I went into the museum, up the empty stairs to the roof; there were no workers or guards, just a toy robot’s blinking lights on one floor; the door to the roof was wide open.
From above, the dark heads of the crowd looked like black caviar, a viscous mass that had filled the square, a strange dish for gourmets of this sort of spectacle. I stood on the roof in front of a barrel of caviar, an accidental guest at someone else’s banquet, and I expected cutlery to appear from the sky for the real diners prepared for the feast, for gluttony, to devour as much as possible without even tasting it.
Moscow had spent the previous years in lines; there were fewer individual pedestrians on the streets than people standing queuing up, looking at the back of another’s head. At any one moment, sometimes even at night, a family member was in line, sometimes people passed along their number to somebody else, writing it down on somebody’s hand, and my school pals and I tried not to wash them off—number 87, number 113—showing off what long lines we had been in.
The ability to form a chain was a skill, a form of existence; there were lines for lines: you had to stand in one for the right to sign up for another.
And this was just such a line spread out over Lubyanka Square, taking up its entire area and splashing out into the lanes, where human currents were pouring into the big sea of people standing in line for the future. If I had been in the street, I would have wholeheartedly rejoiced, kissing and hugging strangers; but from the roof I could see the waves of emotions and unstable feelings traveling over the square; I was happy to see them born and grieved over their quick death.
The year before I had worked as a laborer on an expedition in Kazakhstan. We traveled across a steppe where half-wild horses lived; the magnificent, free creatures galloped across an ideal plane, animals that had never seen a tree, house, fence, or corral, born for an unbounded plain. To me they weren’t animals, not flesh and blood, but spirits of motion.
A month later our expedition came back the same way—there were thousands of dead horses in the steppe; there had been a pestilence.
I was astonished by the speed with which a heavy mass of beauty became a mass of dead meat; the stench was unbearable, and it was impossible to believe it came from bodies that I had seen so recently not as bodies but as spiritual symbols.
I could not believe that beauty could die this way, it should have had a different death, pure and incorporeal. But the sun had turned the steppe into a rupturing abscess, and small predators scurried around the horse carcasses, foxes intoxicated by the abundance of meat were not afraid of cars and got run over, the horse plague had overwhelmed everything, and vultures circled in the sky, hypnotized by the sight, not knowing where to land, which carcass, for there were thousands of carcasses. This chewing, burping, grunting, and flying horde, consisting of teeth, beaks, and bellies, made a sound like the quiet buzz of a circular saw.
On the roof, where the emotional wave did not reach, spreading horizontally and sending throbbing sounds upward which resembled the tide, I realized that this communality was held together by short-lived emotions. Disintegration awaited it, the decay of feelings that, like the meat of victims of a cataclysm, will clutter the space, and in that environment ideas with the air of deterioration would form and carrion-eating creatures would be born. The physical sensation of feelings doomed to an early death moved me away from the edge of the roof.
It was time to go down.
THE BOOK WITH THE BROWN COVER
I got home late; Grandmother Tanya went to sleep without waiting up for me; the high moon filled her room with a weak emulation of the blue glow of the lamp she used to radiate herself with long ago. I went to my room; the light was on—I thought she had gone in and forgotten to turn off the lamp.
On the table, in the lamplight, among last year’s textbooks I had forgotten to turn in, lay a large book, the size of a barnyard ledger, in a brown binding, with neat stiches of waxed thread. Next to it was Grandmother’s porcelain statuette, the three frogs “See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing”; it seemed to me that they were no longer covering their mouth, eyes, and ears.
Frightened, I went to check on Grandmother Tanya: after writing that, even though I didn’t know what that was, she could die, maybe she had lingered on in order to complete this work.
Barricades and bonfires still filled the city’s squares; shells and bullets were still loaded in weapons; and the book—had Grandmother really been writing it for five years, hiding it from everyone?—seemed like a kind of a weapon, too.
