Customer Reviews

Memoirs of a Muse: A Novel

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Lara Varnyar brings here European and Russian traditions of Great Art of Literature. This book is deep and touching. It is charming, witty and encourages you to think. You'll find the reflection of your own self in Lara's characters and you'll sense the connection between the author and her subject...
This book is a test of reader's taste. If you are looking for an easy page-turner packed with Hollywood-style plots, you may be disappointed, but intellectual and demanding person will undoubtly enjoy it.

I picked up an advanced copy of this novel and finished it in a few hours. The story of a Russian immigrant searching for a purpose and direction for her life touched me deeply. References to dead Russian writers and their muses pulled past and present together. I deeply identified with the heroine's struggle to belong in a new culture. I highly recommend this book!

In "Memoirs of a Muse," Vapnyar challenges us to step outside ourselves and see the American Dream through the eyes of Tanya, a bookish Russian Jew. Her dream is steeped in her peculiar background idealizing, and even fantasizing about, the classic Russian writers of the 19th Century, most notably Dostoevsky. One of the book's pleasures is Vapnyar's recreation of that time and her ability to get into the skin of Dostoevsky and his muse Polina Suslova. She deftly conveys the competing feelings in each character: Polina idolizes the great writer while she is disgusted by him; Dostoevsky treats Polina like a groupie but realizes her positive influence on his writing. Tanya follows in her footsteps a century later, eschewing the more materialistic inclinations of her relatives to seek greatness in becoming the muse to a great man. Her lack of familiarity with her new language and culture seal her fate. The book reads like a tragicomedy. In Tanya's story we see reflections of how our ideals of happiness are often based on illusions, and life's penchant for slapping us back to reality.

Memoirs of a Muse is a kindhearted and bittersweet coming-of-age tale of a young Russian girl who suffers from a type of cultural and sexual dissonance. When we first meet her, Tanya Rumer is growing up in Soviet Russia, and as the great Empire comes apart, Tanya spends most of her youth tending to her feeble grandmother whilst her mother works to support them all.

Tanya is an ordinary girl, an underachiever at school; she lacks the obvious conventional talents. Her initial disparateness, however, is tempered by a fierce imagination. As a girl, she's drawn to her grandmother's tales about her family's connection to the famous author Dostoevsky, and in her eyes he appears as a bright and sinister character, almost a fairy-tale villain.

Tanya eventually forms a crush on an older teacher and hopes he will seduce her on a school camping trip. She begins to fantasize that he is like the dead old writers whose works she studies in class, Gogol, Chekhov - and of course Dostoevsky, the "graying hair, prominent foreheads, the knowing eyes," and she begins to see herself as type a muse, "a companion to older artistic, literary men." She needs a Prince who would save her from being a "potato-peeling Cinderella" and turn her "into a Princess/bad girl."

Tanya's fantasies prove to be somewhat prophetic, for she is granted an escape from Russia in the shape of a white envelope from the US Immigration. Now transplanted to New York, her life is suddenly distorted, leaving her facing an enigmatic future. Her world is turned upside down, as this very adventurous Russian is set wandering through a city of strangers with only her eccentric family for help.

Tanya thinks she's escaped reality by leaving Russia, but in fact, she enters a worse reality, filled with humiliating jobs, separate bank accounts, prenup agreements and the smell of cooked salmon. Eventually she meets Mark Schneider, a selfish, snobbish and overly fussy B-grade writer. Blinded to Mark's faults, she begins to entertain the idea of being his muse - and buoyed by the diary she reads detailing Dostoevsky's affair with his mistress Polina - Tanya decides to move in with him.

Wined and dined with everything paid for, Tanya soon realizes that Mark is nothing like her Russian literary idol. Fastidious to the point of frustration, she begins to realize he's a pale glimmer of what she first thought. She used to dream of the "old-bearded writer coming to her bed," but Mark, with his paunchy stomach, graying hair on his chest, and the anxious eyes of a chubby little boy - couldn't be further from her fantasies.

Author Lara Vapnyar beautifully recounts Tanya's unsullied dream of finding Mr. Right, a modern day Dostoevsky, but having to cope with dashed and unfulfilled hopes whilst doing so. Her journey is testament to the fact that dreams from time to time never turn out the way we want them to be. Tanya builds dream castle of Mark based on illusion and hope, then she gets to know him and the illusion crashes and the hopes go.

