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Sep. 15th, 2012 10:46 pm
Большое разочарование
Gorgeous weather in Chicago, an absolutely perfect day to sit in the comfy chair with the windows wide open and read. Too bad I picked such a disappointing book. Medea and her children began promisingly enough, despite the qualms I had when I read the summary on the back cover. A charming family drama in a Crimean setting, okay, I'm up for that. But you know how it is when an author introduces an ensemble cast and then spends most of her time with the characters who least intrigued you?
What made that worse was that so much ink was devoted to fleshing out everyone's backstories and so little to the frame narrative that it ended up feeling almost like a book of linked short stories rather than the novel it purported to be. And some of these stories were fairly engrossing, like the account of the orphaned girl whose is nearly driven to suicide by her insane grandmother, and some were tedious, like the account of the self-contained Don Juan who's amazing at everything.
Such plot as there is is driven by a romance between the orphan and the Don Juan. (The romance I was interested in, that of a middle-aged Pontic Greek divorcé and the high-strung Russian woman staying in the neighbouring cottage, is dispensed with in a few lines of the epilogue.) This has its moments, but it really only carries the last third of the book or so. By that time, was so worn down by yet another chapter-length account of one more family member's life of struggle against the Soviet state that I was finding excuses not to continue reading.
I do feel like I'm coming away with some greater appreciation for life in mid-20th-century Russia (at least among a certain relatively privileged segment of society) and I've been introduced to some cultural touchstones, such as Okudzhava and Kharms, who could be useful to know about in another context. (Though not much specific to the Black Sea region, which is what drew me to the book in the first place.) So it was ultimately worth reading but I think I'll be more choosy about what I pick up next.
What made that worse was that so much ink was devoted to fleshing out everyone's backstories and so little to the frame narrative that it ended up feeling almost like a book of linked short stories rather than the novel it purported to be. And some of these stories were fairly engrossing, like the account of the orphaned girl whose is nearly driven to suicide by her insane grandmother, and some were tedious, like the account of the self-contained Don Juan who's amazing at everything.
Such plot as there is is driven by a romance between the orphan and the Don Juan. (The romance I was interested in, that of a middle-aged Pontic Greek divorcé and the high-strung Russian woman staying in the neighbouring cottage, is dispensed with in a few lines of the epilogue.) This has its moments, but it really only carries the last third of the book or so. By that time, was so worn down by yet another chapter-length account of one more family member's life of struggle against the Soviet state that I was finding excuses not to continue reading.
I do feel like I'm coming away with some greater appreciation for life in mid-20th-century Russia (at least among a certain relatively privileged segment of society) and I've been introduced to some cultural touchstones, such as Okudzhava and Kharms, who could be useful to know about in another context. (Though not much specific to the Black Sea region, which is what drew me to the book in the first place.) So it was ultimately worth reading but I think I'll be more choosy about what I pick up next.