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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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Three Characters in Search of Love and Immortality, a novel by Olga Medvedkova (2020)
Rights sold: Russia - NLO
Shortlisted for the 2021 Andrei Bely Award
Finalist of the 2021 NOS Award
Longlisted for the 2021 Piatigorsky Award
The three characters of the title are the central characters of three separate stories, united only by the title of the book – and yet… In the afterword to the book Medvedkova writes:
"What do they have in common? At first sight nothing... three stories, three epochs, three different countries; three ways of life, thought, feelings; three modes of narrative, proper to those countries and to those times.
A medieval princess is for some unknown reason taken somewhere, and she finds herself in a totally different world, in a Renaissance Italy, and there she meets with…
In mid-eighteenth century a smart widow conducts, deftly and tastefully, her publishing business in a provincial French town. Everything follows a well-thought-out plan and suddenly…
A Polish philologist, born in London at the end of the nineteenth century, looks out the window of his Roman flat at the Aventin hill, dreaming about something. Then, at the risk of his life, goes down the stairs and out in the street, and…
So what do they have in common ? Just one thing: in the turmoil of events and circumstances all three search for love and immortality."
This is a highly unusual book. Deeply human, even when it is cruel, and human in a universal way. It is so elusive that a good way to describe it is by saying what it is not. It is not concerned with social, historical, or psychological “problems," it does not try to stir up the past or peek into the future, it is not a utopia or dystopia, nor is it a murder mystery (there is a murder in one of the stories, but there is so much more), nor a love story (one of them is a wonderful love story, but so much more), nor an intellectual riddle (one of them is about an intellectual quest, but again, there is so much more). It portrays, with a very light touch, characters who live – each in his/her own way, tragically or happily – through something like a revelation or transfiguration. It is as if a miracle happened to each of them, a miracle along the lines indicated in the title.
It is useless to retell these stories, because there is a mystery in them that will evaporate in retelling. The narrative is not a subject with its logic leading from a beginning to an end; it works rather as a special sort of freedom, a gift of chance, not a fatum that follows the rules of a genre. All three stories end well. Not in the sense of a ‘’happy end’’, although there is that, too, but in the sense of the heroes’ secret yearnings being fulfilled.
Medvedkova’s prose is refined without being highbrow. The language of each of the novellas is a stylization done as a conscious playing with the tradition of European prose. And yet it does not leave one with the feeling of an intellectual excercise or of superficial brilliance; rather it feels like a true picture of human life, with all its fragility and its force.
At the same time there is not a drop of sentimentality in these stories. They are told soberly and poetically, in a dream-like language that feels like a translation from every language into Russian. It takes place, as the author herself says, “in wonderful in-between spaces, in which the characters live and breathe freely.”
There is a universality in this book that touches the minds and resonates in the hearts of all sorts of readers, from the simple and naive to the most sophisticated. Readers react as if all three heroes are our contemporaries.The publication of the book in Russia, in the fall of 2020, has been followed by a flood of responses, personal and on social platforms, from all sorts of people. And also by a host of positive reviews in newspapers, internet magazines, and platforms. The publisher has presented it for the “Big Book” award, a prestigious prize for the best book of the year.
Yes, immortality, immortality… that’s the whole point, and it seems that the author herself seeks for it, while sending her heroes, her scouts to reconnoiter… And, above all, she does find what she's searching for! -- Olga Balla-Gertman, Colta.ru
...what comes to the forefront is the level of the writing itself. In Medvedkova it is magic, supple, precise, wise. It is adorned with the precious stones of finely chiseled metaphors. One can see that the author knows more than what she writes, and understands more than she knows. -- Dmitry Bavilsky, literary critic
There is in Medvedkova’s refined prose… the sense of European culture as her own and alien at the same time. This own-alien quality does not convey the habitual Russian drama of alienation, but there is in it the feeling of a special mischievous happiness that is granted to people who know how to wear masks (in this case the masks of foreign languages) while remaining themselves under them. -- Igor Gulin, literary critic, Kommersant.
The ability to create a world on the tips of her fingers, a world that is subject to love and at the same time is absolutely indestructible as it touches immortality – this is what constitutes uniqueness of Olga Medvedkova’s writing and reminds readers of the important possibilities of life and literature. -- Anna Berseneva, writer, Noviye Izvestia.
The book is originally written in Russian and has around 64.000 words.
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