The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight [Hardcover]

Gina Ochsner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 8, 2010

In a crumbling apartment building in post-Soviet Russia, there’s a ghost who won’t keep quiet.

Mircha fell from the roof and was never properly buried, so he sticks around to heckle the living: his wife, Azade; Olga, a disillusioned translator/censor for a military newspaper; Yuri, an army veteran who always wears an aviator’s helmet; and Tanya.

Tanya carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her observations and her dreams of finding love and escaping her job at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, a place which holds a fantastic and terrible collection of art knockoffs created using the tools at hand, from foam to chewing gum, Popsicle sticks to tomato juice. When the museum’s director hears of a mysterious American group seeking to fund art in Russia, it looks like she might get her chance at a better life, if she can only convince them of the collection’s worth. Enlisting the help of Azade, Olga and even Mircha, Tanya scrambles to save her dreams and her neighbors, and along the way discovers that love may have been waiting in her own courtyard all along.

And so in Ochsner's fable-like, magical debut, we see the transcendence of imagination. As Colum McCann has said: "[Ochsner] manages . . . to capture our sundry human moments and make raw and unforgettable music of them."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At the center of Flannery O'Conner Award–winning Ochsner's debut novel (after collection People I Wanted to Be) is a decaying five-story building in a Khrushchev-era slum whose residents navigate the absurdities of post-Soviet life by immersing themselves in dreams. There's Olga, a translator and sometimes censor at the Red Star; her idiot son, Yuri, who represses his memories of Chechnya with a perpetually worn Cosmonaut helmet; the bathroom-attendant Azade, who knows the dreams of others by the scent of their leavings; and Tanya, a hat-check girl at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum of Art, who records her dreams of clouds and air travel in a notebook. When news arrives that the museum may be eligible for a grant, Tanya and Yuri are charged with forging works of art, like Peter the Great's fetus collection and a saintly halo. Meanwhile, Olga fears her son will be forced to fight again in Chechnya. Though Ochsner struggles in places to expand and sustain the energy of her short stories, the novel benefits from its relative plotlessness by granting a rare glimpse of buoyant inner worlds that flourish through the frost. (Feb.)
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Review

"Gina Ochsner has enough imagination to cover Siberia." --Portland Mercury

"This book is poetry." --Salem Montly

"...keeping the reader from getting too comfortable are delightful, intriguing splashes of magical realism...Ochsner's fluid, poetic storytelling [conveys] dry wit and imaginative metaphors." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Grant[s] a rare glimpse of buoyant inner worlds that flourish through the frost."
--Publishers Weekly

"Gina Oschner's novel is enchanting, at once playful and poignant. With her marvelously light touch, she takes the rubble of post-Soviet Russia and turns it into gold."
--Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles and Madeleine Is Sleeping

"The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight is a hilariously absurdist and deeply resonant debut novel. Gina Ochsner transforms ordinary lives into something magical and wise and glintingly beautiful." -- Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K

“Heartbreaking and funny and deeply moving, this beautifully wrought novel matters from first word to last. This is an absolutely original book, and Gina Ochsner is like no other writer I know at work today. She is at once a fabulist and a realist, a romantic and a cold-eyed recorder of the ways we rationalize our most intimate mistakes. Her love of both the written word and of humanity at large shine through on every page, and I couldn't stop reading this tale of the living and the dead, the loved and the unloved, the powerful and the oppressed. This is magical stuff -- The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight is whimsical, ghost-riven, satirical and darkly, richly, wonderfully redeeming.”
--Bret Lott, author of Jewel and A Song I Knew by Heart

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (February 8, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618563733
• ISBN-13: 978-0618563739
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #585,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dreambook, January 31, 2010

By 

Dale - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (Hardcover)

I entered another world, a world of magical, enchanting, heartbreaking souls. As Russia moves from the darkness of a totalitarian state into the "light" of whatever this transformation yields, I found myself wondering whether it is better to live in the darkness or to die in the light. As the character Tanya says, "Suffering - if beautifully done - is an art form." Dreambook is written with great imagination and passion for humanity. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Zany, strange and alluring, April 13, 2010

By 

Jean Grant (Lawrence, Kansas USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (Kindle Edition)

