Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited - Vladimir Nabokov (Wideview/Perigree, 1966)
I have really mixed feelings about Nabokov. I am pretty sure I like his fiction, although I find it challenging. I definitely don't like his opinion that it makes no sense to try to translate Eugene Onegin in verge (why is Pushkin so popular on this blog lately?). And I am not a fan of his decisions on how to transliterate. Ys in confusing places, and the rendering of the Cyrillic "Х" (normally "kh" as in "Khrushchev") as "H," the decision to just use the masculine form of the last name for women (Anna Karenin, instead of Karenina).
Oh wait, I'm digressing. In his autobiography, he also just doesn't seem like the most pleasant guy to be around. Arrogant, homophobic and with a clearly complicated relationship with his gay brother (11 months his junior), and certainly convinced he was the smartest guy in the room (which, unfortunately, he usually was). Plus early in this autobiography (composed of a series of essays and revised over time) he discloses that he read and wrote in English before he did in Russian. So English was virtually a native tongue to him, and my awe of his prowess has to be played down just the teeniest bit.
All that said, this is a masterful work. I've seen it said (and of course I can't provide citations, bad librarian) that this is the best autobiography of the twentieth century. I'm willing to believe it. What he does with language... I'm not sure anyone can beat him. In whatever tongue. But while I admire him all the more for having read this memoir, I'm not sure I like him.
(Not mentioned above but also worth noting: a glorious look at late imperial aristocracy/intelligentsia, and a vivid portrayal of how those folk fled for their lives as the Bolsheviks took control)
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Friday, February 14, 2014
Monday, October 14, 2013
Ideas that kill
Trotsky in Exile - Peter Weiss (trans. Geoffrey Skelton, Pocket Books, 1973)
I'm not sure how widespread this school of thought actually is, but I know that studying Soviet Russia in my youth, there was a strain of counterfactual imagination that wistfully contemplated how different things would have been had Trotsky outmaneuvered Stalin in the years following Lenin's death. In this world, we might have seen a kinder, gentler communism.
Ugh. While sure, the only thing we can really know is that Trotsky's USSR (and the rest of the world around it) would not have looked like Stalin's, it's certainly difficult to believe he would have ushered in some sort of socialist utopia. Trotsky was just as violent, just as conniving, and by a long shot more dedicated to the worldwide part of the worldwide proletarian revolution.
To me, Weiss's Trotsky is of the "man, if only it could have been him" ilk. We visit him in set pieces that travel around in space and time, Trotsky exiled from Soviet Russia at the same time he re-lives moments from his life in prison and exile from tsarist Russia, his intellectual debates and disagreements with Lenin, the chaos of revolution, and the show trials that cemented Stalin's consolidation of power.
I have to keep reminding myself that this play was written during the Cold War, during the Brezhnev Era and just a year after the Prague Spring. (The play dates to 1969, later published in English.) And not only that, it was written by a naturalized Swede of German and Jewish origin. I have the luxury of both a chronological and emotional remove. But still, I don't know how I was supposed to feel about Trotsky, as an intellectual or a revolutionary. Or certainly as a husband or father.
Or maybe I just don't get plays.
I'm not sure how widespread this school of thought actually is, but I know that studying Soviet Russia in my youth, there was a strain of counterfactual imagination that wistfully contemplated how different things would have been had Trotsky outmaneuvered Stalin in the years following Lenin's death. In this world, we might have seen a kinder, gentler communism.
Ugh. While sure, the only thing we can really know is that Trotsky's USSR (and the rest of the world around it) would not have looked like Stalin's, it's certainly difficult to believe he would have ushered in some sort of socialist utopia. Trotsky was just as violent, just as conniving, and by a long shot more dedicated to the worldwide part of the worldwide proletarian revolution.
To me, Weiss's Trotsky is of the "man, if only it could have been him" ilk. We visit him in set pieces that travel around in space and time, Trotsky exiled from Soviet Russia at the same time he re-lives moments from his life in prison and exile from tsarist Russia, his intellectual debates and disagreements with Lenin, the chaos of revolution, and the show trials that cemented Stalin's consolidation of power.
I have to keep reminding myself that this play was written during the Cold War, during the Brezhnev Era and just a year after the Prague Spring. (The play dates to 1969, later published in English.) And not only that, it was written by a naturalized Swede of German and Jewish origin. I have the luxury of both a chronological and emotional remove. But still, I don't know how I was supposed to feel about Trotsky, as an intellectual or a revolutionary. Or certainly as a husband or father.
Or maybe I just don't get plays.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
So that other thing that happened during the Russian Revolution....
Enchantments - Kathryn Harrison (Random House, 2012)
I knew I had read a book by Harrison before, except it turns out I had things all sorts of confused, and the book I knew I had read (Envy) wasn't the book I thought it was. Oops. Anyway, here's what I said about that novel: in progress, and completed. And this answers all the confusion I had about how the same author was responsible for books with such different fingerprints.
But I digress, which is what I do. Enchantments is mostly set in the months following the February Revolution and the tsar's abdication. Masha is the son of the recently murdered Rasputin; in the wake of his death, she and her sister move in with the Romanov's, quite possibly the least awesome place in Russia that they could have been.
Except..... the tsarina thinks Masha has some of her father's healing power, so she spends most of her time with the hemophiliac tsarevich. And in this weird purgatory, young love blossoms. It's a strange, mostly innocent love between teenagers - Alyosha is just barely 14 - but made poignant by the fact that they are just sitting around waiting to die or to be saved. (A state Alyosha has experienced for pretty much his whole life.)
Masha and Alyosha fall in love amidst stories, woven by Masha to pass the time and occupy the prince. She creates a future world, retells stories of her father's past and of his parents' love story, visits scenes from her home, from Petersburg, from wherever. And when they are inevitably separated, the royal family sent East and finally executed, the novel continues with moments from Masha's life in the years to come (during which a young boy continues to hold her heart and stay 14 forever) and through Alyosha's journal from the months before his death.
At the end of the novel, a time when I was feeling particularly melancholy and sad to leave Harrison's world, there are acknowledgments, less that two pages. It explained a little, but left open several historical questions. And reminded me that while I've read broadly about this era - history, literature, etc - I haven't spent much time with the doomed royal family, or the exiled Whites who managed to eke out existences in Germany, France, America. It's enough to drive this girl back to the history books....
