Called “the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence,” Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex became an international phenomenon when it shot to number one on the Ukrainian bestseller list and remained there throughout the 1990s. The novel is narrated in first-person streams of thought by a sharp-tongued poet with an irreverently honest voice. She is visiting professor of Slavic studies at Harvard and her exposure to American values and behaviors conspires with her yearning to break free from Ukrainian conventions. In her despair over a recently ended affair, she turns her attention to the details of her lover’s abusive behavior. In detailing the power her Ukrainian lover wielded over her, and in admitting the underlying reasons for her attraction to him, she begins to see the chains that have defined her as a Ukrainian woman – and in doing so, exposes and calls into question her country’s culture of fear and repression at the very time that it wrestled its way toward independence.
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Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Oksana Zabuzhko
First published in the Ukraine in 1996, Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex unleashed a storm of controversy and propelled the author to international fame. It topped the bestseller list in Ukraine for more than ten years, making it the most successful Ukrainian-language book of the nineties in every regard. Today Zabuzhko is one of the few authors in Ukraine (and the only Ukrainian-language writer) to make a living exclusively from her writing.
Intrigued by her success and her book, which PEN American Center has called “a brilliant, suggestive portrait of the heretofore suppressed private lives of Eastern European women,” our editors sat down with Oksana Zabuzhko for an exclusive Q&A.
Question: Your book was considered controversial for its provocative and “taboo” topics when it was first released in 1996—in many ways it provoked in the Ukraine a similar response as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique did in the United States in the 1960s. What drove you to write this book?
First published in the Ukraine in 1996, Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex unleashed a storm of controversy and propelled the author to international fame. It topped the bestseller list in Ukraine for more than ten years, making it the most successful Ukrainian-language book of the nineties in every regard. Today Zabuzhko is one of the few authors in Ukraine (and the only Ukrainian-language writer) to make a living exclusively from her writing.
Intrigued by her success and her book, which PEN American Center has called “a brilliant, suggestive portrait of the heretofore suppressed private lives of Eastern European women,” our editors sat down with Oksana Zabuzhko for an exclusive Q&A.
Question: Your book was considered controversial for its provocative and “taboo” topics when it was first released in 1996—in many ways it provoked in the Ukraine a similar response as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique did in the United States in the 1960s. What drove you to write this book?
Oksana Zabuzhko: My having been born and grown up as a woman in the Soviet Ukraine. When you turn 30, you inevitably start reconsidering what you have been taught in your formative years--that is, if you really seek your own voice as a writer. In my case, my personal identity crisis had coincided with the one experienced by my country after the advent of independence. The result turned explosive: Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, the story of one woman’s "personal revolt," provoked the top literary scandal of the decade. Now, 14 years after its first publication, the novel is regarded as a "contemporary classic," the milestone in new Ukrainian writings etc., but when I was writing it, it felt simply like a case of "write or die.”
Question: Is the book auto-biographical?
Oksana Zabuzhko: The narrator bears my first name, and was given a lot out of my own life experience. I guess Fieldwork can be called confessional literature. Of course, it is, in many ways, an autobiographical novel (and which novel is not—starting with Madame Bovary?), but it can hardly be regarded as a pure documentary, a non-fiction (no one but myself knows how many things in there are in fact “the products of the author’s imagination,” whatever this formula may stand for!). The reason for giving the narrator my first name, as well as much of my own biography (literary career, teaching at American universities, growing up under the Soviet regime in a Ukrainian dissident’s family) was at first merely intuitional—nearly all my friends who had read the manuscript suggested that I “change the names,” but I stubbornly rejected that advice. It wasn’t until the simultaneous outbursts of ecstasy and indignation came, and the reading public split into two opposing camps, that I said to myself: Hey, woman, weren’t you right! For you see, if the novel was to articulate certain things which Ukrainian literature has never articulated before, and be heard, all these dark and dirty secrets HAD to be pronounced “in the first person,” as a part of the author’s most personal existential experience. Or, to put it briefly: to win the reader’s trust, you sometimes need to pay with your own blood. In the end, that’s what literature is all about, isn’t it?
