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Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts

Monday, October 10, 2016

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

There are several things to love about this novel. I love a book where literature is lauded. The Count's life is saved on account of a poem he wrote, which some thought had a revolutionary message.

Count Alexander Rostov nevertheless finds himself under house arrest in his favorite hotel, The Metropol. He has become in the eyes of the state a "non-person" for the sole crime of having been born a Count.

He loses his grand rooms and is forced to take rooms in the attic where the wait staff live. The Count still considers himself the luckiest man in all of Russia. He is able to keep his desk and its secret stash of gold coins.

No matter how well-educated and well-informed the Count may think he is, life and the people who populate it, never fail to surprise him.

The Count forms, for instance, forms an unexpected friendship with a handyman and he has a love affair with a woman, an actress, who is nothing like she seems.
 
The Count's odd friendship with Nina, a precocious eleven-year-old and daughter of a party leader, results in her sending him Sofia. This girl becomes his adopted daughter, his world, and his greatest accomplishment.

All of these scenes are ironic and comic rather than lugubrious such as the time that Nina goes off to work for a collective farm. Count Alexander knows that "life" will find her.
 
While the novel moves at the pace of an art film, there are wonderful comic moments. This is especially true with the Count's conflict with a waiter-turned-manager that he calls "the Bishop."
 
With sly humor, Towles traces the subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in Russia's changing political landscape.
 

Sunday, September 11, 2016

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

This epic story that  reads like a fairytale at times is the story of a Boyar, Pyotr, his sons, Sasha and Kolya and his strange daughter Vasilia. Before his wife died, she told him that Vasilia would be most like her mother who had the "gift."




Vasilia was born with  the ability to see the creatures that populate Russian airytale creatures--the rusalka, the vazila, domonvoi, vodianoy, leshy and the Frost King, Mozorko. While its commonplace to her, others are terrified of her abilities. Much of the town, and her stepmother, call Vasilia ("Vasya") a demon or a witch. 

Ironically, Vasya's stepmother, Anna, also has the ability to see these household spirits and cheyerti of the forest. Anna, however, denigrates what she sees as "demons" or manifestations of her madness. 

Konstantine, a priest sent by Prince Ivan to the wilds of Rus, terrifies the town by labeling the old village ways "demonic." Their fears only multiply the existing dangers. An old rivalry between two supernatural forces is renewed as the terrible Bear of the fairytales is released from his bindings. 

Don't miss the next two novels in the Winternight series: Arden's The Girl in The Tower and The Winter of the Witch.










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