I knew I had read a book by Harrison before, except it turns out I had things all sorts of confused, and the book I knew I had read (Envy) wasn't the book I thought it was. Oops. Anyway, here's what I said about that novel: in progress, and completed. And this answers all the confusion I had about how the same author was responsible for books with such different fingerprints.
But I digress, which is what I do. Enchantments is mostly set in the months following the February Revolution and the tsar's abdication. Masha is the son of the recently murdered Rasputin; in the wake of his death, she and her sister move in with the Romanov's, quite possibly the least awesome place in Russia that they could have been.
Except..... the tsarina thinks Masha has some of her father's healing power, so she spends most of her time with the hemophiliac tsarevich. And in this weird purgatory, young love blossoms. It's a strange, mostly innocent love between teenagers - Alyosha is just barely 14 - but made poignant by the fact that they are just sitting around waiting to die or to be saved. (A state Alyosha has experienced for pretty much his whole life.)
Masha and Alyosha fall in love amidst stories, woven by Masha to pass the time and occupy the prince. She creates a future world, retells stories of her father's past and of his parents' love story, visits scenes from her home, from Petersburg, from wherever. And when they are inevitably separated, the royal family sent East and finally executed, the novel continues with moments from Masha's life in the years to come (during which a young boy continues to hold her heart and stay 14 forever) and through Alyosha's journal from the months before his death.
At the end of the novel, a time when I was feeling particularly melancholy and sad to leave Harrison's world, there are acknowledgments, less that two pages. It explained a little, but left open several historical questions. And reminded me that while I've read broadly about this era - history, literature, etc - I haven't spent much time with the doomed royal family, or the exiled Whites who managed to eke out existences in Germany, France, America. It's enough to drive this girl back to the history books....
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
KGB-CIA Smackdown
The Charm School - Nelson DeMille (Warner Books, 1988, 2006)
My mom tells me that she went through a phase when I was a baby where she believed it inevitable that Reagan would blow us all up. And really, am I too blasé in my conviction that the Cold War was never really going to go thermonuclear?
I grew up, for all intents and purposes, after the Cold War. Born weeks after the Miracle on Ice, I knew the USSR as a place my daddy had visited as a student. Heck, he worked for a Russian businessman who - I think? - was installing laundromats in Moscow or something. It was perestroika, glasnost, and then a Wall fell, but I was too little to understand. And then a putsch. And aftermath. Drunken Yeltsin dancing on a stage. So long Soviet Union, I hardly knew ye.
Even after I became a scholar of Soviet history, I was just that: a scholar. I never had known the USSR as an existential threat, the way my professors had. Well, many of them hadn't felt that way themselves, but they existed in a world that did. (And some did. Certainly.)
But I digress. There's a book here. A spy thriller! I don't think I've ever read one of these before. It's exciting! And during the Cold War - probably set roughly around when it was written, 1988. And it takes things so seriously. And gives the Soviets points for competence that, quite honestly, they probably didn't deserve. The allure of détente vies for primacy with the deeply rooted sentiment that the Soviets would do anything to win.
Lots more for me to think about as well. Often the action (and exciting action! KGB training "Americans" how to completely pass and infiltrate our society. Car chases! Plane crashes! Lots of doublespeak! Oh, and sex) felt like just a distraction from the questions I wanted to ponder about the importance of the Cold War as an origin myth in the construction of post-war identity in both the USA and USSR. So my point is: this was fun! Seriously. Spy novels are awesome. But it also made me want to run into the garage and dig through boxes until I found all my history books.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
I want this
Ad in a recent New Yorker:
This is a Russian magazine called Snob. Obviously I must find myself a copy.
This is a Russian magazine called Snob. Obviously I must find myself a copy.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Volume 3: The Big Battle
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
Volume Three
This whole section is pretty much the lead up to the Battle of Borodino and the resulting (despite a result that has to be considered a draw) Russian retreat past Moscow, ceding the ancient capital to Napoleon. In the midst of long philosophical musings by Tolstoy about how war is outrageously crazy but wheels get set in motion and none of us can really do anything about it (no matter how the history books later spin it), our characters recover - or don't - from the upheaval that ended Volume Two, they seek revenge, they move around and seek places where they feel at home.
Pierre, a la Forrest Gump, ends up right in the middle of the Battle of Borodino. Because of course he does.
Some things that happen in these 300 pages...
Tolstoy waits until page 603 to call war "an event .... contrary to human reason and the whole of human nature." [By the way, based on the complexities with which he describes people and human nature, does he really believe this?]
Tolstoy explains that the Russians fleeing Moscow essentially led to Napoleon's retreat and humiliation. He counters this act of patriotism to "the killing of children to save the fatherland." ... I would love to know what Tolstoy would have to say about the Soviets in World War II (aka The Great Fatherland War).
And all this, according to my Twitter feed:
"Everyone wished more to listen than to speak." This seems unlikely. Also, for Tolstoy, unusual.
We *think* we have free will and all, but really we are just cogs in some big master plan of fate. Even Napoleon.
Also. it's really easy to pick out evidence after the fact to justify your interpretation. This is why historians are lame.
It's kind of amazing how much I like Tolstoy considering how annoyed I get by half of what he says.
Chaotic Battle of Borodino today in #WandP. Reminds me of this poem: http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/grass.html
Tolstoy takes two pages to say: Correlation does not equal causation. (This is why #WandP is 1215 pages long.)
At the end of Volume 3, Moscow is burning, Pierre is in jail(ish), but the love story might be back on. Yay?
Volume Three
This whole section is pretty much the lead up to the Battle of Borodino and the resulting (despite a result that has to be considered a draw) Russian retreat past Moscow, ceding the ancient capital to Napoleon. In the midst of long philosophical musings by Tolstoy about how war is outrageously crazy but wheels get set in motion and none of us can really do anything about it (no matter how the history books later spin it), our characters recover - or don't - from the upheaval that ended Volume Two, they seek revenge, they move around and seek places where they feel at home.
Pierre, a la Forrest Gump, ends up right in the middle of the Battle of Borodino. Because of course he does.
Some things that happen in these 300 pages...
Tolstoy waits until page 603 to call war "an event .... contrary to human reason and the whole of human nature." [By the way, based on the complexities with which he describes people and human nature, does he really believe this?]