Grandmother Tanya was breathing, breathing more evenly than usual, more calmly, as if her illness had left her. I envied her, she seemed so at peace, complete and finished; I wished that someday I would lie as calmly, and I lightly touched her gray hair, thinning with every year; the planet of another person’s mind, weightless in sleep, rested on the pillow.
Carefully, I turned the heavy cover and leafed through the pages, not reading the words, recognizing the colors of the ink—I had seen these pens on Grandmother Tanya’s desk—recognizing the various forms of her penmanship, the various stages of illness, when pain directed her fingers and the letters grew bigger, childishly disobedient, and then diminished in size when the pain weakened.
Here were the first lines, the first sentences. But what was it—had she decided to write a novel instead of a memoir, a novel stylized as a family chronicle, invented from the first letter to the last, kindly and edifying? Why fiction, why artistic invention, when I had thirsted for truth, even if it were meager, but still truth?
“The history of our family goes back to the XIV century,” Grandmother wrote. “Our family had military men, heads of the nobility, priests and metropolitans, generals and naval men, revolutionaries and philosophers, officers tried in the Decembrist plot and terrorists in the Socialist Revolutionary organization. Your great-grandfather, about whom you know nothing, was a nobleman and military doctor. And you, my grandson, are the seventeenth generation in our line.”
“You, my grandson.” It was only on the third reading that I understood this was not a stylistic turn and that Grandmother truly was addressing me. I was the seventeenth generation of the line.
A swarm of dead men, previously invisible, appeared and turned into the rustle of August foliage, into moonlight, as if they had seeped one by one through a crack in time, into the joint of eras, awakened by the soldiers’ boots stomping on cobblestones, the fall of monuments, the rumble of tanks, and the din of the crowd.
The wind picked up and trees trembled in the dark, and I thought, honestly sensing my own smallness, that it would be better to destroy Grandmother’s manuscript and throw myself from the balcony; no one would understand, but living with this was more than I could bear. I had been counting on a personal truth, a small, manageable piece of it, and I had been given too much.
Mechanically, I reached out in a farewell gesture and touched an apple; we brought them from the dacha and kept them in boxes on the balcony. Sharp, angry, boiling with an excess of flavor, the juice burned my mouth; I discovered that I was like an animal, chewing and choking on that apple, enormous, juicy—the harvest had been a good one that August, the tree branches cracked under the weight of the fruit, even though we propped them up—and the desire to live seethed and raged within me.
I was to be born anew.
IF VENICE DIES BY SALVATORE SETTIS
INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED ART HISTORIAN Salvatore Settis ignites a new debate about the Pearl of the Adriatic and cultural patrimony at large. In this fiery blend of history and cultural analysis, Settis argues that “hit-and-run” visitors are turning Venice and other landmark urban settings into shopping malls and theme parks. This is a passionate plea to secure the soul of Venice, written with consummate authority, wide-ranging erudition and élan.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/if-venice-dies/
A VERY RUSSIAN CHRISTMAS
THIS IS RUSSIAN CHRISTMAS CELEBRATED IN supreme pleasure and pain by the grea
test of writers, from Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to Chekhov and Teffi. The dozen stories in this collection will satisfy every reader, and with their wit, humor, and tenderness, packed full of sentimental songs, footmen, whirling winds, solitary nights, snow drifts, and hopeful children, the collection proves that Nobody Does Christmas Like the Russians.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/a-very-russian-christmas/
