| Ludmila Ulitskaya, Ulitskaya's French translator Sophie Benech, Elena Kostioukovitch and Yulia Dobrovolskaya during La Comédie du Livre literary festival in Montpellier, France, 29/05-02/06/08 | |||
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Featured titles
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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.
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Thief, Spy, and Murderer, a novel by Yuri Buida (2013)
2013 Big Book Award finalist
Rights sold: Russia - EKSMO, AST, France - GALLIMARD, Spain - AUTOMATICA, World Arabic - DAR NEBRAS
"Most of our town was laying in ruins – everywhere shards of houses, walls with gaping windows, basements without buildings – and everything covered by elderberry bushes. In the summer their dense foliage hid all this misery; you could go in the bushes since in the whole town there wasn't a single public toilet, and the men went there to drink, far from prying eyes."
Yuri Buida's new novel, the autobiographical fantasy "Thief, Spy and Murderer", tells a story of hero's childhood, youth, and maturing as a person and writer, his role in that time and place where he was born and lived, namely in the splinters of Teutonic civilization, in Western Prussia, annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II, in a small town outside Kaliningrad, in a time of half-built socialism during Khrushchev's "thaw" of the 60's. Comical and sad, monstrous and beautiful stories from the lives of those around him meld into a complete symphony of his era. Upset by the abyss between the high-minded problems of literary heroes and the vegetative lives of his contemporaries, he comes to a new level of understanding as he matures: to appreciate the harmony and the beauty of life, you need to lower your visor and start absorbing it directly through all your nerve endings. Then all of life's absurdity and horror will also enter you completely – but such is the price of feeling truly alive.
Buida's prose tastes at once bitter and sweet – such is the nature of this author's talent. As a literary critic once remarked, Buida is a little perilous to read, because he "winds his string very tight". But every time the string seems ready to break, it doesn't – it just screams at the limit of its abilities.
That's also how it is with his new novel. Its heroes live a life without a core, built on contrasts that sear the soul, as the sight of a snow-covered, sunlit mountaintop sears the eye. It's a wild life, untethered, newly primitive, knowing neither fear nor shame. Childlike innocence and feral cruelty, generosity of soul and poverty of mind, desire for divine flight and for desperate self-destruction go hand in hand. Here love and death are of equal value, both working toward annihilation.
The world reposes in evil, thinks Yuri Buida's hero, who has adored Kafka since his youth and dreamed of becoming a writer like him: to steal images from reality, to spy after the tiniest movements of the soul, and to kill moments – only to depict them forever.
Buida’s Thief, Spy, and Murderer feels like multiple books, in multiple ways. The description the literary journal Znamya gave the book - an autobiographical fantasy - sums up a lot: over all, Thief, Spy, and Murderer sure feels like an autobiography but some passages sure feel embellished. Thief, Spy, and Murderer read so much like a fiction-nonfiction hybrid to me that I can’t quite bring myself to refer to it as a novel, as Eksmo, its publisher, does. At least neither the journal nor the book publisher labelled it a “documentary novel,” a term I’ve always found annoyingly opaque.
At least the basics are fairly easy to list. Thief, Spy, and Murder is a first-person narrative told by a male who is identified (all of once) as Buida: he’s a boy when the book begins, an adult writer when it ends. ... Details may vary significantly but much of what happens to meta-Buida (as I’ll call the Buida in the book) echoes circumstances and events in the life of the writer named Iurii Buida, including being from the Kaliningrad area, practicing journalism, and becoming a writer.
Thief, Spy, and Murderer begins with meta-Buida’s family getting up in the morning and preparing to go out for a Revolution Day demonstration. The narrator first describes the order in which the family uses the slop pail, then shows us his mother in curlers and his father shaving and putting on his medals. We’re in the post-War years. As neighbors begin to appear, so do stories, like the woman whose daughters came “from the elder bushes” that grow in the ruins of buildings. And then banners and a smell (Red Moscow perfume makes yet another literary appearance) and toasts... There’s an earthiness, a bit of an edge, and a real sense of seaminess.
There are lots of other promising bits in the beginning of the book: railroad tracks that raised my expectations for a Don Domino-esque book, some sordid and lonely crime, and the narrator’s father preventing a group of men from hurting a gypsy child. I think my favorite passage involved a trip to the paper mill where meta-Buida’s father works: they look inside a train car loaded with books by Stalin, all waiting to be pulped. There are sixteen tons of Stalin in each car; hundreds of cars are lined up, if only in the distance. The father gives permission to begin work on the books, allowing them to be unloaded, pitchforked into the pulper, and then piped to a cardboard-making machine. Yikes. Vodka is consumed. Then a bit later: “After they’d cleared out the fourth car, my father took me by the hand and we went home.”
On the next page, meta-Buida says his first experience with the writings of Solzhenitsyn is through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which fails to make much of an impression because “Everything, everything, felt familiar to me when I read it: not the details, of course, but the very atmosphere, the air.” It’s the life and the worst aspects of everydayness that feel familiar to him - and scarier than the statistics of the Gulag - and it is all steeped in Stalin.
That mention of Solzhenitsyn is key to the book, I think because, for my taste, anyway, Buida is at his best in Thief, Spy, and Murderer when he addresses those everyday horrors: the book feels most elemental and smartest then, too, particularly because many of these scenes have the surreal or mythical touches I enjoyed so much in Don Domino and Blue Blood.
(From Lisa Hayden Espenshade's review. Full version is here: http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com.es/)
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