Customer Reviews

The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

The Russian Dreambook takes place in post-Soviet Perm, Russia. The story is centered around one dilapidated apartment building and the poverty-stricken people living inside of it. These characters' interactions with each other is largely what the novel is about, with very long introspective passages from most of the characters about their dreams, burdens, and lives.

This novel plays with magical realism and does it in, I would say, a successful way. It's interwoven with reality in such a tangible way that it is almost believable. A ghost comes back to drink vodka and mock those he mocked while he was living? Why not!

She also has quite a few very beautiful lines, in both describing the setting but also within her characters' minds, like this one:

"Though Azade had smelled the upside-down dreams of bats and the warm and weedy dreams of eels, nothing
reeked as much as the dreams of humans." p. 192

Each character has their own inner demons, weaknesses, and broken dreams. At the end of the story, none of that has changed. Their lives are mostly the same (except they ran off all the evil characters, Mircha, Vitek, and Zoya) and are more comfortable with themselves and each other.

I must admit that it took genuine effort to get through this novel. While it was interesting and the language beautifully and creatively written, it's just a tough book to get through. Most of it is written in long, introspective chapters without much action. I also found the "bad" characters to be extremely flat and underdeveloped which caused them to play simple villian roles, which stood out in a book as complex as this one.

To read more of this review, and other reviews of modern fiction, go to: [...]

This is what I enjoyed..the voice is like nothing I've ever read before. The feel is of being in a daydream where you are laden by consciousness but imagining things freely. The book does deliver on some very profound real thoughts and I found myself wondering about things like lack of political support for arts, the folly of war, and negligence toward children, while inside the amusing comforts of a colorful dreamscape. The Russian characters live far off in Perm that is without modern comforts but their harsh plights are delicately woven with whimsical situations and poetic musings. "When the very earth beneath your feet could not be trusted, what then? Certainly she could not write what she knew to be true: that the ground they lived on had been completely over-mined and under supported." Hmmm? Why not just color it with imaginings and ghosts, and float beyond it in different perspectives then? It was a lovely journey!

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.

This is what happened when author never was in Perm and have no idea what she is doing..
This is what happened when the only source of information were conversation with russian-speaking (read-NON RUSSIANS)..
This is what happened when author tried to "create" and do not care about result
Russian - american,former permiak (person from Perm city)