Question: How does Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex compare to your previous works?
Oksana Zabuzhko: It is generally regarded as my first "commercial book," even though I had previously published three collections of poetry, stories, and a literary study. For me, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex has become an act of my personal liberation, not the least of the linguistic kind--since with this novel I knew for sure I was a "language writer." For Ukrainian literature, it turned out to be a book which has dramatically changed the literary landscape, and brought to life a whole new generation of women authors (dubbed by critics as "Zabuzhko’s daughters").
Question: You’ve clearly had an impact on other female writers in your home country. What authors or books have influenced your writing?
Oksana Zabuzhko: I am afraid I might now confuse my own memories with the influences ascribed to me by critics (this book has been translated in some 12 countries, and from country to country the set of "the names of influence" varies). The most immediate challenge was Milan Kundera: I used to admire his skill to use sex as a tool to both portray the characters and construct the plot, yet I have always found his macho attitudes annoying. My ambition was to try a similar "sex game" on a woman’s part. This is why, of all the praise this novel has received, the one comparison which made me the happiest was a Czech review in which I was named "Lady Kundera." So, I made it work after all!
Question: Have you always wanted to write? What other careers have you pursued?
Oksana Zabuzhko: I have wanted to be an author since I was five. Only my parents' blacklisting by the KGB helped keep me from publishing in my teens. It is the only thing for which I am truly grateful to the late USSR, for there are few things as certain to destroy "a career writer" as the premature start.
In my school years, music and theater were two other strong temptations. Later I studied philosophy, and obtained a degree in the philosophy of arts. I have also taught at several universities in Ukraine and abroad (including Harvard, Penn State, and the University of Pittsburgh in the U.S.), and worked as a newspaper columnist. Since 1996, when Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was published, I have been living as a freelance writer.
Question: What's next for you?Oksana Zabuzhko: I have in my mind quite a list of things which I want yet to write about, yet, despite the fact that over the past 15 years I did manage to cross several lines off as "done," the list keeps growing. For example, while I was doing research on my recently published novel, The Museum of the Abandoned Secrets, I came upon some documents which pressed the button for long-silenced memories to surface. But I’d rather not discuss my next work until the title is set—this is one of my writing superstitions.
Amazon Exclusive: An Essay by Translator Halyna Hryn
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is an unusual work—it is not light fiction intended to entertain (although it can certainly do that); rather it is an urgent, inspired exposition of one woman’s fight to catch her bearings, land on her feet, after life had thrown her a particularly nasty curveball. At the heart of the story is a failed relationship, and here the author’s unflinching courage in dissecting the how-and-why is most gripping. What makes us love so that we overlook the abuse (and is it really abuse?) that ultimately makes our love unsustainable? What do we do with the shame? At the time and place of its initial publication (post-Soviet Ukraine, 1996), this book indeed had the effect of a bombshell, but it continues to make us uncomfortable even now. Praise and opprobrium have tended to fall along gender lines in Ukraine. It will be interesting to see the response to the English language version.
The larger story that envelops the love affair is, of course, the story of Ukraine itself, so unexpectedly liberated with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, coming to grips with its suppressed history, martyrology, searching for its identity together with the heroine. The conceit is a series of lectures in which the heroine explains herself and her country to a North American audience. The task is not easy: Zabuzhko’s sentences go on for a page or more at a time; she demands both trust and sustained effort, and it is up to each reader how far they are willing to travel along this road. Translation is not merely a matter of words: it opens windows into an entirely unfamiliar way of contemplating the world. (When you see a sports match where you don’t know the players: is your instinct to cheer for the winners or the losers? Does supporting the losers strike you as absurd?)