Whilst Mark sees Tanya as a vulnerable foreigner, exotic, young and different, his initial attempt at intimacy, and the warm confessions, masquerade as a smooth, well-rehearsed performance. He never tries to be close to her; he just wants to listen and be admired. Tanya's altruism and the need for her to be loved is swamped Mark's smugness, especially his conviction that people are there to serve only him.

A charming exploration of sex, intimacy and feminine intuition, Memoirs of a Muse captures the heart of what it means to be a woman, who is awakening sexually and emotionally. Tanya's whole life prior to meeting Mark, was series of predetermined and interconnected steps all leading her to becoming a writer's muse.

As she reads about the young Polina, Tanya is gradually transformed and filled with a cavernous, impalpable yearning. Unfortunately, her subsequent search for this connection doesn't really quell her longing. Tanya learns the hard lesson - while geniuses create art through struggling and suffering, ordinary people are habitually consumed by it and are often left with the remnants, to feed off the geniuses troubled mind. Mike Leonard June 06.

Tanya lives in Moscow with her professor mother upon whose bedroom wall is an array of pictures of the greats of Russian literature. The young Tanya is fascinated by the portrait of Dosstoyevsky. She spends her time reading about him and is especially fascinated by his stormy relationship with the charismatic yet difficult Polina Suslova Dostoyevsky's mistress. When Polina ends their relatioinship Dostoyevsky marries an unpreposssing girl, Anna Grigorievna, 24 years his junior. Anna is placid of temperament, tending to the needs of the great writer. Young Tanya decides it is her destiny to be the muse of a great man, to be the spark that ignites his great female characters as Polina did for Dostoyevsky.

Tanya is an attractive but otherwise unremarkable student who receives her college degree in history writing on such topics as the history of Russian makeup, and breakfast in ancient Rome. After having graduated she receives an opportunity to go to New York to live with her aunt and uncle, poor emigres trying to make lives for themselves and fit into the alien American culture. Finally her chance to be a muse comes when she meets Mark, a published writer at a reading in an upper West Side bookstore.

The much older Mark is a classic narcissist. He has little interest in Tanya's thoughts, memories even her sexual pleasure. She spends her days tending to his needs, waiting to inspire Mark to begin a new novel. In the process she abandons a career or even just a job and is being 'kept' by Mark as her professor mother reminds her during phone calls to Moscow. But as the years go on Tanya begins to suspect that something is wrong with their relationship. When Mark begins to write a new novel, and Tanya discovers in a biography of Dostoyevsky Mark's real thoughts about her, her belief in the importance of being a muse begins to unravel.

Although the progress of the relationship with Mark is predictable the juxtaposition of the relationship between Dostoyevsky and Polina, Dostoyevsky and Anna and Tanya's own life makes for an engrossing story. Along the way Vapnyar provides insights into the difficulties of the immigrant experience and what it means to lose one's sense of self in another. This is Vapnyar's first novel. She is a fine writer to be watched.

Vapnyar is one of those writers who is able to write in a way that transports readers to the scene - I felt, I smelled, I heard, I giggled... I couldn't put the book down.

This is a story of a Russian girl with a rich imagination and a longing for a life that is lived "to the utmost degree!". "But now I was fifteen, and that long-anticipated extraordinary talent still hadn't emerged. My many gifts rattled about like cheap jewelry in a sequined bag - there wasn't a single gemstone. Now what kind of fulfilling life could the likes of me lead?" Her language is honest and sincere (with ought being rude or shocking) and puts the story on a very intimate and familiar level.

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Ms. Vapnyar constructs lovely sentences of well-chosen words. The main story is juxtaposed with a fabricated diary of Dostoevsky's mistress, whom the heroine, Tanya, of "Memoirs" admires. The entire book is set in Simoncini Garamond, but a second typeface would have served well to delineate between Tanya's writing and the 19th Century diaries of Polina. (This book was published by Mark Z. Danielewski's house, Pantheon Books. They *know* about typeface changes!)

"Memoirs" would have been an excellent piece of short fiction, but it's been padded at the beginning with 88 pages of narrative about the female protagonist's childhood which does nothing for the story. This is almost half of the 212-page book. The second half of the book is much better than the first 88 pages.