Tolstoy explains that the Russians fleeing Moscow essentially led to Napoleon's retreat and humiliation. He counters this act of patriotism to "the killing of children to save the fatherland." ... I would love to know what Tolstoy would have to say about the Soviets in World War II (aka The Great Fatherland War).
And all this, according to my Twitter feed:
"Everyone wished more to listen than to speak." This seems unlikely. Also, for Tolstoy, unusual.
We *think* we have free will and all, but really we are just cogs in some big master plan of fate. Even Napoleon.
Also. it's really easy to pick out evidence after the fact to justify your interpretation. This is why historians are lame.
It's kind of amazing how much I like Tolstoy considering how annoyed I get by half of what he says.
Chaotic Battle of Borodino today in #WandP. Reminds me of this poem: http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/grass.html
Tolstoy takes two pages to say: Correlation does not equal causation. (This is why #WandP is 1215 pages long.)
Monday, July 19, 2010
More tweeting Tolstoy
What I had to say about Volume 2, in 140 character snippets...
I know you haven't been missing my #WandP tweets, but they are back anyway.
Love & death are capricious.
Also, "Vera's observation was correct, as were all her observations; but, like most ... this one made everyone feel awkward."
Russian nobles can be really depressing. And Masons have a bunch of wacky rituals.
"She was in that highest degree of happiness when a person ... does not believe in the possibility of evil, unhappiness, and grief."
Tolstoy, did you just call the military sanctioned idleness? OH SNAP.
I am trying to picture how fat Pierre Bezukhov is supposed to be. Having trouble.
The end of Volume 2 of #WandP is like reading a train wreck. Why is everybody so vain/proud/foolish/sexually-frustrated/etc?
And now I'm in a bad mood. Thank you Tolstoy.
I know you haven't been missing my #WandP tweets, but they are back anyway.
Love & death are capricious.
Also, "Vera's observation was correct, as were all her observations; but, like most ... this one made everyone feel awkward."
Russian nobles can be really depressing. And Masons have a bunch of wacky rituals.
"She was in that highest degree of happiness when a person ... does not believe in the possibility of evil, unhappiness, and grief."
Tolstoy, did you just call the military sanctioned idleness? OH SNAP.
I am trying to picture how fat Pierre Bezukhov is supposed to be. Having trouble.
The end of Volume 2 of #WandP is like reading a train wreck. Why is everybody so vain/proud/foolish/sexually-frustrated/etc?
And now I'm in a bad mood. Thank you Tolstoy.
The saga continued (and delayed)
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
Volume Two
I don't have a lot to say about V2 right now. I waited a week before blogging, mainly because I've been busy, but also because this section has such a downer ending.
It's been years since the skirmish, and everyone has grown up more. The emperor and Napoleon are pals, mostly. Pierre's marriage is going about as well as you'd expect, Andrei has given up on everything, Natasha is hmm, mostly indescribable, Nikolai is kind of a hotshot. And there are of course a bazillion other characters.
And then there's this reversal of sorts, that opens up the possibility of some sort of happily-ever-after. As if Tolstoy would allow such things. And then you spend about 200 pages feeling the same sense of dread that Natasha's family seems to feel. And, since I'm doing a terrible job with this post, I'm just going to quote this description of Mama Rostov(a): "Her maternal intuition told her that there was too much of something in Natasha, and that because of it she would not be happy."
And by the way, this time reading, I have a lot more blame to spread around. Everyone's at fault. Everyone.
Volume Two
I don't have a lot to say about V2 right now. I waited a week before blogging, mainly because I've been busy, but also because this section has such a downer ending.
It's been years since the skirmish, and everyone has grown up more. The emperor and Napoleon are pals, mostly. Pierre's marriage is going about as well as you'd expect, Andrei has given up on everything, Natasha is hmm, mostly indescribable, Nikolai is kind of a hotshot. And there are of course a bazillion other characters.
And then there's this reversal of sorts, that opens up the possibility of some sort of happily-ever-after. As if Tolstoy would allow such things. And then you spend about 200 pages feeling the same sense of dread that Natasha's family seems to feel. And, since I'm doing a terrible job with this post, I'm just going to quote this description of Mama Rostov(a): "Her maternal intuition told her that there was too much of something in Natasha, and that because of it she would not be happy."
And by the way, this time reading, I have a lot more blame to spread around. Everyone's at fault. Everyone.
Monday, July 05, 2010
Russian! Books! Stanford!
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them - Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
This book has a whole bunch of things I love:
Elif Batuman is delightful. Is it obnoxious and conceited to say she reminds me a little bit of myself? Her comical accounts of the "adventures" of the subtitle are interwoven with consider detail and exposition about lots of random facts about literature, history, geography, etc. She passes up few teachable moments.
I found myself laughing aloud several times while reading this book (which is a collection of essays about her adventures in undergrad & grad school as a student of Russian literature, many involving travel), and when I tried to explain what was so funny, it didn't translate. So I'm not sure it will here either, but here are a few of my favorite moments:
On Derrida: Elif is "someone who likes to keep to a minimum her visits to Planet Derrida--that land where all seemingly secondary phenomena are actually primary, and anything you can think of doing is an act of violence, practically by virtue of your having thought about it using some words that were also known to Aristotle..."
"Babel in California" is chock full of awesome, particularly picking up Babel's surviving partner and their daughter, working with Hoover, and other daughter Nathalie Babel's speech as rendered by Batuman.
Also this moment, which manages to contain a deeply-held belief and be hilarious at the same time:
An Uzbek janitor giving Elif's boyfriend sex advice, because it's unthinkable that she would be childless at 24. The "husband" must be doing something wrong.
Utterly amazing quote by Tolstoy (too long to post in full) about that misty half-understanding of poetry in a foreign language... "once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented..." - this is a feeling I have about songs all the time.
A couple things I liked less: Batuman doesn't have much nice to say about Orhan Pamuk. This hurts my feelings a little bit, but okay. And at one point I found myself troubled by how often she recounted held truths, most often of foreigners, in ways that made them clearly and patently ridiculous. Then I realized the foolishness wasn't endemic to that culture itself, but rather to all cultures, or all held and unquestioned truths.
I'm really just scratching the surface. This book was tailor-made for me. But if you like Russian literature and/or have dealt with being in grad school in the humanities, you might also find it filled with fun.
