Featured titles
-
The House That, a novel by Mariam Petrosyan
Rights sold: Belarus - GUTENBERG, Brazil - EDITORA MORRO BRANCO, Bulgaria - HERMES, Czech Republic - FRAGMENT, France – MONSIEUR TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE, Hungary – MAGVETO, Italy – SALANI, Latvia – JANIS ROZE, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Poland - ALBATROS, Slovenia - CANKARJEVA ZALOŽBA, Spain - EDHASA, Ukraine - KNIGOLOVE, World English - AMAZON CROSSING
2016 Lire Magazine Award for the best SiFi/Fantasy book (France)
2010 Russian Student Booker Award
2010 Russian Literary Award for the best novel
2010 NatsBest Literary Award nominee
2010 Russian Booker shortlist
2009 Big Book Russian National Literary Prize readers' open voting bronze-winner
The House That... is an extraordinary book, unexpected, fresh, of those which are impossible to put down. It is interesting that it has been published just now, when world literary trends are showing interest towards the enigmas of adolescence and the use of means far from pure realism to closely consider them. It is a current book but nothing transitory.
“The House” is the name given by the children and adolescents to the center for disabled minors they are residing, or rather interned in. The universe of The House has little, if anything, to do with that of outside; there within they've created laws, myths and their own rules, until nature itself has been become unique, independent. The resident pupils of The House haven't names, only nicknames, and are divided into groups, or better said, into packs or gangs, whose leaders fight to the death for supremacy. Their deficiencies are no more than a condition, almost a symbol, which establish their belonging to this other reality of their own design. Through the stories of various characters, the chapters separated in time, a panorama of the world of these youths has been created; limitless, fantastic, cruel, tender, completely isolated and cut-off from communication with the “real” world of the adults.
Focal points of Petrosyan’s novel are Friendship, adapting to the group, power, confrontation between the concepts of the individual freedom of the youths and the rules imposed by the educators, psychological growth, self-definition, choosing between “right” and “wrong”, love/sex/sexuality/sensuality..
The House That..., with no place for doubts, is a literary event which exceeds the borders of national literature. The work stands out with its harmony and fullness; all of the elements – language, rhythm, character development – are in perfect synchronization. The narration flows, envelopes, hypnotizes. The impact is profoundly emotional. Perhaps for this reason, difficulties arise at the hour to “explain” the work, the literary critics have had to turn to examples and have created a long list of “predecessors”: Salinger, Golding (Lord of the Flies), Faulkner (Light in August), Ken Kesey, Lewis Carroll, Ruben Gallego, Haruki Murakami, Philip K. Dick, John Steinbeck, etc. Rational, verbal resources come up short.
Petrosyan's award-winning debut novel ... is a wildly imaginative tale of epic proportions. The House, which sits overlooked on the outskirts of town, is a boarding school for disabled children and teenagers. Isolated from the Outsides, the residents of the House are enmeshed in a carefully constructed world of unspoken rules and thorny histories. The meandering narrative moves back and forth in time, alternating narrators and tenses, to paint an intricate portrait of a social order that appears ultimately dictated by an unknown force, understood by its inhabitants to be the House itself. When student deaths begin to pile up over the course of the narrative, readers can identify with newcomer Smoker as he tries to understand the mysteries of the House and the source of its power over its inhabitants. Petrosyan has created a painstakingly three-dimensional, fully inhabited world. Slowly but surely, the plot reveals itself through a gradual process of unraveling, leading readers down a sprawling rabbit hole of intrigue and mysteries, accompanied by a dizzying array of quirky denizens. Petrosyan's prose is wildly imaginative and beautifully wrought, overflowing in Machkasov's translation with rich sensory details that combine with an offbeat sense of humor to form a fully realized world. This dense, heady tale should be enjoyed by seasoned readers of literary fiction and magical realism. Although it is being marketed in the U.S. for teens, it will perhaps find its most natural audience among adult readers. An impressive—and impressively massive—feat of imagination and translation. - Kirkus Reviews
The titular house in Armenian writer Petrosyan’s massively absorbing and sometimes frustrating novel is a boarding school for physically disabled students on the outskirts of an unnamed town. The distinctly supernatural house is a three story “gigantic beehive” made up of dormitories, classrooms, and other less formal spaces, each with their own set of rules and secrets. The students—known only by nicknames bestowed upon them by their peers—divide themselves into tribes based on their assigned dormitories, and these close-knit groups work to uncover the mysteries of the house and its history while also trying to avoid war between the factions. Rich with startling details and vivid world building, the novel unfolds in alternating points of view as characters learn about how the house operates differently from the largely unknown world outsides and collectively wonder about what will happen after graduation, when they must reenter a world that they no longer know. Much of the novel consists of the students telling fairy tales to each other about the “Outsides” and what they know of the house’s past and their own place within it, building a personal mythology as a way of explaining the strange world in which they have found themselves. The witty dialogue, sharply drawn characters, and endlessly unfolding riddle of the house’s true nature buoy a narrative that sometimes seems as meandering as the hallways of the house itself, a series of entertaining anecdotes rather than a cohesive whole. But the intellectually and emotionally rewarding conclusion confirms this fantasy novel’s undeniable power. - The Publishers Weekly
The House That is a remarkable work. It’s a door leading to that new literature we all have been waiting for. – Dmitry Bykov, writer and literary critic.
