Ambassador of the Dead [Hardcover]

Askold Melnyczuk (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 24, 2001

"Ambassador of the Dead is an extraordinary novel, passionately and intelligently written...Askold Melnyczuk has brought to light the flip side of the American dream shaded by the dark loneliness of the human heart."-Ha Jin, author of Waiting.

One Sunday morning, Nick Blud, a successful Boston physician, is home in bed when he receives a phone call from Ada Kruk, the mother of a boyhood friend. Ada summons Nick back to his old Ukranian-American New Jersey neighborhood, where something unspeakable has just happened-exactly what, no one is willing to say. To find out, Nick sets off on a journey through the past, his own as well as that of Ada's son, Alex, who long has struggled to escape his family's legacy of violence.

A harrowing tale about friendship and love, America and the immigrant's dream, Ambassador of the Dead introduces Ada Kruk, a mother like no other, at once Mary and Medea, Sarah and Medusa. A study of ambitions gone awry and appetites too easily gratified, this novel is also an unflinching meditation on exile and assimilation and the price of love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This tale of Ukrainian immigrants' attempts at adjustment to life in America has a dreamy affect, but its undercurrent of emotional honesty gives it bite. Nick, a Boston doctor, is drawn back to his hometown of Elizabeth, N.J., by the news that his childhood friend Alex is in trouble although he does not yet know what kind of trouble. He finds first that Alex's mother, Ada, once vibrant and attractive, is now embittered, lonely and nearly blind. Nick reminisces about his past, focusing on memories of his friend for most of the book. As a child, Alex was mischievous, but eventually became more and more wild, due in part to his father's abuse and subsequent abandonment. Throughout the novel he is agitated by society and by his own psyche, gradually losing his sanity. Melnyczuk (What Is Told) writes exceedingly well-controlled miniature narratives that begin as soft-focus reveries and develop into darker tales that confidently clinch the attention and release it just as smoothly. One of Alex's mother's early lovers seems gentle during their initial courtship, then expresses sadomasochistic desires; she pursues another failed romance with an ‚migr‚ poet. Even the story of the narrator's marriage is laced with strife: his wife confesses that she had rejected his earliest advances because he was Ukrainian and she was Jewish. The book drifts in a Proustian fashion, vividly portraying the difficulties of cultural assimilation until the jarring conclusion. Recollections that might have fizzled in another author's hands here grow luminous and haunting.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This ambitious, harrowing novel by AGNI editor Melnyczuk (What Is Told) tells of Ada Kruk, an innocent Ukrainian girl victimized by cruelty and violence during World War II. During the occupation of her homeland, Ada is brutally raped by a soldier one winter night on her way home from skating at a local pond. Soon after, her father is arrested and murdered by the occupying Nazis. The memories of these and other atrocities haunt Ada for the rest of her life long after the war ends and long after she immigrates to the United States and begins a family of her own. Battered and confused, Ada is a deeply tragic figure, and Melnyczuk tells her story with great sympathy and insight. As Ada's narrative unfolds, Melnyczuk also explores profound questions related to violence, the weight of the past, and the kind of pain from which it is impossible to recover. A very powerful and disturbing novel; recommended for all libraries. Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint Press (April 24, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582431329
• ISBN-13: 978-1582431321
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,241,259 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Askold Melnyczuk has published three novels: The House of Widows, an Editor's Choice selection of the American Library Association's Booklist, Ambassador of the Dead, a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2002 and What is Told, a New York Times Notable Book.

He has also published a novella about Rimbaud titled Blind Angel.

Melnyczuk's essay on visiting Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria was selected as a "Notable Essay" for 2008's Best American Essays and excerpts from his memoir-in-progress, Turbulence, Love were selected as "Notable Essays" in the 2010 edition of Best American Essays. He received a three-year fellowship in fiction from the Lila Wallace Foundation, as well as numerous grants from the NEA for his work as editor of AGNI magazine, which he founded in 1972. In 2001, Melnyczuk received the Magid Award from PEN which described AGNI as "one of America's, and the world's, most significant literary journals."