This book has a whole bunch of things I love:
- A regular New Yorker contributor as author
- Lots of talk about my alma mater and professors I knew
- Russian books and Russian history
- A good sense of humor
Elif Batuman is delightful. Is it obnoxious and conceited to say she reminds me a little bit of myself? Her comical accounts of the "adventures" of the subtitle are interwoven with consider detail and exposition about lots of random facts about literature, history, geography, etc. She passes up few teachable moments.
I found myself laughing aloud several times while reading this book (which is a collection of essays about her adventures in undergrad & grad school as a student of Russian literature, many involving travel), and when I tried to explain what was so funny, it didn't translate. So I'm not sure it will here either, but here are a few of my favorite moments:
On Derrida: Elif is "someone who likes to keep to a minimum her visits to Planet Derrida--that land where all seemingly secondary phenomena are actually primary, and anything you can think of doing is an act of violence, practically by virtue of your having thought about it using some words that were also known to Aristotle..."
"Babel in California" is chock full of awesome, particularly picking up Babel's surviving partner and their daughter, working with Hoover, and other daughter Nathalie Babel's speech as rendered by Batuman.
Also this moment, which manages to contain a deeply-held belief and be hilarious at the same time:
...one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? On these grounds I once became impatient with a colleague at a conference, who was trying to convince me that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov's "specifically Jewish alienation."Older Russian women have a great perspective on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
"Right," I finally said. "A s a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew."
He nodded: "So you see the problem."
An Uzbek janitor giving Elif's boyfriend sex advice, because it's unthinkable that she would be childless at 24. The "husband" must be doing something wrong.
Utterly amazing quote by Tolstoy (too long to post in full) about that misty half-understanding of poetry in a foreign language... "once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented..." - this is a feeling I have about songs all the time.
A couple things I liked less: Batuman doesn't have much nice to say about Orhan Pamuk. This hurts my feelings a little bit, but okay. And at one point I found myself troubled by how often she recounted held truths, most often of foreigners, in ways that made them clearly and patently ridiculous. Then I realized the foolishness wasn't endemic to that culture itself, but rather to all cultures, or all held and unquestioned truths.
I'm really just scratching the surface. This book was tailor-made for me. But if you like Russian literature and/or have dealt with being in grad school in the humanities, you might also find it filled with fun.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Tweeting Tolstoy
During my reading of Volume One, I also shared regular thoughts on my Twitter feed. Here they are... (hashtags removed except where integral to the tweet)
"If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy" --Isaac Babel
Feeling far more sympathetic to Pierre Bezukhov than I remembered.
If Prince Andrei turns out to be like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, I'm going to be pissed.
I imagine it comes as no surprise that I think War < Peace.
Andrei Bolkonsky is maybe not as awesome as I remember. (I think this is going to be a major theme of my #WandP tweeting.)
chai at Panera and #WandP (Napoleon is winning.)
The aftermath of battle: "All this was so strange, so unlike what he had hoped for."
"He was sincerely beginning to believe in his extraordinary kindness and his extraordinary intelligence..."
"... the more so because, deep in his heart, it had always seemed to him that he really was very kind and very intelligent."
The thought of battle makes soldiers emo. Also? Apparently the emperor is like Jesus or something.
Battles make for all sorts of confusion. And overblown prose. Thus ends Volume One.
"If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy" --Isaac Babel
Feeling far more sympathetic to Pierre Bezukhov than I remembered.
If Prince Andrei turns out to be like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, I'm going to be pissed.
I imagine it comes as no surprise that I think War < Peace.
Andrei Bolkonsky is maybe not as awesome as I remember. (I think this is going to be a major theme of my #WandP tweeting.)
chai at Panera and #WandP (Napoleon is winning.)
The aftermath of battle: "All this was so strange, so unlike what he had hoped for."
"He was sincerely beginning to believe in his extraordinary kindness and his extraordinary intelligence..."
"... the more so because, deep in his heart, it had always seemed to him that he really was very kind and very intelligent."
The thought of battle makes soldiers emo. Also? Apparently the emperor is like Jesus or something.
Battles make for all sorts of confusion. And overblown prose. Thus ends Volume One.
Peace > War
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
Volume One
I was all aflutter when this translation came out, and it took me awhile (a year or so) to actually purchase it. And then it took me even longer to read it. I've mentioned before that I read W&P right after high school and fell dramatically in love with it. But how would I feel 13 years later?
So here I am this summer, reading this translation. Marveling at all the French. (Apparently P & V's decision to leave so much of the original French, which I think it probably justified, caused some amount of controversy.) When I committed to this big book (1215 pages before the appendix and endnotes) I decided I would serialize my reading. There are four volumes and a (two-part) epilogue. Attaching the epilogue to Volume 4, it makes for about 4 chunks of 300 pages each. I'll be interspersing this with lighter - or at least other - reading. (For example, on my plate right now: essays about being a 20-something female.)
I remembered that Tolstoy cut back and forth between "peace" in Moscow & Petersburg, and "war" out in Austria or wherever. I remembered finding war significantly less interesting. This has not changed. The homefront has women! and gossip! and romance and intrigue. The soldiers on the other hand are mostly just riding around being melodramatic and daydreaming about glory. Seriously, I found myself nodding off multiple times during battle scenes.
I did not remember that the novel starts back in 1805, years before much of the main action. I forgot that we meet Natalya Rostov(a) as a coltish tween. I forgot that before I had an irrational excuse to dislike Pierre, I might have actually found him charmingly inept and adorable, the way I do now.
But of course I remembered the epic scope of Tolstoy's world. And the ways in which he was so generous with detail. No one is an afterthought.
I'm looking forward to Volume 2.
Volume One
I was all aflutter when this translation came out, and it took me awhile (a year or so) to actually purchase it. And then it took me even longer to read it. I've mentioned before that I read W&P right after high school and fell dramatically in love with it. But how would I feel 13 years later?
So here I am this summer, reading this translation. Marveling at all the French. (Apparently P & V's decision to leave so much of the original French, which I think it probably justified, caused some amount of controversy.) When I committed to this big book (1215 pages before the appendix and endnotes) I decided I would serialize my reading. There are four volumes and a (two-part) epilogue. Attaching the epilogue to Volume 4, it makes for about 4 chunks of 300 pages each. I'll be interspersing this with lighter - or at least other - reading. (For example, on my plate right now: essays about being a 20-something female.)