The book is a brilliant and fanciful parable telling about other kids. – Yevgenia Ritz, literary critic.
Read more... -
Harbin Moths, a novel by Andrei Ivanov (2013)
Rights sold: Estonia - VARRAK, Russia - AST
Winner of the 2014 NOS Literature Award
Andrei Ivanov’s ‘Harbin Moths’ is a bewitching novel about Russians living in Estonia in the period between the World Wars, and about their resting point, Tallinn, or Revel as it was known Russian-style. The central character, artist and art photographer Boris Rebrov is a refugee who as a seventeen year old retreated with Yudenich’s North-western Army from Russia to Estonia. On the journey – somewhere in Estonia’s border regions – his parents and little sister die from typhus, the memory of which haunts him. As a photographer Rebrov tries to capture places of former happiness which have been forever lost, he projects his lost hometown of St. Petersburg on to Tallinn, and at the same time catches, as if intentionally, moments which weren’t intended to last - dreams not the truth; spaces and light, not people.
The novel deals in general terms with that period of Estonian history, and the community of Russians who fled there as a result of the October Revolution, who lived in a kind of no-man’s land, in a peculiar parallel reality, which nevertheless overflowed with action, ideas and émigrés; Russian businessmen, speculators, smugglers, actors, artists, politicians, writers, journalists. In the context of the Estonian republic’s fragile independence, this was a time of historical limbo, when people wandered in a strange and still unknown country and physical space. Those two spaces – the Estonian republic and the peculiarly alienated parallel reality – rarely coincided.
Rebrov receives letters from Harbin, Manchuria, from a community of stateless Russians who are members of a Russian fascist party, whose ideas are just as absurd and destructive as the ghostly lilac-coloured moths flying out of the book and leaflet boxes. Rebrov’s companions, with whom he has intermittent contact, could also call themselves moths, searching through suffering for fame or oblivion, flapping in a blaze of ideas or in a cocaine haze.
When war breaks out again the artist leaves Estonia for Sweden with a new identity.
Rebrov is both a refugee and an internal exile who asks the question ‘what is really man’s destiny? A spider’s web woven into a many-layered pattern, and the more relatives and friends a person has, the closer he is bound in and the more surely he stands; I have no one at all; sometimes it seems as if I don’t even exist.’ In the novel this same theme of human fate is woven into history’s remorseless twists and turns.
A sense of what is happening in the surrounding world is given through a view of Rebrov’s inner world, and in places through his diary: in the highly powerful combination of the encounters he has, his reflections, the blaze of creativity, the pain of loss, and the letters he receives and poems he reads. Against the historical background the novel contains a strong allusion to the present day and a wide, universal, generalisation on the refugee, whenever or wherever he may be. A thread which runs through the novel is a particular question about injustice.
In this novel the reader is captivated by a disturbed, despairing, oppressive, grotesquely displaced reality, and the language in turn creates a magical world.
Read more...