Vita Nostra

Vita Nostra / Marina & Sergey Dyachenko
trans. from Russian by Julia Meitov Hersey
NY: Harper Voyager, c2018
416 p.

Today's read is by a duo of authors, a wife and husband team -- Marina & Sergey Dyachenko. They have written quite a number of books together, but Marina noted in an interview that this one might be her favourite.

I'm so glad it was translated because it was a great read. It started out like a YA novel, with a teenage girl as the main character, encountering a strange man while on vacation who tells her she is special. I was dubious. But I kept on and by about chapter three I was hooked.

Sasha Samokhina must perform incomprehensible tasks given to her by Farit Kozhennikov -- to swim naked in sea exactly at the same time every day, or to take a daily run in the park on schedule once she's returned home. For every day that she completes her task correctly, she receives a strange gold coin, via throwing it up later. The tasks are testing her discipline, obedience and stamina. 

And when she finishes her high school studies and is applying to colleges, Farit Kozhennikov tells her that her gold coins are the entrance to the Institute of Special Technologies, a distant college in a nowhere town, where she will be studying. This is not a suggestion.

This is where the book really picks up. Sasha heads out to Torpa to attend school, against her mother and stepfather's wishes -- it's so far away! They don't know anything about it! How will she make the right connections to get a job there! But she's determined. One of the reasons for this is that the instructors at Torpa, Farit Kozhennikov included, rule by fear -- if you fail or don't do as expected in your studies or tasks, someone in your family suffers. It's dark, twisted and confusing. 

The whole book is the same; confusing, but in the way that you feel that in just a few pages you'll understand...even though just like Sasha you're fumbling your way through incomprehensible assignments, laid out in intense intellectual and philosophical phrases and images. 

In one way the story is slow moving, not very plot driven -- the action is all in the mind. In this book, it's the ideas that drive it, and the slow expansion of what a reader might think the world is.

This is kind-of fantasy, although solidly based in an already surreal post-Soviet reality. There's magic, in the sense of telekinesis, learning to fly, and shifting realities -- but there is also just a lot of esoteric thought and conversation that makes you wonder about the theology of creation, or the reality of the world we perceive, or the power of language to shape our understanding. It feels like a more intense, fantastical experience of the world-expanding feeling of intense study when you attend university for the first time. 

This is dark in parts, with some violence and a very Soviet feel to many interactions. There is an atmosphere of fear and mistrust throughout. But Sasha applies herself to her studies, she takes on harder and harder tasks, and finds that she begins to crave learning more and more. And in the end, she overcomes Fear and surpasses even her teachers.  

This is a hard book to describe or summarize, but it was compelling even with its focus on the mind and what's happening to someone on the interior rather than flashy outer action. Unexpected and unusual, it was a very different reading experience.