April 1, 2023
In this autobiographical debut novel, a young lesbian poet travels from Moscow to her Siberian hometown to lay her mother's ashes to rest. Along the way, she recalls her childhood and contemplates her sexual and artistic identities even as she wrestles with her grief. Winner of Russia's NOS (New Literature) Award in 2021. Prepub Alert.
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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from July 17, 2023
Poet Vasyakina explores grief and sexuality in her stirring English-language debut about a 30-year-old lesbian poet named Oksana Vasyakina who makes a lengthy and circuitous trip to bury her mother in late 2010s Russia. After her mother, Angella, loses a yearslong battle with cancer, Oksana travels from her home in Moscow to Volzhsky, where her mother is cremated. She then returns to Moscow with Angella’s ashes and contends with a dead-end gallery job and a loveless relationship. Two months pass before her scheduled departure to Siberia, where she was raised and where she plans to bury Angella’s ashes. Over this time, Oksana recounts with unflinching clarity her fear of her mother’s decaying breath in the weeks before she died, the emptiness in Angella’s indifferent gaze while she was sick, and the frustration of having to wait around for someone to die—and contemplates how Angella’s emotional neglect over the course of her life impacted her ability to experience carnal pleasure, an effect that ended after her mother’s death. The narrative is distinguished by its dry wit and philosophical import, which Alter, a PW contributor, renders in razor-sharp prose (as Oksana feels the urn digging into her back while carrying it in a backpack, she embraces the pain and considers how she’s embodying a cliché: “I was on an important ritual journey, which is always marked by suffering”). Vasyakina stuns with this bold and emotionally raw chronicle.
August 1, 2023
When Vasyakina begins her debut novel, a work of autofiction, the narrator, a young poet, has already lost her mother. Over the course of two months, the woman travels with her mother's ashes for a burial in Siberia, and Vasyakina uses the simplicity of this story to work through the poet's relationship to her mother's distant yet overbearing presence, her queerness, and the limits of language itself. Vasyakina is a poet herself; her maximalism lends itself well to autofiction, extending the simplest moments and recollections into exquisitely melancholy scenes. She ponders on the women poets who came before her, questioning how they gave voice to subconscious desires. She weaves many forms throughout her work: prose unexpectedly interrupted by a poem, or an essay on Arachne's role in classical myth. Vasyakina uses every tool at her disposal to try and make sense of death and its relation to memory. What's left is a deeply intimate novel, and the sense that the mother-daughter relationship at its heart is evolving still.
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December 22, 2023
DEBUT This autobiographical novel describes a pilgrimage the narrator takes to bury her mother's ashes. Starting in Volzhsky, a city in the Russian Steppe, and ending in Ust-Ilimsk in Siberia, Vasyakina intersects her mother's life, illness, and death with her own quest for knowledge and understanding. Moving back and forth through time, the book includes poetry and ruminations on philosophy, art, literature, and music. Descriptions of cities, towns, the taiga, the steppe, Lake Baikal, and the Angara River, as well as individual rooms, government departments, and apartments, provide context to significant events in the characters' lives. As a poet who is a lesbian, Vasyakina's narrator is aware of how unorthodox she appears to others. The novel paints a grim picture of life in Russia with its bureaucracy and daily difficulties. Yet people are resilient and resolute. The book could have used tighter editing as it occasionally meanders. Despite the emphasis on family, there is only one mention of the narrator's sister, who appears near the end. VERDICT Vasyakina's autobiographical debut novel enhances collections by introducing readers to an exciting new voice from Russia.--Jacqueline Snider
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