I have read with great interest the reader reviews that have been posted on the Amazon site. They show the full range of an intelligent reading audience and allow me to see what was successful and what was not in my own translation. The “stream of consciousness” long, pulsating sentences have frustrated some. I had decided not to destroy this basic architecture of the work in the translation, although it does do pose a challenge for both translator and reader. Word order is somewhat different in Ukrainian: in these long sentences the last word of each phrase is the crucial link to the subsequent phrase and so it must go at the end whether it’s the natural place for it in English or not, otherwise the link is broken and the edifice collapses. Hence the somewhat foreign cadence that some have noticed. Likewise with pronouns: in many European languages the verb endings make the use of personal pronouns redundant. In English, however, they need to be reinstated so that we know whether I, you, he, she, it or they “are speaking”—add the politically correct “he or she,” “him or her,” and several rounds of editors, and the final effect can be less than optimal. I appreciate all your comments and will be happy to respond to any questions.
For me, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is a thoughtful, exhilarating and ultimately brilliant literary text, and I am proud to help bring it to the English-speaking reader. I hope you will feel the same.
From the Back Cover
“Language – any language – that’s what I would call the capital love of my life: nothing else has the power to synthesize music and myth, two things without which the world would be a totally unlivable place.” – Oksana Zabuzhko
“Oksana Zabuzkho’s poetry effervesces with the joys of inwardness--irony, sorrow, compassion and that aching sense of love that ‘turns bones into flutes.’” – L.A. Times
“Oksana Zabuzhko is a well-known Ukrainian poet of the younger generation as well as a literary critic and translator. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, her debut in the genre of the novel, marks the emergence of a powerful new voice in Ukrainian belle-lettres. This work immediately strikes the reader with its novelty of form and with the original way it presents eternal issues like love, life, and creativity, intertwining them with uniquely Ukrainian themes.” – Slavic and East European Journal
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was first published in the Ukraine in 1996, unleashing a storm of controversy and propelling the author to national fame. It topped the bestseller list in Ukraine for more than ten years, making it the most successful Ukrainian-language book of the nineties in every regard. Today Oksana Zabuzhko is one of the few authors in Ukraine (and the only Ukrainian-language writer) to make a living exclusively from her writing.
“Oksana Zabuzkho’s poetry effervesces with the joys of inwardness--irony, sorrow, compassion and that aching sense of love that ‘turns bones into flutes.’” – L.A. Times
“Oksana Zabuzhko is a well-known Ukrainian poet of the younger generation as well as a literary critic and translator. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, her debut in the genre of the novel, marks the emergence of a powerful new voice in Ukrainian belle-lettres. This work immediately strikes the reader with its novelty of form and with the original way it presents eternal issues like love, life, and creativity, intertwining them with uniquely Ukrainian themes.” – Slavic and East European Journal
Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was first published in the Ukraine in 1996, unleashing a storm of controversy and propelling the author to national fame. It topped the bestseller list in Ukraine for more than ten years, making it the most successful Ukrainian-language book of the nineties in every regard. Today Oksana Zabuzhko is one of the few authors in Ukraine (and the only Ukrainian-language writer) to make a living exclusively from her writing.
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More About the Author
Oksana Zabuzhko was born in 1960 in Ukraine. She made her poetry debut at the age of 12, yet, because her parents had been blacklisted during the Soviet purges of the 1970s, it was not until the perestroika that her first book was published. She graduated from the department of philosophy of Kyiv Shevchenko University, obtained her PhD in philosophy of arts, and has spent some time in the USA lecturing as a Fulbright Fellow and a Writer-in-Residence at Penn State University, Harvard University, and University of Pittsburgh. After the publication of her novel "Field Work in Ukrainian Sex" (1996), which in 2006 was named "the most influential Ukrainian book for the 15 years of independence", she has been living in Kiev as a free-lance author. She has authored 17 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Among her numerous acknowledgments are the Global Commitment Foundation Poetry Prize (1997), MacArthur Grant (2002), Antonovych International Foundation Prize (2008), the Ukrainian National Award, the Order of Princess Olha (2009), and many other national awards.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
The first sentence in this novel is six words long: "Not today, she says to herself." The rest of the page, 265 words more, is the second. It takes a total of only thirty-three sentences to carry the reader though the first ten pages. That tells you something about the book. It's highly unconventional in its structure and syntax, it's written by a poet, and it reads something close to `stream of consciousness.' Does it work here? Yes, it does, for Zabuzhko has an original voice and she writes of experiences common to more women than we men would like to admit exist.
