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Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, a novel by Guzel Yakhina (2015)
German rights are handled by Christina Links:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Azerbaijan - QANUN, Bosnia - BUYBOOK, Bulgaria - COLIBRI, China - The People´s Literature, Croatia - HENA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, Denmark - JP/POLITIKENS, Estonia - TANAPAEV, Finland - INTO, France - NOIR SUR BLANC, France (large print) - Éditions Voir de près, Germany - AUFBAU, Hungary - EUROPA, India - SHARDA (hindi), Italy - SALANI, Israel - CARMEL, Iran - NILOOFAR, Japan - HAKUSUISHA, Kazakhstan - FOLIANT, S.Korea - WALKER (Geodneunsaram), Latvia - ZVAIGZNE, Lithuania - ALMA LITTERA, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Mongolia - MASH NUUTS MEDIA, Netherlands - QUERIDO, Norway - CAPPELEN DAMM, Poland - NOIR SUR BLANC, Portugal - BERTRAND, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - SAMIZDAT, Slovakia - SLOVART, Spain - Acantilado, Sweden - Ersatz, Tatar language – Tatar Publishing House, Turkey - TEAS, Ukraine - BookChef, Uzbekistan - ZABARJAD MEDIA (book edition), SUG'DIYONA (magazine rights), World English - ONEWORLD, World Arabic - ARAB SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHERS, World Esperanto - ARS LIBRI
Winner of the 2020 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa International Literary Award (Italy)
Finalist of the the 2020 EBRD Literature Prize (UK)
Winner of the 2018 Abolhassan Najafi Award for the best translated novel (Iran)
FInalist of the Prix Médicis award (2017, France)
Prix du magazine "Transfuge" (2017, France)
Winner of the 2015 Big Book literary award
Winner of the People's Choice open online voting for the 2015 Big Book literary award
Winner of the 2015 "Ticket to the Stars" prize
Winner of the 2015 Best Prosaic Work of the Year prize
Winner of the 2015 Yasnaya Polyana award
Winner of the People's Choice open online voting for the 2015 Yasnaya Polyana award
Finalist of the 2015 Russian Booker literary award
Finalist of the the 2015 NOS literary award
Guzel Yakhina’s debut novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes is an enjoyable and smooth novel, unpretentious mainstream historical fiction that covers a lot of cultural, ethnic, religious, and sociopolitical issues.
The novel begins in 1930 in a Tatar village, from which a kulak woman Zuleikha is quickly sent into exile after her husband is murdered by communists. Zuleikha’s own life — after seeing her husband killed, after a horrendous train trip to a spot on the Angara River where her group of exiles will settle, and after a difficult first winter that kills many — settles into a new routine with characters nothing like her village neighbors. The characters are many but distinct, and they include a rather dotty doctor, an artist who paints on the sly, and urbane city dwellers who remember past European travels, as well as Ignatov, Zuleikha’s husband’s killer. Ignatov is persuaded to remain in the settlement, as its commandant, and he stays because of his own political issues back in Kazan. Most important, there is Zuleikha’s son Yuzuf, born in the settlement, who develops an interest for art and learns to paint.
Yakhina’s writing is simple, albeit sprinkled with Tatar words (there’s a glossary). Yakhina herself has said that the novel is about how Zuleikha wakes up, opens her eyes to the world, and finds happiness, albeit a bitter one. Another is, again, Yakhina’s ability to use a simple structure and language to tell her story, all as she plants details that will have meaning later in the book.
Guzel Yakhina´s novel hits directly in the heart. It’s a powerful praise for love and tenderness in hell.
Ludmila Ulitskaya
There’s something that Guzel Yakhina succeeded to transmit with amazing, sharp exactness: women’s attitude towards love. Not towards the subject of love, but towards the love itself.
Anna Narinskaya, literary critic
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The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, a novel by Ilya Ehrenburg (1922)
Publishers: Estonia - VARRAK (2004), Finland - TAJO (1964), France - PLON (1964), Germany - KINDLER (1967), SUHRKAMP (1976, 1990), Italy - EINAUDI (1969), MERIDIANO ZERO (2012), Spain - SEIX BARRAL (1971), AKAL (1997), CAPITÁN SWING LIBROS, Switzerland - GLOOR (1970), Turkey - ADAM (1983, 1994), USA/UK - MACQIBBON & KEE (1958), GREENWOOD PRESS (1976)
The book deals with the adventures of a Mexican dreamer Julio Jurenito and his wanderings about Europe along with his seven disciples (Ehrenburg himself is the first disciple and the author-narrator).
The novel includes authentic characters, such as Mayakovski, Picasso, Chaplin, and Tatlin. This is a biting satire of the European postwar civilization. This extraordinarily sneering book is a modernized Candide, covering Soviet Russia and the European West, after the stress of the WWI years.
Its main character Jurenito (he is supposed to be a portrait of the famous Mexican painter, Diego Rivera) and his Negro servant travel, observe, comment, and make the reader roar with laughter at the idiotic inconsistencies of capitalist civilization. A prolific and smart journalist by nature, Ehrenburg combines a satirical vein with a snappy, terse language, and a flair for topical themes with very unsentimental eroticism.
Julio Jurenito will probably remain the most vivid illustration, not just in Russian but in the whole of European literature, of the post-WWI sentiments of the harassed western intelligentsia. In this book there is everything: sophistication, cynicism, trenchant satire, sentimental lyricism, and the gay abandon of despair. All this combined makes a brilliant firework of paradoxes, subtle observations of the life of the European bourgeoisie, and sarcastic details. It may be called a confession, a pamphlet, a grotesque, or a poem.…A piquant, picaresque satire a la Voltaire of both Western capitalism and the Communist Revolution. - TIME
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A mixture of mockery and prophecy, the book savaged every ideology and religion while foreseeing both the Holocaust and Hiroshima. (Ehrenburg himself predicted the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union to the day -- his intimacy with history always bordered on the telepathic.) - Richard Lourie, The NY Times, August 25, 1996