THE MADONNA OF NOTRE DAME BY ALEXIS RAGOUGNEAU
FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE JAM INTO NOTRE DAME Cathedral to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption. The next morning, a beautiful young woman clothed in white kneels at prayer in a cathedral side chapel. But when someone accidentally bumps against her, her body collapses. She has been murdered. This thrilling novel illuminates shadowy corners of the world’s most famous cathedral, shedding light on good and evil with suspense, compassion and wry humor.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/madonna-notre-dame/
MOVING THE PALACE BY CHARIF MAJDALANI
A YOUNG LEBANESE ADVENTURER EXPLORES THE wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot who has dismantled a sumptuous palace and is transporting it across the continent on a camel caravan. This is a captivating modern-day Odyssey in the tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/moving-the-palace/
ADUA BY IGIABA SCEGO
ADUA, AN IMMIGRANT FROM SOMALIA TO ITALY, has lived in Rome for nearly forty years. She came seeking freedom from a strict father and an oppressive regime, but her dreams of film stardom ended in shame. Now that the civil war in Somalia is over, her homeland calls her. She must decide whether to return and reclaim her inheritance, but also how to take charge of her own story and build a future.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/adua/
THE 6:41 TO PARIS BY JEAN-PHILIPPE BLONDEL
CÉCILE, A STYLISH 47-YEAR-OLD, HAS SPENT the weekend visiting her parents outside Paris. By Monday morning, she’s exhausted. These trips back home are stressful and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it’s soon occupied by a man she recognizes as Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation 30 years ago. In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, Cécile and Philippe hurtle towards the French capital in a psychological thriller about the pain and promise of past romance.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-641-to-paris/
ON THE RUN WITH MARY BY JONATHAN BARROW
SHINING MOMENTS OF TENDER BEAUTY PUNCtuate this story of a youth on the run after escaping from an elite English boarding school. At London’s Euston Station, the narrator meets a talking dachshund named Mary and together they’re off on escapades through posh Mayfair streets and jaunts in a Rolls-Royce. But the youth soon realizes that the seemingly sweet dog is a handful; an alcoholic, nymphomaniac, drug-addicted mess who can’t stay out of pubs or off the dance floor. On the Run with Mary mirrors the horrors and the joys of the terrible 20th century.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/on-the-run-with-mary/
OBLIVION BY SERGEI LEBEDEV
IN ONE OF THE FIRST 21ST CENTURY RUSSIAN novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/oblivion/
THE LAST WEYNFELDT BY MARTIN SUTER
ADRIAN WEYNFELDT IS AN ART EXPERT IN AN international auction house, a bachelor in his mid-fifties living in a grand Zurich apartment filled with costly paintings and antiques. Always correct and well-mannered, he’s given up on love until one night—entirely out of character for him—Weynfeldt decides to take home a ravishing but unaccountable young woman and gets embroiled in an art forgery scheme that threatens his buttoned up existence. This refined page-turner moves behind elegant bourgeois facades into darker recesses of the heart.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-last-weynfeldt/
THE LAST SUPPER BY KLAUS WIVEL
ALARMED BY THE OPPRESSION OF 7.5 MILLION Christians in the Middle East, journalist Klaus Wivel traveled to Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories to learn about their fate. He found a minority under threat of death and humiliation, desperate in the face of rising Islamic extremism and without hope their situation will improve. An unsettling account of a severely beleaguered religious group living, so it seems, on borrowed time. Wivel asks, Why have we not done more to protect these people?