As much as anything, this book is a long letting loose of emotion following a sexually intense but ultimately abusive relationship with a painter named Mykhola. She knew Mykhola was trouble the first time she met him. As he talked to her, setting up his later seduction of her, he casually twisted her fingers back almost to the breaking point, establishing his dominance of her while inflicting gratuitous pain. Later he progressed to verbal abuse and threats and he burned her with cigarettes. Hyper-charged fragments of Zabuzhko's poetry are interspersed throughout the book, providing counterpoint to the story of sexual enthrallment and abuse she is telling:
Something has shifted in the world:
someone was crying
Out my name at night as though
from a torture chamber
And someone rustled leaves on the porch,
Tossed and turned, and could not fall asleep:
I was learning the lessons of parting....
Zabuzhko flings out one metaphor after another, writing prose like a poet writes poetry. Some of them work, some don't, but the effect builds up, creating a dense, allusive, emotionally intent portrait of a woman and what has befallen her in a doomed relationship. (Zabuzhko's troubles don't end with the painter. She wants to be seen as a person but repeatedly falls into relationships where she is diminished.) The rush of poetized language she creates is a kind of hyperbolic venting. Some passages fail: overwritten, clunkiy, awkward use of imagery. Why, for instance, on page 15, does "we" transmute into "his or her" twice over, in the same passage, and why use "its own life" when the pronoun signifies not an `it,' but "hundreds of men"? But these are trivial excesses, or errors, in a book that deliberately courts disaster on every page, but by virtue of the poet's clearheaded view of herself and her control of her language, never stops moving forward, and ultimately, creates a wholly original and highly affecting portrait of the complicated creature that was Oksana Zabuzhko in her mid-thirties, when this novel was written.
****
SECOND THOUGHTS After reading Roger Brunyate's correspondence with me concerning the book, I began having second thoughts about having assigned the book five stars so I reread large chunks of it. I think Roger is right: it is too uneven to merit five stars. So I have changed my rating to four stars. I still believe it is highly original and it will probably be one of the handful of books I will recommend to friends at the end of the year.
Part of the reason is the theme running through it that can roughly be summarized as follows: I come from a nation with a long history of oppression, moral and well as political; oppression bleeds away the sense of joy; sex without joy cannot long endure as love; thus my country's history of oppression, and the oppression with which I grew up have robbed me of love, making crucial forms of emotional authenticity and personal identity problematic for me. This is also the theme lying beneath Milan Kundera's phenomenal The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by the way. I'm no expert on eastern European literature (and psyches) but in 2009, I reviewed a memoir by a Bulgarian poet, Kapka Kassabova, entitled Street Without a Name. Both Zabuzhko and Kassabova point to ways that their separate countries' histories of oppression deformed the people. Street Without a Name, by the way, is a fascinating read, and at times, hilariously funny. And Kundera's Book is, in my mind, one of the best, if not THE best, book he has written.
As much as anything, this book is a long letting loose of emotion following a sexually intense but ultimately abusive relationship with a painter named Mykhola. She knew Mykhola was trouble the first time she met him. As he talked to her, setting up his later seduction of her, he casually twisted her fingers back almost to the breaking point, establishing his dominance of her while inflicting gratuitous pain. Later he progressed to verbal abuse and threats and he burned her with cigarettes. Hyper-charged fragments of Zabuzhko's poetry are interspersed throughout the book, providing counterpoint to the story of sexual enthrallment and abuse she is telling:
Something has shifted in the world:
someone was crying
Out my name at night as though
from a torture chamber
And someone rustled leaves on the porch,
Tossed and turned, and could not fall asleep:
I was learning the lessons of parting....