"If I'm asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say:
I have slept with Hank Rearden. I had earned it."
Dagny Taggart in "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand

The primary goal of a modern feminism, post suffragist movement, is to overthrow a notion that a woman's worth is determined by a man she can get. Only a true fourth wave man-hating dyke on the margins of a womankind would subscribe to this idea. The rest of the best of us are looking for a man that will validate our ostentatious views of ourselves. But there is a fine line between earning a worthy man to share your body with and pursuing a man through whom one can justify its own existence.
The book "Memoirs of a Muse" by Lara Vapnyar is written in simple, yet elegant prose, simultaneously funny, sad and intelligent. It is a story of a young woman, Tanya, whose only aspiration in life is to become a muse for a reputable writer. She equates herself with Dostoyevsky's lover Appolinaria Suslova, a prototype for a number of women in Dostoyevsky's masterpieces, who neither achieved happiness in her own life, nor brought it to the great Russian writer. Tanya succeeds in finding a suitable man (Mark), considerably older than her, who had published a number of critically acclaimed novels. She moves into Mark's flat, providing him with sex and household chores, and keeping a diary of his daily activities, while he embarks on writing a new novel.
Tanya doesn't physically love Mark, she has to fake orgasms (whether Mark is not adept enough, or she is utterly repulsed by him); the only thing that keeps her from leaving Mark is a dream of forever associating her name with a famous writer. Who would remember Appolinaria Suslova without Dostoyevsky?
As the time passes by, Tanya starts realizing that in her quest of becoming a Muse, and therefore, endorsing her feelings of self-importance, she settled for being a care-taker, not a very flattering role; and not only she doesn't love Mark, but is not loved in return. He is nothing more than a repository of her hopes and dreams; she finds it hard to abandon her mission when she invested so heavily into it.
In the end, the heroine chooses a direction different from Appolinaria's, since a life with a decent man without great literary gifts is simpler, yet happier than with a talented, but egotistic and self-absorbed man.
Tanya's marriage to an engineer functions as a happy end, if one omits an interesting detail: toward the end of the book, in order for our heroine to extricate herself from a position of Mark's concierge, she reads his newly finished book and finds it thoroughly lacking. That gives Tanya strength to leave. She would not have found enough resolve had he written a masterpiece. Appolinaria's downfall was becoming a mistress of Dostoevsky and not of some obscure 19th century writer that nobody remembers or reads. The book is not a treatise on how to find happiness, but a tribute to a genius. (This is a very forced conclusion; the author would most likely disagree).
Appolinaria carried on her bleak affair with Dostoevsky, a married and emotionally detached man, who never satisfied her physically, "for he touched her perfect body with his mind". (Leonard Cohen, "Suzanne")

Imagine deciding to become a muse to a famous author when you grow up! That is just what Tatiana (Tanya) Rumer does in this very readable, comic and original novel. The problem is that Tanya craves to become a bad girl muse rather a good girl one. Her model is Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, Fedor Dostoevsky's muse. She vows to become like Polina and never like the "devoted, calm, domesticated" Anna Grigorievna, Dostoevsky's wife.

Unfortunately for Tanya, things do not go as planned with her writer, but there is a wonderful suprise ending for her ambition. This is a charming story with a twist of Russian irony.

Growing up in Russia before the collapse, Tanya discovered Dostoyevsky and more significant the great writer's muse. Moving with her mom the professor to Brighton beach Brooklyn, Tanya concluded that Dostoyevsky's muse was his mistress Polina, who became part of The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot; the second wife Anna was a secretary stenographer, but obviously no inspiration. Tanya decides her goal in life is to be the motivation to a great novelist.

She meets writer Mark Schneider at a book gala and decides he is the one. They have an affair, but as she notes in her "Memoirs of a Muse" he seems more preoccupied with physically working out, sex, and partying than in writing. Tanya's begins to reconsider whether she selected the wrong author or perhaps her role as she studies further the influence of Dostoyevsky's muse.

This is a terrific character study told mostly by Tanya with an intermingling look at Dostoyevsky's life. Tanya is a delight from her deep understanding about cosmetics in tsarist Russia to her belief that she is somebody's muse. Part amusing satire and part a serious look at roles in interrelationships, fans who enjoy a well written refreshingly unique tale, will want to read MEMOIRS OF A MUSE.

Harriet Klausner