This is a highly unusual book. It's full of Rabelaisian gusto, more than a touch of the magical and the macabre, and the dreams of the pure in heart in a filthy Russia where nothing works, not even the outhouses. Ochsner has a voice like no other: confident as she bounces along, but then a paragraph would stop me short and I'd start to reread it, but I wanted even more to find out what happened to her characters so I'd go on. Like an old-fashioned novel, the patient and the good are rewarded at the end--maybe too easily? As FOR the bad guys, some are REALLY bad, and come to bad ends.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 4.5 stars - This is an amazing book, but it is definitely quirky!, June 23, 2010

By 

Shellie D. Nunn "Shellie from Layers of Thought" (Scottsdale, AZ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (Hardcover)

Synopsis: Within a current day setting in Russia, with all its difficult economics and "shell shocked" population, a number of diverse individuals relay their lives via an omnipresent narrator in separate yet interrelated chapters. They all live in the same dilapidated building where the plumbing has been non existent for several months. They are coping, but it seems there is nothing they can do about the situation. Most significantly the group experiences a death of one of their fellow residents via suicide. Because the "dead guy" is not buried properly in contravention of the demands of his Muslim tradition, he haunts the others with hilarious, heart wrenching, and smelly results.

Layered within this story are the difficult and sadly comical experiences of each of the individuals. Each leading lives with a shared, conflicted yet accepting, desperation. All with differing perspectives due to varying ethnicity, age, and gender. Each are both thoughtful and dark.

As the characters are developed, the story starts to revolve around several American museum facilitators of "Russian Extraction" who will visit and determine if they are to help the Russian group and their local "handmade" museum. It is a promise of a monetary donation, but as the residents try to meet the Americans' exacting standards and try and plan out a reasonable way of showing the donators that their museum is worthy of support, that they lead normal and sane lives, havoc ensues.

My Thoughts: The above description of this book unjustly simplifies it, since there is so much more complexity within the book than can be described within three paragraphs. There were so may wonderful examples of complex and unusual word usage. I found myself laughing and amazed. The most fun aspect of the book is the way that the author seamlessly incorporates folktales, knowledge and tradition from each of the respective religious backgrounds. "Magical realism" melded with the reality of life - heartbreaking yet hopeful. The book is a linguistic mix of metaphor and imagery.

Key concepts which I found interesting within the book are the nature of truth and how cultures define what they choose to relay to the population through the media, what they hide, and who it is that decides what is shared. It is here that we see that Russians as indirect by cultural default. But we also see how frustrated and powerless they feel about their country's conflicts. Here is a wonderful example where the main character Olga struggles with her job of translating for a local newspaper, where she is required to create euphemisms for the public to read:

"Through the snow Olga trudged, dimly aware that in faraway places people spoke with purer words of unvarnished meaning. Or maybe not. Maybe at other news agencies in other countries people simply told more palatable lies. And as she rounded the corner and climbed over the remains of the broken stone archway that marked the entrance to the courtyard, she felt despair sliding down her throat, setting up quick residence in her stomach. Language was, after all, just word shaped stains, simply another way to evade and obscure the truth."

As I read, I felt the cultural angst. It was a fascinating glimpse into the Soviet psyche which I now understand is more complex than many of us realize. We find that the country has residents of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian background - all with their generalized terms and stagnant beliefs about themselves and others, not unlike the US or any other country for that matter. Here the author sums up human character via Olga:

"Olga wagged her head slowly from side to side. It never ceased to amaze her what the human animal was capable of. What great great acts of generosity and cruelty. And how a human could harbor the inclination for both within the same heart! She wished she could say it was beyond her. But it wasn't, because she felt it, too: compassion and rage, love and hate. Even good people could - and did - commit acts of cruelty. Even people like Olga. How many times had she wished Afghanistan and everyone in it would simply fall off the map?"

There are many other examples in the book which exemplify its wonderful language as well as its important concepts. It is a lovely and complex book which was originally published in Great Britain in 2009. The version I read had language appropriate for the area, and will be changed for the American audience. The quotes reflect the UK version. It did feel like a translation, however I could find no evidence of it being one.

I loved this book, and recommend it for people who enjoy unusual and creative language, metaphor and imagery, slipstream/magical realism, as well as art, art history, and cultural perspectives. I rate it at 4.5 stars. I will be looking for a hard copy of this book for my personal collection and I have also included Gina Ochsner on my list of authors to watch.