Zabuzhko flings out one metaphor after another, writing prose like a poet writes poetry. Some of them work, some don't, but the effect builds up, creating a dense, allusive, emotionally intent portrait of a woman and what has befallen her in a doomed relationship. (Zabuzhko's troubles don't end with the painter. She wants to be seen as a person but repeatedly falls into relationships where she is diminished.) The rush of poetized language she creates is a kind of hyperbolic venting. Some passages fail: overwritten, clunkiy, awkward use of imagery. Why, for instance, on page 15, does "we" transmute into "his or her" twice over, in the same passage, and why use "its own life" when the pronoun signifies not an `it,' but "hundreds of men"? But these are trivial excesses, or errors, in a book that deliberately courts disaster on every page, but by virtue of the poet's clearheaded view of herself and her control of her language, never stops moving forward, and ultimately, creates a wholly original and highly affecting portrait of the complicated creature that was Oksana Zabuzhko in her mid-thirties, when this novel was written.
****
SECOND THOUGHTS After reading Roger Brunyate's correspondence with me concerning the book, I began having second thoughts about having assigned the book five stars so I reread large chunks of it. I think Roger is right: it is too uneven to merit five stars. So I have changed my rating to four stars. I still believe it is highly original and it will probably be one of the handful of books I will recommend to friends at the end of the year.
Part of the reason is the theme running through it that can roughly be summarized as follows: I come from a nation with a long history of oppression, moral and well as political; oppression bleeds away the sense of joy; sex without joy cannot long endure as love; thus my country's history of oppression, and the oppression with which I grew up have robbed me of love, making crucial forms of emotional authenticity and personal identity problematic for me. This is also the theme lying beneath Milan Kundera's phenomenal The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by the way. I'm no expert on eastern European literature (and psyches) but in 2009, I reviewed a memoir by a Bulgarian poet, Kapka Kassabova, entitled Street Without a Name. Both Zabuzhko and Kassabova point to ways that their separate countries' histories of oppression deformed the people. Street Without a Name, by the way, is a fascinating read, and at times, hilariously funny. And Kundera's Book is, in my mind, one of the best, if not THE best, book he has written.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
the modern circuitous literary novel with a tradition all its own, at least since ford maddox ford's Good Soldier, a sufficient length of time to have become a genre, should cause wonder why a novel this well written, entertaining, and evocative of so many literary luminaries, published in the ukraine in 1994, written in pittsburgh with the speed of light in less than four months, took so long to find a way to readers of english. experimentalism and a depressed character are not the answers. had there been a translator of the ukrainian language ready to take on the task, we would not be getting the news so late.
the telling of a love story on the skids. she's a poet and professor and he's a painter. they knew each other in kyiv, ukraine. she arrived in cambridge, mass first, a year later he followed. the relationship did not work out. there's life in the usa to blame, there's ukraine, there's her childhood, there's her father's past of a slave's existence under soviet rule.
clotted words, a slow onrush of run on sentences. paragraphs open to close pages later. the narrator, switches voice when speaking about herself from first person to third person, scarcely signaling, running her novella length monologue without chapter break willy nilly present to past, scenes spoken as remembered, as they make sense, as they fit her depression, cambridge, kyiv, jerusalem. picking up speed, her tone keens and screams like lina wertmueller films, like jazz novels by black writers in the 60s and 70s, hushed from literary memory (find clarence major's All-Night Visitors and carlene hatcher polite's The Flagellants, for examples).
so many similarities between oksana the narrator and oksana the author of Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, philip roth's The Counterlife is never far from thought: where does fact end and fiction begin?
