Presented on December 3rd during the 13th non/fiction Book Fair in Moscow, Umberto Eco´s THE CEMETERY OF PRAGUE is already the number 1 on the bestsellers list of Moskva bookshop.
Rights sold: Russia - AST
Longlisted for the 2018 National Bestseller literary award
Ksenia Buksha’s new novel The Detector is an anti-utopia dressed up as a classic closed-circle murder mystery, where biting sociopolitical satire on a police state alternates with profound poetic lyricism. The action takes place in Russia in the near future, where everyone in the land is preparing for the tsar’s coronation. The ceremony is to take place in an ancient monastery on the “Islands” (invented by the author, they are an evident allusion to the Solovetsky monastery beloved by Vladimir Putin). With thousands of people thronging to the locale, a walk-through security screener – the Detector – has been installed at the landing pier as one of the event’s many safety measures. Ten visitors set it off, for reasons none of them can fathom, and they are divested of their possessions and taken into custody inside the island fortress.
This is the mismatched band of strangers that ends up locked inside one of the Island Monastery’s cells, awaiting “clarification of their circumstances:” an oppositional journalist; a serial foster mother; a successful Central Asian businessman; a normalization-chip developer convinced that his implants, embedded in citizens’ brains, can maximize human productivity; a femme fatale/professional wedding organizer; an aging hippie who can predict the future; an earnest Frenchman who runs a Russian Down syndrome support group; a Jewish grandma who speaks Dog; a kind man who tries to get in to the ceremony on his dead brother’s ticket; and a woman who wants to have the tsar’s baby. They squabble over everything from which of them must be guilty of wanting to kill the tsar, to how to divide up their rations, to the childlessness tax and the ban on resuscitating anyone who is reproductively disabled or of retirement age. Here, in this closed space, they display both their own individual characters and the character of the country they live in, the character of today’s Russia.
The lives of all ten of these dissimilar individuals depend on whether they can solve a mystery: what shared trait made them each set off the Detector? And what is going to happen to them after the coronation?
Praise for Ksenia Buksha´s The Detector
As usual, Ksenia Buksha’s new novel isn’t anything at all like her previous ones. As usual, it is dazzlingly brilliant, fresh, and disturbing. And as usual, it’s full of black comedy, ruthlessness, and that special kind of elegance and grace found only in Petersburg prose. And the fact that these days, lots of people are having similar thoughts and feelings? Well, that’s what makes writers writers: while we haven’t even admitted it to ourselves yet, they’ve already said it out loud, and it left our ears ringing. -- Dmitry Bykov, literary critic
Buksha is talented and fizzing with ideas, with her own idiosyncratic metre and vernacular, which makes for an exciting read. The Frame / Ramka throws together ten characters (all determined by the metal-detector-like "frame" to be a danger to the mass spectacle they've all come to attend, and consequently temporarily incarcerated together) and uses them, with their individual narrative dialects to voice, interrogate, and kick around a host of ideas ranging from the surveillance state and imminent technocracy to human rights, consumerism, identity, the corruption of power, and the chaotic perils of modern life. She owes a debt to both Sorokin and Kafka, but writes with a manic energy all her own. Beyond the clever device of the frame as an impassive automated bureaucratic separator of the wheat from the chaff, there's no meaningful overarching plot, but there needn't be - like a spliced-and-diced video-game Canterbury Tales on acid, the otkazniks' individual stories crash into a kind of mosaic whose nuance may be hard to discern but whose overall impression is one of wild colour and eye-popping, nerve-shredding lights. Towards the end the sheer multiplicity of characters and vectors spins out of control and explodes, but perhaps to wish for a less messy ending is beside the point. With the stories flipping between monologue, stream-of-consciousness, dialogue and exchanges often resembling texting rather than conversation as they unfold, the whole text comes intriguingly close to a prose poem. The Frame is hyper-active, funny, idiosyncratic and exhausting - but certainly never bland. -- Ilona Chavasse, literary critic and translator
Read more...Rights sold: Czech Republic - MARATON, Poland - ZNAK
The recorded oral memories of Agnes Mironova (1903-1982) is a must book for anybody who wants to know what was a personal life like under Stalinism. For the first time ever, Agnes’s notes open the secret door into living rooms and boudoirs of Stalin's "hangmen", top-ranked Soviet secret police officers during the purges of 1930-40ies. However, anyone who reads this book with the intention to better understand the past, will also discover an outstanding female character, a gorgeous bitch, a proud predator, who reveals all truths about herself frankly and without keeping anything back. A life story of this unique woman, so beautiful and repulsive at once, has developed during the most terrible and bloody period of modern history.
She has always shaped her own destiny in line with XIXth-century model of aggressive female personality in search of perfect husband. Her acumen and self-centeredness are reminiscent of the strong character and high degree of self-interest of Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine of Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. There’s no bigotry or hypocrisy in Agnes’s life ideology, she is too proud and self-assured in her own attractiveness and her feminine power over men. At certain moments of her life, she demonstrates a highest degree of determination mixed with filibusterism.
One of Agnes’s husbands, ‘the main love of her life’ as she dubbed him, was ambitious and energetic NKVD officer Sergei Mironov. Thanks to his extremely fast and successful career, Agnes got to the very top society of the Stalin era. Later, after Mironov was arrested and executed, Agnes began a new life with a new husband. We follow the amazing trajectory of her life full of most drastic contrasts: first she talks with Stalin at the New Year celebration party in Kremlin, and next freezes in some Gulag camp lost in cold Kazakh steppes; first she lives alone with her husband in a huge mansion once belonging to the royal governor of Siberia, and next in a miserable pigeonhole in communal apartment in Moscow; first she travels in a luxury saloon cars and limos, and next is a prisoner of the NKVD jail.
Aged Agnes has shared her life story with a younger friend; she definitely wasn’t trying to elicit sympathy or compassion, but rather to revive the memories of the bright and happy days when she was so victorious, beloved, beautiful, and nicely-dressed.
The memories of Agnes Mironova is more than just an interesting biography with rich historical background; it’s a fascinating text with exactly grasped conversational tone that conveys something that no archive document can revive: everyday life, ordinary characters, ideas, and finally, the mythology of the past.
Oral memories of Agnes Mironova recorded by Mira Yakovenko were first published in 2008 by Memorial Society. In 2012, Irina Sherbakova, the head of Moscow Memorial Society, has prepared an extensive commentary, a preface to Agnes’s book, and the index of all historical figures mentioned in the book. Available also a collection of photos from Agnes’s personal archive.
Technical details: 89.837 words, 499.782 symbols with spaces in the translated manuscript + 8.317 words, 56.953 symbols with spaces in the introductory article + аcollection of photos from family album
- There are many fine works that offer harrowing accounts of the fate of Stalin's innocent victims. This book is different. Agnessa was the beautiful, strong-willed, frivolous, and loving wife of a regional boss of Stalin's secret police who shut her eyes to the murderous activities of her husband. She offers a unique account of what it was like to be the wife of a high-ranking member of the Soviet elite, enjoying fine food, high fashion, 'ladies-in-waiting,' and lavish holidays at a time when millions were starving or being worked to death. Her gripping story provides insight into the thuggish world of cronyism, backstabbing, and intrigue that typified the Stalinist elite, a world in which the guilty feared they would meet the same sticky end as that to which they had condemned millions of innocent people. Agnessa's life would be marked by tragedy, and she would rise to its challenges. But it is her partial complicity in the world of which she is a part, the fact that she is a very flawed heroine, that makes her account so compelling.
--S.A. Smith, All Souls College, Oxford
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