I remembered that Tolstoy cut back and forth between "peace" in Moscow & Petersburg, and "war" out in Austria or wherever. I remembered finding war significantly less interesting. This has not changed. The homefront has women! and gossip! and romance and intrigue. The soldiers on the other hand are mostly just riding around being melodramatic and daydreaming about glory. Seriously, I found myself nodding off multiple times during battle scenes.
I did not remember that the novel starts back in 1805, years before much of the main action. I forgot that we meet Natalya Rostov(a) as a coltish tween. I forgot that before I had an irrational excuse to dislike Pierre, I might have actually found him charmingly inept and adorable, the way I do now.
But of course I remembered the epic scope of Tolstoy's world. And the ways in which he was so generous with detail. No one is an afterthought.
I'm looking forward to Volume 2.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Oops (which is also something a Soviet artist who gave up his dreams might say)
I am realizing that I'm not a very good blogger. I forget to post. I prattle on about the wrong things. But then, since I pretty much always intended this as a reading journal, perhaps it doesn't matter that much.
I am also not very good about reading books in a timely manner. Some books, yes. But others will languish unread for years. And strangely enough, this is not because I don't want to read them. (Well, sometimes maybe.) Rather, it is that I am looking so forward to them that I want to prolong the anticipation. I used to do the same thing with my favorite Halloween candy, which backfired when my parents ended up eating all my Twix. And there would often been Cadbury cream eggs in the refrigerator into the fall.
(Hmm, I was just struck with the thought that this delayed gratification streak is one of the things that is really good about getting so many of my books from the library. First, I get the delay while I'm waiting to get to the top of the list. But then! there are deadlines. I have to pick up the book by a certain date, and then I have to get it back to the library, read, just a few weeks later. It's very good for me.)
Anyway, I digress. One of those languishing books, a gift from almost 3 years back, was The Dream Life of Sukhanov, by Olga Grushin. (By the way, should I be spending mental energy wondering why Grushin, who grew up in Moscow & Prague before moving to the US, is Grushin instead of Grushina?) In Dream Life, we meet a self-satisfied art magazine editor in his late 50s, who appears to be on top of the world with a cushy job, all the perks of being high up in the Soviet apparatus, and a lovely family. But it's the mid-1980s, and there is a new Party Secretary, and a bunch else is about to begin to change. And more importantly, a quarter century earlier, Sukhanov, a talented artist, put aside his ideologically impure art in favor of security. Now, the decision is coming back to haunt him, literally.
As the past descends on Sukhanov, his grasp on reality and time grows shaky, as he slips into flashbacks. Grushin emphasizes these transitions by seamlessly switching from a third-person present to a third person past to a first-person past. And the flashbacks become longer, and deeper. Not only does the technique enable to reader to see how and why Sukhanov abandoned what he most loved, it also illustrates the way that he is sinking further and further into this dream life. And perhaps has inherited his father's insanity. The end comes in a dizzying whirl.
This reader's reaction to Sukhanov was complicated. His self-satisfied smugness at the opening is irritating, and I couldn't help being happy that he was going to be taken down a peg or two. And yet, especially as his vulnerability comes through, I pitied him, and wanted him to be okay. To somehow take the action that would save his (artistic) soul while remaining safe from the wild currents of history and madness. And the vagaries of bureaucratic displeasure. What can I say? I have an over-protective nature.
Grushin was a teen in Moscow in the mid1980s. I hope that her fiction will continue to engage this confusing and heady era, shedding light on how Russians of all stripes faced the promise and peril of the times.
I am also not very good about reading books in a timely manner. Some books, yes. But others will languish unread for years. And strangely enough, this is not because I don't want to read them. (Well, sometimes maybe.) Rather, it is that I am looking so forward to them that I want to prolong the anticipation. I used to do the same thing with my favorite Halloween candy, which backfired when my parents ended up eating all my Twix. And there would often been Cadbury cream eggs in the refrigerator into the fall.
(Hmm, I was just struck with the thought that this delayed gratification streak is one of the things that is really good about getting so many of my books from the library. First, I get the delay while I'm waiting to get to the top of the list. But then! there are deadlines. I have to pick up the book by a certain date, and then I have to get it back to the library, read, just a few weeks later. It's very good for me.)
Anyway, I digress. One of those languishing books, a gift from almost 3 years back, was The Dream Life of Sukhanov, by Olga Grushin. (By the way, should I be spending mental energy wondering why Grushin, who grew up in Moscow & Prague before moving to the US, is Grushin instead of Grushina?) In Dream Life, we meet a self-satisfied art magazine editor in his late 50s, who appears to be on top of the world with a cushy job, all the perks of being high up in the Soviet apparatus, and a lovely family. But it's the mid-1980s, and there is a new Party Secretary, and a bunch else is about to begin to change. And more importantly, a quarter century earlier, Sukhanov, a talented artist, put aside his ideologically impure art in favor of security. Now, the decision is coming back to haunt him, literally.
As the past descends on Sukhanov, his grasp on reality and time grows shaky, as he slips into flashbacks. Grushin emphasizes these transitions by seamlessly switching from a third-person present to a third person past to a first-person past. And the flashbacks become longer, and deeper. Not only does the technique enable to reader to see how and why Sukhanov abandoned what he most loved, it also illustrates the way that he is sinking further and further into this dream life. And perhaps has inherited his father's insanity. The end comes in a dizzying whirl.
This reader's reaction to Sukhanov was complicated. His self-satisfied smugness at the opening is irritating, and I couldn't help being happy that he was going to be taken down a peg or two. And yet, especially as his vulnerability comes through, I pitied him, and wanted him to be okay. To somehow take the action that would save his (artistic) soul while remaining safe from the wild currents of history and madness. And the vagaries of bureaucratic displeasure. What can I say? I have an over-protective nature.
Grushin was a teen in Moscow in the mid1980s. I hope that her fiction will continue to engage this confusing and heady era, shedding light on how Russians of all stripes faced the promise and peril of the times.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
"This bright brute is the gayest"
...of his novels. This is how Nabokov described King, Queen, Knave, which he first wrote in exile in the late 1920s and which his son translated into English in the 1960s. Set in Berlin, the king is the moneyed entrepreneur Dreyer. He's a bit of a buffoon, like the caricatures of Germans in French literature from the late nineteenth century. (I did a paper on this in grad school. Don't ask. Actually, you can ask. It was really fun to read kids' books that made fun of Germans in Alsace.) The queen is his wife, Martha. She's kind of a cipher, beautiful and cold and bewitching. Except maybe also not that attractive. The knave is our naive (and any pun there is an accident of translation) Franz, Dreyer's nephew, who has come to Berlin for a job at his uncle's store and soon becomes a fixture in the Dreyer household.