within the pages, oksana reads toni morrison and garcia marquez, and she paraphrases the first lines of Ecclesiastes and The Dunio Elegies. like most cosmopolitans, she remains loyal to her homeland: `...the Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you, and that all of our hapless literature is merely a cry of someone pinned down by a beam in a building after an earthquake - I'm here! I'm still alive! - but unfortunately, the rescue teams are taking their time ...'
so much goes wrong in life, but she endures and observes in small rooms and the spaces of the place, the country, everyone wants to come to: ...the open expanse, prairies without cowboys, a light taste of madness, which flickers among the nighttime flashes of billboards: the mind, frightened of its own creation, because this civilization is entirely man-made and that's why you've got the somnambulant's aching longing of the saxophone, poured like the light of the moon over the desert, the ... voice of a jazz-club singer, which pulls your soul out of your body with each languorous twist: I'm alone in this big city ... we are all alone here, free and alone, it's wonderful - to build your life on your own, it's frightening - to build your life on your own, you'll see up close the faces brought together, the hues and tints ... ` and all the rest of it.
the author, oksana zabuzhko, in interview accepts the comparison of her work to that of milan kundera. from this side of the ocean, to start with, we might suggest jack kerouac.
the telling of a love story on the skids. she's a poet and professor and he's a painter. they knew each other in kyiv, ukraine. she arrived in cambridge, mass first, a year later he followed. the relationship did not work out. there's life in the usa to blame, there's ukraine, there's her childhood, there's her father's past of a slave's existence under soviet rule.
clotted words, a slow onrush of run on sentences. paragraphs open to close pages later. the narrator, switches voice when speaking about herself from first person to third person, scarcely signaling, running her novella length monologue without chapter break willy nilly present to past, scenes spoken as remembered, as they make sense, as they fit her depression, cambridge, kyiv, jerusalem. picking up speed, her tone keens and screams like lina wertmueller films, like jazz novels by black writers in the 60s and 70s, hushed from literary memory (find clarence major's All-Night Visitors and carlene hatcher polite's The Flagellants, for examples).
so many similarities between oksana the narrator and oksana the author of Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, philip roth's The Counterlife is never far from thought: where does fact end and fiction begin?
within the pages, oksana reads toni morrison and garcia marquez, and she paraphrases the first lines of Ecclesiastes and The Dunio Elegies. like most cosmopolitans, she remains loyal to her homeland: `...the Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you, and that all of our hapless literature is merely a cry of someone pinned down by a beam in a building after an earthquake - I'm here! I'm still alive! - but unfortunately, the rescue teams are taking their time ...'
so much goes wrong in life, but she endures and observes in small rooms and the spaces of the place, the country, everyone wants to come to: ...the open expanse, prairies without cowboys, a light taste of madness, which flickers among the nighttime flashes of billboards: the mind, frightened of its own creation, because this civilization is entirely man-made and that's why you've got the somnambulant's aching longing of the saxophone, poured like the light of the moon over the desert, the ... voice of a jazz-club singer, which pulls your soul out of your body with each languorous twist: I'm alone in this big city ... we are all alone here, free and alone, it's wonderful - to build your life on your own, it's frightening - to build your life on your own, you'll see up close the faces brought together, the hues and tints ... ` and all the rest of it.
the author, oksana zabuzhko, in interview accepts the comparison of her work to that of milan kundera. from this side of the ocean, to start with, we might suggest jack kerouac.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
The title of this brilliant and blistering novel led me to expect humor. Wrong, mostly. (There is that side-splitting taxi ride with an illiterate Pakistani who can't follow a map or spoken instruction ...)
A reader barely has time to catch a breath in the course of the unrelenting stream of consciousness narrative of an expat Ukrainian woman, child of the Soviet enslavement of her homeland, writer and lover, contemplating suicide as the logical extrapolation of authorship. Page-long parenthetical descriptions cascade between snippets of poetry as the author explores the attractions and repulsions of a damaged and damaging love affair, the lure of danger and its rootedness in her relationship with her parents: a stymied academic mother whose career was wrecked by the dissident father, shipped to the Gulag,and blacklisted on release. We are witness to the psychological demolition of a nation and its repercussions in the generations that ensue, the mental starvation that accompanied the famine of 1933, and the pervasive hopelessness that still lingered in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.