http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-last-supper/
GUYS LIKE ME BY DOMINIQUE FABRE
DOMINIQUE FABRE, BORN IN PARIS AND A life-long resident of the city, exposes the shadowy, anonymous lives of many who inhabit the French capital. In this quiet, subdued tale, a middle-aged office worker, divorced and alienated from his only son, meets up with two childhood friends who are similarly adrift. He’s looking for a second act to his mournful life, seeking the harbor of love and a true connection with his son. Set in palpably real Paris streets that feel miles away from the City of Light, a stirring novel of regret and absence, yet not without a glimmer of hope.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/guys-like/
ANIMAL INTERNET BY ALEXANDER PSCHERA
SOME 50,000 CREATURES AROUND THE GLOBE—including whales, leopards, flamingoes, bats and snails—are being equipped with digital tracking devices. The data gathered and studied by major scientific institutes about their behavior will warn us about tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but also radically transform our relationship to the natural world. Contrary to pessimistic fears, author Alexander Pschera sees the Internet as creating a historic opportunity for a new dialogue between man and nature.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/animal-internet/
KILLING AUNTIE BY ANDRZEJ BURSA
A YOUNG UNIVERSITY STUDENT NAMED JUREK, with no particular ambitions or talents, finds himself with nothing to do. After his doting aunt asks the young man to perform a small chore, he decides to kill her for no good reason other than, perhaps, boredom. This short comedic masterpiece combines elements of Dostoevsky, Sartre, Kafka, and Heller, coming together to produce an unforgettable tale of murder and—just maybe—redemption.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/killing-auntie/
I CALLED HIM NECKTIE BY MILENA MICHIKO FLAŠAR
TWENTY-YEAR-OLD TAGUCHI HIRO HAS SPENT the last two years of his life living as a hikikomori—a shut-in who never leaves his room and has no human interaction—in his parents’ home in Tokyo. As Hiro tentatively decides to reenter the world, he spends his days observing life from a park bench. Gradually he makes friends with Ohara Tetsu, a salaryman who has lost his job. The two discover in their sadness a common bond. This beautiful novel is moving, unforgettable, and full of surprises.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/called-necktie/
WHO IS MARTHA? BY MARJANA GAPONENKO
IN THIS ROLLICKING NOVEL, 96-YEAR-OLD ornithologist Luka Levadski foregoes treatment for lung cancer and moves from Ukraine to Vienna to make a grand exit in a luxury suite at the Hotel Imperial. He reflects on his past while indulging in Viennese cakes and savoring music in a gilded concert hall. Levadski was born in 1914, the same year that Martha—the last of the now-extinct passenger pigeons—died. Levadski himself has an acute sense of being the last of a species. This gloriously written tale mixes piquant wit with lofty musings about life, friendship, aging and death.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/martha/
ALL BACKS WERE TURNED BY MAREK HLASKO
TWO DESPERATE FRIENDS—ON THE EDGE OF the law—travel to the southern Israeli city of Eilat to find work. There
, Dov Ben Dov, the handsome native Israeli with a reputation for causing trouble, and Israel, his sidekick, stay with Ben Dov’s younger brother, Little Dov, who has enough trouble of his own. Local toughs are encroaching on Little Dov’s business, and he enlists his older brother to drive them away. It doesn’t help that a beautiful German widow is rooming next door. A story of passion, deception, violence, and betrayal, conveyed in hard-boiled prose reminiscent of Hammett and Chandler.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/backs-turned/
ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER BY YITZHAK GORMEZANO GOREN
THIS IS THE STORY OF TWO JEWISH FAMILIES living their frenzied last days in the doomed cosmopolitan social whirl of Alexandria just before fleeing Egypt for Israel in 1951. The conventions of the Egyptian upper-middle class are laid bare in this dazzling novel, which exposes sexual hypocrisies and portrays a vanished polyglot world of horse racing, seaside promenades and nightclubs.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/alexandrian-summer/
COCAINE BY PITIGRILLI
PARIS IN THE 1920s—DIZZY AND DECADENT. Where a young man can make a fortune with his wits … unless he is led into temptation. Cocaine’s dandified hero Tito Arnaudi invents lurid scandals and gruesome deaths, and sells these stories to the newspapers. But his own life becomes even more outrageous when he acquires three demanding mistresses. Elegant, witty and wicked, Pitigrilli’s classic novel was first published in Italian in 1921 and retains its venom even today.
http://newvesselpress.com/books/cocaine/
KILLING THE SECOND DOG BY MAREK HLASKO
TWO DOWN-AND-OUT POLISH CON MEN LIVING in Israel in the 1950s scam an American widow visiting the country. Robert, who masterminds the scheme, and Jacob, who acts it out, are tough, desperate men, exiled from their native land and adrift in the hot, nasty underworld of Tel Aviv. Robert arranges for Jacob to run into the widow who has enough trouble with her young son to keep her occupied all day. What follows is a story of romance, deception, cruelty and shame. Hlasko’s writing combines brutal realism with smoky, hard-boiled dialogue, in a bleak world where violence is the norm and love is often only an act.
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