Tag Archives: olga grushin

The midpoint recap

50 Books for 2010, , , , , , , , , ,

Twenty-five books down, twenty-five to go. (This excludes the two bonuses: xkcd and The Bro Code.) Right now I’m a little ahead of schedule but my pace is slowing, so the second half of the year will be interesting. I’m having nightmares about hunkering down in a dank basement, reading some horribly written novel, while the rest of the world celebrates New Year’s Eve. I’m determined not to let this happen. Finished by Christmas would be nice.

Anyway, since halfway point summaries (or retrospectives, or recaps) seem to work so well for sports seasons (e.g. the All-Star break report cards that always have baseball journalists salivating), I suppose it’s worth a try on a book blog, too. So without further ado, here are my thoughts on the first half of book-worming, 2010-style.

But first, some stats (in keeping with my love of baseball, of course). Leading off, my gender ratio was a bit lopsided: nineteen books written by men, and only six by women. The writers’ nationalities tell a similar story: eighteen Americans and seven of everyone else (only one nation, Great Britain, had multiple authors, with two). Fifteen books fell into the non-fiction category, with ten in fiction. All but four books were published in 2007 or later. Three books were under 200 pages, fifteen were between 200 and 300, five were between 300 and 400, and two were over 400 pages. In summary, the average book was a non-fiction work spanning 274 pages, published in 2008, and authored by an American male. (My girlfriend has ever so gently reminded me to include more women and authors of color in the second half; luckily for me, her English literature degree is, contrary to her lamentations, quite relevant when it comes time for book recommendations.)

And now, onto the 50BF2010 awards:

Best Non-Fiction Book: The Big Short, by Michael Lewis

When I reviewed The Big Short on April 18, I described it as a “very, very entertaining book.” Relative to the seven books I’ve read since then, this has only become even truer. This is not due to any shortcomings of those books as much as it is a further ringing endorsement of The Big Short. Michael Lewis takes an incredibly complex and arcane set of circumstances and transforms it into a suspenseful narrative with an uncomfortably ambiguous approach to morality. (Were his characters the good guys, or villains? I think it’s a bit of both.) His insider story of the outsiders who prophesied the coming Great Recession is almost beyond belief; but then, never more so than the financial collapse itself, which Lewis captures vividly with intimate portraits of the people who, after watching in shock as it unfolded, proceeded to cash in on the subsequent implosion. Most of the time I feel ambivalent about the term “must-read;” but if ever the expression had an appropriate usage, The Big Short undoubtedly qualifies.

Honorable mention: SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner; and Freefall, by Joseph Stiglitz

Best Fiction Book: The Dream Life of Sukhanov, by Olga Grushin

This story, of a Soviet art critic whose fragile political stature is threatened by the dawn of glasnost, is a delicately woven tale of the zeitgeist of the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, and a brilliant depiction of one man’s struggle with self-identity in the face of previously unimaginable national transformation. Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov’s sojourns through his past and present gradually coalesce into one time-blurred journey, with surrealism as both its guide and genre, realism as its omnipresent companion, and metamorphosis as the destination. That Olga Grushin managed to pen this novel in a non-native tongue is a testament to the boundless nature of her literary imagination, and an apt metaphor for Sukhanov’s own disorientation in a world not his own.

Honorable mention: The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin; and The Informers, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Worst Non-Fiction Book: Reality Hunger, by David Shields

It’s officially filed under “Literary Criticism,” according to its ISBN categorization. But I remain unconvinced that Reality Hunger is actually anything of the sort, and even less so that it amounts to much more than self-aggrandizement. David Shields opens his book with epigraphs by Picasso, Walter Benjamin, and Graham Greene, and then proceeds, for the next 205 pages, to steal and plunder from authors, thinkers, and entertainers both near and far, past and present. The intention, he implies, is to revolutionize the commonly held platitudes that have defined and separated the worlds of fiction and non-fiction and, in the meantime, to decimate international standards of intellectual property rights. Why this is so urgent is never made entirely clear. To be fair, it is difficult to concoct a cogent argument out of 618 literary scraps from authors who, strangely enough, write their own material. But this is no deterrent to the inexorable Shields, whose campaign to throw open the doors to appropriation of others’ creativity fails to appreciate the very real line between ideas and their expression. His literary remix, unsurprisingly, dissolves into cognitive dissonance.

Dishonorable mention: The Flight of the Intellectuals, by Paul Berman; and The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean

Worst Fiction Book: The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte

Q: What do you get when you start with a disenchanted development officer, add in a newly rediscovered friendship with an old college buddy, and, for good measure, throw in a subplot involving his wife’s potential infidelity?