Melnyczuk, founder of Arrowsmith Press, has edited six books, including three volumes in Graywolf's Take Three Poetry Series, an anthology of writing from Ukraine, From Three Worlds, a volume on the painter Gerry Bergstein, and a book of essays about Father Daniel Berrigan.

He translated Girls, a novella by Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine's leading novelist and poet, as well as a selection of poems, Eight Notes from a Blue Angel, by Marjana Savka.

Other Melnyczuk work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Boston Globe, Ploughshares, Grand Street, and Poetry. He has taught at Harvard University and currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2011 he received the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Associated Writing Programs. Excerpts from Smedly, a novel in progress, may be heard on The Drum Literary Magazine website.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars PROCESSING THE SINS AND PAIN OF THE PAST, January 19, 2002

By 

Larry L. Looney (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ambassador of the Dead (Hardcover)

We are each a storehouse of the accumulative pain that we have experienced, handed down to us by our parents and other significants -- how we recognize, view and process that pain draws the boundaries of the way in which we live our lives. Some people have a tougher time dealing with their past than others -- and when, as in the case of Nick Blud, the narrator of Askold Melnyczuk's dark, rich and extremely moving novel, that pain is multiplied by the suffering endured by his parents and grandparents, it's an almost insurmountable task. To make matters even more difficult for him, his parents -- Ukranian immigrants who have made a new life in America -- are reluctant to give many details about what they experienced in WWII in their homeland. This novel chronicles Nick's journey inward and backward to fill in the gaps in his family's past and come to terms with them. There are several characters in the novel who are making this journey -- and, indeed, aren't we all, to varying degrees? Each of them has their own discoveries to make, their own ghosts to exorcize, their own truths to define. Some of them are up to the challenge -- and some of them fail in devastating ways.

The mood of Melnyczuk's novel is dark -- but the writing is very rich, expressing the desperation and hope, the pain and joy, the terror and exultation in which his characters are awash. The emotions here run strong and deep, and they are honestly -- at times brutally so -- portrayed. A premise is expressed toward the end of the novel -- and this isn't a spoiling revelation, don't worry -- about the nature of darkness and light in our lives: 'Death, a writer once observed, is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything'. We need one in order to know and appreciate the other.

I found the novel to be modrately compelling for the first 100 pages -- then it picked up steam and held me unrelentingly in its grip for the duration of the story. The characterizations are full, developed vivdly, and memorable. This is one of the more unusual tales I've come across in the last year or so -- very entertaining on one level, and very instructive on another. I'll have to check out the author's earlier novel, WHAT IS TOLD -- I'm extremely impressed with the skills and style he has shown in this book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WALKING WITH THE DEAD, November 24, 2001

By 

S. F Gulvezan (Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ambassador of the Dead (Hardcover)

The narrator of Askold Melnyczuk's masterful novel, a successful physician, thinks that to a large extent he has escaped the past - the troubled lives of his Ukranian immigrant friends - and become successfully assimilated into the American dream of upward mobility. In the course of the novel he learns that the past is not like the pages of a photo album that you can leaf through when the spirit moves you; rather, it lives within you, influences and molds you, whether you want it to or not, and can spring out at you, like a tiger crouching in the bushes outside your sunny suburban home. A difficult theme, and Melnyczuk handles it well.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WALKING WITH THE DEAD, November 24, 2001

By 

S. F Gulvezan (Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ambassador of the Dead (Hardcover)

The narrator of Askold Melnyczuk's masterful novel, a successful physician, thinks that to a large extent he has escaped the past - the troubled lives of his Ukranian immigrant friends - and become successfully assimilated into the American dream of upward mobility. In the course of the novel he learns that the past is not like the pages of a photo album that you can leaf through when the spirit moves you; rather, it lives within you, influences and molds you, whether you want it to or not, and can spring out at you, like a tiger crouching in the bushes outside your sunny suburban home. A difficult theme, and Melnyczuk handles it well.