scenes that she observes today – in the yard or in the elevator. In the preface, she asks a question, surprising in its sincerity and vulnerability: “Why write about this now, when every second of the real writing masters, with varying degrees of amazingness, but with a high degree of certainty, embodied on paper the images and realities of his childhood, is this trend not tiresome? put on stream? And I have an answer to it: yes, tiring. It seems that Dovlatov was the first to master this type of journalistic prose when his Nashi and Chemodan appeared.
Since then, stories about acquaintances and acquaintances, everyday scenes and stories of things have become boring. However, Natalia Kim’s book is one of the best in this genre. Her characters are unpretentious, and their name is legion, such stories can be collected in dozens, just reach out your hand. But she has enough skill to compose the stories, giving each completeness and integrity, and the whole collection – the harmony of the story. She manages to draw a little girl dreaming of a Christmas toy, a ballet grandmother Marina Ilyinichna, a defectologist teacher Arsyusha, who changed sex and became Alla, such that you see them, hear them and seem to be familiar with them yourself.
And yet, the truth is familiar. Suppose you did not live in a Moscow communal apartment, like me. But you talked with neighbors, saleswomen, grandmothers on the benches and bombers, heard their lively chatter, were surprised at the bright spoken language, laughed and probably also thought: you don’t have a writer, because if you write it down, no one will believe it.
Russian prose has this branch of gentle humorous stories, infinitely dear to me, from which, if you read them all the time and read to your heart’s content, it becomes sad. It contains Gogol’s poem and the whole Saltykov-Shchedrin, it contains Chekhov’s early stories and partly Pogorelsky. And the prose of Natalia Kim belongs to this thread much more than the tedious trendy blogging trend to retell the lives of relatives and friends. That, in fact, is different, that is the road.
“My Motherland, Automobile Plant” by Natalia Kim (Time, 224 p.)
Freedom
“Girls” by Emma Kline
Do you know the history of Charles Manson’s Family Commune? It ended only now, when in November 2017, 84-year-old Manson died in a California prison. Debutante Emma Kline wrote a novel based on the events of 1969: the girls from the commune committed a series of bloody murders. They are from 16 to 19 years old, all of them, like the main character Evie Boyd, are in love with each other, with their spiritual teacher Russell and with the very idea of a non-blood family. Why they are disgusted with normal bourgeois life, and Russell is adored, can only be understood by reading the book to the end. My feeling is that the existential hunger of unloved people is insatiable, unbearable and can lead anywhere. And besides, this is a feminist novel about hippies – the most free and infantile generation of the twentieth century – artistically impeccable.
Translation from English by Anastasia Zavozova. PhantomPress, 384 p.
Basics
Serpent’s Gaze by Thomas Saulius Kondrotas
Kondrotas is a great writer and at the same time… unknown. The novel The Look of the Serpent was not glorified even by the film adaptation. It is unfair: we seem to be deprived of Kondrotas’s dense, unlike anything prose, but we could be happy reading it. This is a saga – but a short one – about four generations of prosperous Lithuanian peasants. This is mystical realism, but mysticism is physiological and paradoxical: old Meizhys dies, his son washes and dresses up the corpse in the bathhouse, and then the corpse sits at the table at its own wake for several weeks. A simple meal or a dialogue about the weather seems like a ritual act. Sparing on emotions, ascetic prose seems to stretch the space of the novel vertically – and we plunge into it, like into an adit, in search of treasure.
Translated from Lithuanian by Thomas Chepaitis. Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 368 p.