I started reading and got swept up in it immediately. I loved the way it was so much a product of a gay and glittering and yet not-so-glamorous time. And so entirely Russian, even as it was set in Berlin with German characters. But then, after a few days, I found myself distracted, and picking up other reading material when I got into bed. The last 50-60 pages came well after the rest. And it shouldn't have gotten boring. I put it down right in the middle of a murder plot. So what happened?
I can't answer the question. I - or the book - just lost momentum. Sometimes that happens. When I finally did get to those last few pages, it came together in a perfectly satisfactory way. I can't complain. But all the joy and passion in my reading was gone. Strange. But still, for the first 100 or so pages in particular, it was a delight.
Oh, and this was my fourth and final selection for the Russian Reading Challenge. I do have one more bonus entry though before the year is through.
I started reading and got swept up in it immediately. I loved the way it was so much a product of a gay and glittering and yet not-so-glamorous time. And so entirely Russian, even as it was set in Berlin with German characters. But then, after a few days, I found myself distracted, and picking up other reading material when I got into bed. The last 50-60 pages came well after the rest. And it shouldn't have gotten boring. I put it down right in the middle of a murder plot. So what happened?
I can't answer the question. I - or the book - just lost momentum. Sometimes that happens. When I finally did get to those last few pages, it came together in a perfectly satisfactory way. I can't complain. But all the joy and passion in my reading was gone. Strange. But still, for the first 100 or so pages in particular, it was a delight.
Oh, and this was my fourth and final selection for the Russian Reading Challenge. I do have one more bonus entry though before the year is through.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
The Places We Go For Love
A thematic, dual review...
First up is book club selection Candide, which was fun to revisit for the first time since high school. Voltaire is funny and also complicated. I felt like I wasn't deep enough when I was reading it, if that makes sense. But it's an impressively modern-feeling satire, skewering our beliefs in progress, our obsession with money and being right, and of course our hypocrisy about most everything. The translation I chose was a recent one, from 2005, by Burton Raffel. Comparing mine with other club readers' editions today, I'm pretty fond of Raffel's, with one exception. He notes in an introduction that "il faut cultiver notre jardin" has been mistranslated for ages now. Since garden/jardin meant something closer to "fields," he ends the book with "we need to work our fields." Are you kidding me? Sometimes you've just got to go with the famous line. Which isn't to say that it's not useful to know that Candide isn't just talking about pruning roses but actually tending to crops and plants intended for use. But dude, "we need to work our fields"? Yuck.
(PS - To make it clear for readers who have forgotten or never experienced the novella, it fits into my theme because Candide's rather ridiculous travels and travails all stem from his love for Cunegonde and desire to be with her.)
Next up is yet another of my Eastern European ex-pat books, this one a memoir by journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen. The title, Lying Together, provides a delicious double-meaning that frames her Cohen's affair with the one who got away, a fellow college student and Russophile that at the start of the action is working in St. Petersberg and has leads Cohen needs for a story. Within weeks they are engaged and she is on a plane. And that's where the fun begins. I can't believe how much happens in what I believe is apparently just 11 months. Maybe there was an extra year there that I missed. Dunno. Anyway, Cohen does a fantastic job of recreating the seduction of a good scoop, and the heady first days of love, and the heady crazy capitalism of 1990s Russia. But when Jennifer & Kevin start to fall apart, things get hazy and the book loses focus. Which is fine, b/c by then it's almost over and for a book that you can read in just about one sitting (despite the heat! oh the heat in Los Angeles this weekend!) you can forgiven a weak ending when it's got a strong beginning. Plus it mimics their deterioration.
(PS for this one - do you ever mark pages and notes on bookmarks when you are reading and then come back to them and wonder why exactly you felt this passage was worth noting?)
First up is book club selection Candide, which was fun to revisit for the first time since high school. Voltaire is funny and also complicated. I felt like I wasn't deep enough when I was reading it, if that makes sense. But it's an impressively modern-feeling satire, skewering our beliefs in progress, our obsession with money and being right, and of course our hypocrisy about most everything. The translation I chose was a recent one, from 2005, by Burton Raffel. Comparing mine with other club readers' editions today, I'm pretty fond of Raffel's, with one exception. He notes in an introduction that "il faut cultiver notre jardin" has been mistranslated for ages now. Since garden/jardin meant something closer to "fields," he ends the book with "we need to work our fields." Are you kidding me? Sometimes you've just got to go with the famous line. Which isn't to say that it's not useful to know that Candide isn't just talking about pruning roses but actually tending to crops and plants intended for use. But dude, "we need to work our fields"? Yuck.
(PS - To make it clear for readers who have forgotten or never experienced the novella, it fits into my theme because Candide's rather ridiculous travels and travails all stem from his love for Cunegonde and desire to be with her.)
Next up is yet another of my Eastern European ex-pat books, this one a memoir by journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen. The title, Lying Together, provides a delicious double-meaning that frames her Cohen's affair with the one who got away, a fellow college student and Russophile that at the start of the action is working in St. Petersberg and has leads Cohen needs for a story. Within weeks they are engaged and she is on a plane. And that's where the fun begins. I can't believe how much happens in what I believe is apparently just 11 months. Maybe there was an extra year there that I missed. Dunno. Anyway, Cohen does a fantastic job of recreating the seduction of a good scoop, and the heady first days of love, and the heady crazy capitalism of 1990s Russia. But when Jennifer & Kevin start to fall apart, things get hazy and the book loses focus. Which is fine, b/c by then it's almost over and for a book that you can read in just about one sitting (despite the heat! oh the heat in Los Angeles this weekend!) you can forgiven a weak ending when it's got a strong beginning. Plus it mimics their deterioration.
(PS for this one - do you ever mark pages and notes on bookmarks when you are reading and then come back to them and wonder why exactly you felt this passage was worth noting?)
