Maidenhair, by Mikhail Shishkin
Maidenhair
by Mikhail Shishkin
Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
Open Letter Books, 2012
Finalist for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award
Named one of “50 Must-Reads of Slavic Literature,” by Leah Rachel von Essen at Book Riot
Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter—the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise—and tell of the atrocities they’ve suffered, or that they’ve invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter’s own reading: a history of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son “Nebuchadnezzasaurus,” ruler of a distant, imaginary childhood empire; and the diaries of a Russian singer who lived through Russia’s wars and revolutions in the early part of the twentieth century, and eventually saw the Soviet Union’s dissolution.
Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is an instant classic of Russian literature. It bravely takes on the eternal questions—of truth and fiction, of time and timelessness, of love and war, of Death and the Word—and is a movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life and its uncountable joys
PRAISE FOR THE TRANSLATION
"Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair is the type of novel that professors of Russian literature can hold up as a shining example in their classrooms that no, Russian literature is not dead (nor has it ever been), while those who might not know their Pushkin from their Shishkin can read and enjoy Maidenhair as a standalone work of literary brilliance; while at the same time the notoriously fickle American readers who might have read Anna Karenina when Oprah's Book Club made their recommendation or stumbled upon and enjoyed Master & Margarita can sink their mindsteeth into Marian Schwartz's incredible translation of Shishkin's novel and marvel in the fact that Maidenhair harkens back to the great classic Russian novels of ideas in every way." -- Will Evans
“Shishkin’s language— artfully translated by Marian Schwartz— is a delightful pastiche of many storytelling genres: hard-boiled detective fiction, biblical language, fantasy, historical realism, philosophical discourse.” — Victoria Zhuang, Harvard Review Online
REVIEWS
Slightly Bookist
Edmonton Journal
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