The book partakes of both Virginia Woolf and Kurt Vonnegut, the first for its themes of relational discord and suicidal leanings, the latter for his dark view of 20th century history. A brilliant first novel, this was published in the Ukraine in 1996 and is only now available in English. Absolutely breathtaking.
A reader barely has time to catch a breath in the course of the unrelenting stream of consciousness narrative of an expat Ukrainian woman, child of the Soviet enslavement of her homeland, writer and lover, contemplating suicide as the logical extrapolation of authorship. Page-long parenthetical descriptions cascade between snippets of poetry as the author explores the attractions and repulsions of a damaged and damaging love affair, the lure of danger and its rootedness in her relationship with her parents: a stymied academic mother whose career was wrecked by the dissident father, shipped to the Gulag,and blacklisted on release. We are witness to the psychological demolition of a nation and its repercussions in the generations that ensue, the mental starvation that accompanied the famine of 1933, and the pervasive hopelessness that still lingered in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.
The book partakes of both Virginia Woolf and Kurt Vonnegut, the first for its themes of relational discord and suicidal leanings, the latter for his dark view of 20th century history. A brilliant first novel, this was published in the Ukraine in 1996 and is only now available in English. Absolutely breathtaking.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Reading this frenetically paced, in your face tale about Ukrainian...
When I chose this book, I wish I'd paid more attention to the word "sex" and less to "Ukrainian," which I focused on because my ethnic German ancestors lived for several... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Julee Rudolf
2.0 out of 5 stars
a disappoinment for me
I have to admit that I had high hopes and maybe this is partly why I am quite disappointed by "Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex". Read more
Published 11 months ago by Aleksandra Nita-Lazar
3.0 out of 5 stars
Prose or poetry?
I was somewhat baffled when I started to read this book, as the author's style (perhaps it is the translation? Read more
Published 12 months ago by L. Allen
1.0 out of 5 stars
Five points for the translation
The translation by Halyna Hryn (and for the effort it must have cost) deserves five stars.
Otherwise, this is an appalling novel by a self-absorbed, drama-seeking,... Read more
Otherwise, this is an appalling novel by a self-absorbed, drama-seeking,... Read more
Published 15 months ago by natpaw
2.0 out of 5 stars
Maybe you just have to be Ukrainian to appreciate it.
The modern classic of the Ukraine! A fresh voice from a fresh corner of world literature! Boy did I want to appreciate this book. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Lydia K.
3.0 out of 5 stars
This is a literary classic . . . in the Ukraine.
I have kept wanting to like this book. It was first published in the Ukraine in 1996 & was a best seller there for ten years. Read more
Published 20 months ago by R. A. Frauenglas
4.0 out of 5 stars
EXCELLENT writing.
Full disclosure: I have not yet finished this novel.
But so far, it is amazing. Brilliant writing, relate-able and sympathetic characters and compelling story make this novel... Read more
But so far, it is amazing. Brilliant writing, relate-able and sympathetic characters and compelling story make this novel... Read more
Published 22 months ago by Roselynde Barrow
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gut-renching, brutally emotional
Maybe it's because I'm a student of Russian & Eastern European literature (and Russian language), but I found Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex to be an incredibly captivating read. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Stephan Nance
2.0 out of 5 stars
Painful stream of consciousness
I tried. I really tried to finish this book. I read some of the other reviewer's opinions to try and find the energy to read five more pages, four, three, even one more, seeking to... Read more
Published 22 months ago by Amateur curmudgeon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Burden of a slavic soul
This is a very unique piece of literary work from a writer whose background is in philosophy. For a slim book of only 150 pages, it is an amazing dissection of the life and love... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Reader