Saturday, May 31, 2008
The Winter Queen
Book 3 of the Russian Reading Challenge: Boris Akunin's The Winter Queen, the first in a series of mysteries set in the final decades of the 19th century. Akunin started publishing in Russia about 10 years ago, and gained massive popularity in a hurry, and TWQ first appeared in English in 2003. (At least a half dozen other Akunin titles are also available in translation.)
The book's protagonist is Erast Fandorin, a very young clerk in the Moscow police department. He is eager and curious, traits that lead him to investigate a simple suicide that proves to be anything but. The mystery has a variety of twists and discoveries, and while it's not particularly challenging, it is awfully fun. (I'd like to hear what others think of the ending though.)
A couple other aspects of the novel that I found noteworthy:
The suicide is a case of "American roulette," better known to most of us as Russian, and it prompted this observation by a rakish count: "It's stupid but exciting. A shame the Americans thought of it before we did." This led me to wonder about the origins of the term, and mini-research (Wikipedia, of course - and in Russian) suggests that Akunin is alone on the American origin thing, although there doesn't seem to be much evidence attaching it to Russia either. But it was still funny to me. (Also, a similar game of chance with gunplay is mentioned in Lermontov's A Hero of our Time - per Wiki the only instance of R.R. in Russian literature - but it's hard to call it quite the same thing, upon rereading the story.)
Aspects of the characters reminded me a great deal of Dostoevsky, particularly The Idiot, although also Bros. K. Fandorin has a shade of Myshkin-esque innocence to him, and he is also drawn to two distinct types of beauties. One is pure and fair, and of good family; the other is dark, corrupted, but utterly beguiling. And the latter has a train of roguish followers. Maybe I'm making too much of it though.
All in all though, an excellent challenge selection.
crossposted at RRC
The book's protagonist is Erast Fandorin, a very young clerk in the Moscow police department. He is eager and curious, traits that lead him to investigate a simple suicide that proves to be anything but. The mystery has a variety of twists and discoveries, and while it's not particularly challenging, it is awfully fun. (I'd like to hear what others think of the ending though.)
A couple other aspects of the novel that I found noteworthy:
The suicide is a case of "American roulette," better known to most of us as Russian, and it prompted this observation by a rakish count: "It's stupid but exciting. A shame the Americans thought of it before we did." This led me to wonder about the origins of the term, and mini-research (Wikipedia, of course - and in Russian) suggests that Akunin is alone on the American origin thing, although there doesn't seem to be much evidence attaching it to Russia either. But it was still funny to me. (Also, a similar game of chance with gunplay is mentioned in Lermontov's A Hero of our Time - per Wiki the only instance of R.R. in Russian literature - but it's hard to call it quite the same thing, upon rereading the story.)
Aspects of the characters reminded me a great deal of Dostoevsky, particularly The Idiot, although also Bros. K. Fandorin has a shade of Myshkin-esque innocence to him, and he is also drawn to two distinct types of beauties. One is pure and fair, and of good family; the other is dark, corrupted, but utterly beguiling. And the latter has a train of roguish followers. Maybe I'm making too much of it though.
All in all though, an excellent challenge selection.
crossposted at RRC
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Mostly melodrama
I've read two books in the last little while. One is Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes, a collection of short stories that mostly fits into his general vein, so I won't say too much about that. The other is Keys to Happiness, a Russian Silver Age novel by Anastasya Verbitskaya, which is book two for the Russian Reading Challenge. This book was a serendipitous $1 find at Dutton's some time ago, and I bought it mainly because its title was the genesis for Laura Engelstein's The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia. The latter book was an extremely useful source for my undergraduate thesis, so when I saw the original, I grabbed it.
Fortunately, this translation is abridged, and at just under 300 pages is somewhere around 1/3 of the original serialized novel. The translators, both academics, felt that the novel could be a little repetitive, and so chopped it down to the essence. To which I say thank god, because I know I couldn't have made it through an extra 800 pages of the same. KTH was a sensation, full of free love and revolutionary ideals and art and anti-semitism, and I don't even know what else. It's quite a product of its time.
Manya, our heroine, has "eyes like stars" and more dancing ability than Isadora Duncan, and captivates a series of archetypal men. She is capricious as all get out, and never has one emotion when she can have five instead. Keeping up with her is exhausting. I'm not going to even try to recount the plot, but suffice it to say it is quite the early 20th-century telenovela.
So while the book itself isn't all that fantastic, it's got a lot of historical value. Its huge popularity is a reflection of the changing values of the period, where some men and women threw off the social mores regarding love and sex. Most did not, but they lived vicariously through such vibrant characters as Manya.
cross-posted at Russian Reading Challenge
Fortunately, this translation is abridged, and at just under 300 pages is somewhere around 1/3 of the original serialized novel. The translators, both academics, felt that the novel could be a little repetitive, and so chopped it down to the essence. To which I say thank god, because I know I couldn't have made it through an extra 800 pages of the same. KTH was a sensation, full of free love and revolutionary ideals and art and anti-semitism, and I don't even know what else. It's quite a product of its time.
Manya, our heroine, has "eyes like stars" and more dancing ability than Isadora Duncan, and captivates a series of archetypal men. She is capricious as all get out, and never has one emotion when she can have five instead. Keeping up with her is exhausting. I'm not going to even try to recount the plot, but suffice it to say it is quite the early 20th-century telenovela.
So while the book itself isn't all that fantastic, it's got a lot of historical value. Its huge popularity is a reflection of the changing values of the period, where some men and women threw off the social mores regarding love and sex. Most did not, but they lived vicariously through such vibrant characters as Manya.
cross-posted at Russian Reading Challenge
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Natasha's Dance, 19th & 20th Centuries
Finishing Figes' book took longer than I expected. (Largely b/c I spent a lot of time in the past two weeks falling asleep. Why is it that I always think I'll get more reading done when I'm sick and I never ever do?)
But I made it through. The last couple chapters dealt with topics I knew pretty well: the Tatar legacy, the Russian avant-garde, and Soviet culture. The final chapter however, "Russia Abroad" was about the exiles and what Russia meant and became to them after the creation of the USSR. That I never bothered to study too much, so it made for a lovely ending.
Most of the general comments in my earlier post remain relevant. I'm not sure that I have that much to add. What I did LOVE though was Figes' Guide to Further Reading, 29 pages of suggestions, all in English, so the reader won't get bogged down in a list of sources that may have been fantastic for Figes but probably aren't much good for him or her. That section alone could probably keep me happy for ages, and of course there was the joy of seeing him give high marks to books that I have read/owned/etc.