A: A terrible novel. One online reviewer noted, with a beautiful sense of irony, a bit of dialogue late in the book in which Milo, the book’s utterly forgettable antihero, asks a colleague, “…If I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?” Her reply: “I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can’t think of anyone who would.” Well said. It seemed as if author Sam Lipsyte neglected to decide whether he was writing comedy or tragedy until, at the end, he eventually gave up and decided, rather arbitrarily, to stop writing. Fortunately, it was as good a point as any to stop reading.

Dishonorable mention: Family Album, by Penelope Lively

Onward march to the next twenty-five!

#22: The Dream Life of Sukhanov

50 Books for 2010, , , , , , , , , , , ,

It had been awhile since I’d read a Russian novel. In fact, I believe the last such book I’d read until now was Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov. Even after having read only a scant few of the major works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, I suppose I still should have realized that not all Russian books — or Russian authors, for that matter — are alike. And yet somehow I was persuaded by the name Olga Grushin and the intriguing title of her book, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, into presuming literary greatness.

As it turns out, not all stereotypes are inaccurate. Beautiful novels are as Russian as vodka consumption and chess. But where the last two are respectively vulgar or elite, the Russian novel is a format accessible to all, at least to those for whom 700-page sagas are not too forbidding. Grushin’s is no different (except considerably shorter). As several reviewers have noted, her writing does contain a slight foreign twang, as when she uses overly lengthy strings of adjectives to describe mundane settings. But her English is considerably better than my Russian, so judge I shall not.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov opens with the the protagonist and sometime antihero, Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov, arriving with his wife, Nina, at a birthday celebration for a renowned Soviet painter named Pyotr Alekseevich Malenin. (Do not fear an endless litany of names for each person; either Grushin has graciously spared her anglophone readers the consternation of rote name memorization, or I have subconsciously grown accustomed to the practice. And I’m quite confident it’s not the latter.) Malinin is a product of the Soviet machine, an “artist” whose works traffic in ideological and political cliche, stripped of their creative meaning even as they enjoy the public notoriety afforded by an official stamp of approval.

Malinin is also Nina’s father. Sukhanov, while privately musing that “the main quality uniting all [of Malinin’s] works…was the inherent ease with which they slid into oblivion the moment one’s back was turned,” was nevertheless duty-bound to pay the man his patriotic dues. Anyway, as editor in chief of Art of the World, the nation’s (and thus the state-approved) premier art magazine, Sukhanov was in no position to evaluate the integrity of others’ choices.

What he cannot stop himself from doing, however, is reassessing his own decisions, ad nauseum. As Sukhanov constantly travels in thought from the present to his past, the narrative voice switches from third to first. He is once again a small child, then a young man in love with both art and his future wife. Surrealism is his passion, but the Kruschev Thaw all too soon evaporated and, with it, the sacred luxury of maintaining artistic creativity without forfeiting all professional (and certainly political) ambition. Sukhanov confronted a life-altering decision: to rebel, or choose the safety of the ideological mainstream.

Choosing the latter, Sukhanov eventually soared to career success. When the time came, however, he was unable or unwilling to comprehend the realities of glasnost and perestroika, even as they rendered his suppressive voice cartoonish and his fears of a crackdown anachronistic. When a student journalist accosts him at Malinin’s birthday event, demanding that he acknowledge the innate dishonesty in the great man’s paintings, Sukhanov condescendingly responds, “A piece of friendly advice…Those artistic ideas of yours, I wouldn’t advertise them so openly if I were you — you never know who might hear you.” To which she replies, presciently, “I don’t care who hears me…The times are changing.”

The Dream Life of Sukhanov, in chronicling a unique world event — the twilight of the Soviet era — evokes a surrealist universe of its own, neatly meshing with the artistic chaos of the genre that first captured Sukhanov’s heart as a child. Olga Grushin, Russian by birth and now American via naturalization, has experienced first-hand the decline of Russian communism, both from within and without the country; and this personal touch lends her already sterling writing an entirely believable hue. Sukhanov as a character is difficult to be admired, and yet a decent helping of contextual pity is always present nonetheless. Upon hearing (but not heeding) the student’s retort about changing times, Sukhanov concludes the terse conversation: “The times are always changing, my dear Lida…But it would serve you well to remember that certain things always stay the same.” In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of 1985, those “certain things” were nonexistent. For Sukhanov, then, as for the rest of the country and the world at large, the only question was whether to accept the inevitable.