Seaman writes one of the most accurate descriptions of the book I’ve read:

Strange things are happening in the rugged Riphean Mountains in this rambunctious novel of Russian society 100 years after the revolution, winner of the Russian Booker Prize. Slavnikova’s imaginary mountains, which resemble the Urals where she grew up, harbor mischievous spirits protecting deep veins of rubies that attract two unlikely rock hounds, the impervious professor Anfilogov and his humble, steel-toothed conspirator, Kolyan. As Slavnikova’s high-strung, stubbornly romantic narrator, Krylov, a down-and-out historian turned gem cutter, sees them off at the train station, he falls in love with a stranger. Their affair is so clandestine they don’t know each other’s names or why they’re being followed. more

I’ve already mentioned Kyle Semmel’s wonderful review for Three Percent, and now there are also reviews in Russian Life, ForeWord Reviews, and New York Journal of Books.

It’s hard not to think of twentieth-century Russian history as you crack open 2017, Olga Slavnikova’s Russian Booker Prize winning novel. The year 2017 will mark, of course, the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which culminated in the collapse of the Czarist autocracy and gave rise to the Soviet Union. It’s against this backdrop that readers enter this novel: a pot brimming with precious stones, a dash of spy novel intrigue, and a raw-to-the-bone social critique bubbling and boiling in a dense, evocative stew.

Excuse the metaphor. This is not a novel of food—far from it. But 2017 is a novel that asks you to savor it slowly, bite by bite. Translator Marian Schwartz, one of the most accomplished Russian translators working today—who has translated the works of Nina Berberova, Edvard Radzinsky, and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others—has recreated Slavnikova’s dense novel in a smooth, eminently enjoyable English text. Passages describing the craft of obscure trades like gemcutting or rock-hounding flow from sentence to sentence with ease, making the translation seem effortless.

To read the rest, go straight to Three Percent, the blog for international literature out of the University of Rochester, or click here.

The roundtable also includes Edward Gauvin, translator of French graphic novels filmscripts; Michael Emmerich, translator of young Japanese writers; and Martha Tennent, who translates Catalan literature.

This event is free and open to the public.

Reading the World Conversation Series is supported by the Open Letter, a literary press at the University of Rochester; the College of Arts, Sciences and Engineering; the Humanities Project; and the Friends of the Library. For information, call (585) 319-0823 or visit www.openletterbooks.org.

When and where: 5:00 to 6:30 pm, at the Rush Rhees Library, Plutzik Library, University of Rochester