Getting through Figes in the first 3 weeks of the year means that I have time to catch up on library books (and the book for my new book club!) before turning to book 2 of the challenge.
But I made it through. The last couple chapters dealt with topics I knew pretty well: the Tatar legacy, the Russian avant-garde, and Soviet culture. The final chapter however, "Russia Abroad" was about the exiles and what Russia meant and became to them after the creation of the USSR. That I never bothered to study too much, so it made for a lovely ending.
Most of the general comments in my earlier post remain relevant. I'm not sure that I have that much to add. What I did LOVE though was Figes' Guide to Further Reading, 29 pages of suggestions, all in English, so the reader won't get bogged down in a list of sources that may have been fantastic for Figes but probably aren't much good for him or her. That section alone could probably keep me happy for ages, and of course there was the joy of seeing him give high marks to books that I have read/owned/etc.
Getting through Figes in the first 3 weeks of the year means that I have time to catch up on library books (and the book for my new book club!) before turning to book 2 of the challenge.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
A Big Book of Russian Culture
Happy New Year!
I decided to start off 2008 with a tome - and one from the Russian Reading Challenge in order to get started on that list - and I'm while reading is harder now that work has begun again, I am making decent progress.
The book? Orlando Figes' Natasha's Dance. Figes became one of my favorite Russian historians when I was in grad school; he was so personable and witty and vast. There was plenty to quibble with in his scope and analysis, but that was part of the fun too. In Natasha's Dance, he takes on the oh-so-manageable task of writing "a cultural history of Russia."
One of my happy discoveries thus far is that I haven't forgotten all my history in the 3 years since leaving Georgetown. Several times I've wondered "will he talk about this?" a few pages before he does. (In particular: philanthropy among the merchant classes in late 19th century Moscow, which btw was the topic of the first scholarly book I read in full in Russian) Another surprise: the Natasha of the title is the imperious heroine of War and Peace. The passage Figes references - where Natasha instinctively performs a peasant dance - represents for him Russian cultural history, the interplay between Western aspirations and the "Russian soul."
A little lighter on the history than maybe I would like, but lots and lots of books and art and music. Hooray! Oh, and architecture. Plus, I loved this little ditty by Turgenev, about one of the foremost critics of the day:
I decided to start off 2008 with a tome - and one from the Russian Reading Challenge in order to get started on that list - and I'm while reading is harder now that work has begun again, I am making decent progress.
The book? Orlando Figes' Natasha's Dance. Figes became one of my favorite Russian historians when I was in grad school; he was so personable and witty and vast. There was plenty to quibble with in his scope and analysis, but that was part of the fun too. In Natasha's Dance, he takes on the oh-so-manageable task of writing "a cultural history of Russia."
One of my happy discoveries thus far is that I haven't forgotten all my history in the 3 years since leaving Georgetown. Several times I've wondered "will he talk about this?" a few pages before he does. (In particular: philanthropy among the merchant classes in late 19th century Moscow, which btw was the topic of the first scholarly book I read in full in Russian) Another surprise: the Natasha of the title is the imperious heroine of War and Peace. The passage Figes references - where Natasha instinctively performs a peasant dance - represents for him Russian cultural history, the interplay between Western aspirations and the "Russian soul."
A little lighter on the history than maybe I would like, but lots and lots of books and art and music. Hooray! Oh, and architecture. Plus, I loved this little ditty by Turgenev, about one of the foremost critics of the day:
Argue with someone more intelligent than you:
He will defeat you.
But from your defeat you will learn something useful.
Argue with someone of equal intelligence:
Neither will be victorious.
And in any case you will have the pleasure of the struggle.
Argue with someone less intelligent:
Not from a desire for victory
But because you may be of use to him.
Argue even with a fool:
You will not gain glory
But sometimes it is fun.
Only do not argue with Vladimir Stasov.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Russian Reading Challenge 2008
(crossposted from the Russian Reading Challenge blog)
I've only glanced at other lists, but what I've seen all sounds good and I am a bit envious and excited for the reading ahead in 2008. While I LOVE lists, I was overwhelmed by the prospect of figuring out what to choose, so I limited my choices to only books that I had already sitting on my shelves and hadn't read. Which was still too many, but eventually got whittled down to the following:
Natasha's Dance - Orlando Figes
Keys to Happiness - Anastasya Verbitskaya
The Winter Queen - Boris Akunin
King Queen Knave - Vladimir Nabokov
and for extra credit, since it was written in English and doesn't count: Olga's Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov.
[My other challenge: reading at least 5 other books that I already own]
I've only glanced at other lists, but what I've seen all sounds good and I am a bit envious and excited for the reading ahead in 2008. While I LOVE lists, I was overwhelmed by the prospect of figuring out what to choose, so I limited my choices to only books that I had already sitting on my shelves and hadn't read. Which was still too many, but eventually got whittled down to the following:
Natasha's Dance - Orlando Figes
Keys to Happiness - Anastasya Verbitskaya
The Winter Queen - Boris Akunin
King Queen Knave - Vladimir Nabokov
and for extra credit, since it was written in English and doesn't count: Olga's Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov.
[My other challenge: reading at least 5 other books that I already own]
Monday, October 22, 2007
War and Peace and Sex
This week's LA Times Book Review brought a few happy discoveries:
New translations of War and Peace. Tolstoy's tome is in my all-time top three, so the idea of new, updated interpretations thrills me. Plus, one of them (by Andrew Bromfield) is of an early draft of the novel, a shorter one, and one in which my favorite character appears to meet with a less tragic ending.
The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. Reviewed by Carolyn Kellogg, formerly of LAist. She notes that this book is getting lots of review attention. And speaking of, I heard Perrotta on last week's New York Times Book Review podcast.
New translations of War and Peace. Tolstoy's tome is in my all-time top three, so the idea of new, updated interpretations thrills me. Plus, one of them (by Andrew Bromfield) is of an early draft of the novel, a shorter one, and one in which my favorite character appears to meet with a less tragic ending.
The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. Reviewed by Carolyn Kellogg, formerly of LAist. She notes that this book is getting lots of review attention. And speaking of, I heard Perrotta on last week's New York Times Book Review podcast.
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