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The title describes the form of this novel: the history of an island state, recorded contemporaneously by a succession of monks. The chronicle is interspersed with commentary by its sometime rulers, Prince Parfeny and Princess Ksenia, and this postmodern conceit is blended with a dose of magical realism (think Umberto Eco meets Mikhail Bulgakov) by means of which the royal couple age much slower than normal.
The Church Times, UK
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A History re-envisions the tragic irony in the “forward march.” For every supposedly shiny progress, what shadowy cost remains untallied?
Joshua Hren, Church Life Journal
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Tenderness mixed with melancholy and understated spirituality. ...Vodolazkin weaves together grief, joy, romance, and a sense of life’s redemptive surprises to create a story about hope that surpasses understanding.
G. Connor Salter, Fellowship & Fairydust Magazine
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Quirky, whimsical, funny, and yet also devastatingly critical of the past century or more of Russian history, with its generations of oppressive leaders and of suffering people, with no redemption yet in sight—except maybe on this island.
Patheos
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Dostoevskyan
First Things
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Vodolazkin’s novels are wildly experimental, and A History of the Island is his most ambitious novel to date. Transmuting old facts and fables into fresh fiction, Vodolazkin is a literary alchemist whose novels invite us to think like medievals and mystics in the modern wasteland.
Law & Liberty
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Vodolazkin ironizes on the way this history is constantly being rewritten, according to each current political era.
Irish Sun
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Eugene Vodolazkin’s A History of the Island skewers all pretentious claims about history as a grand and noble march toward a bright future where Important People will usher in democracy and freedom for all. And it manages to be downright funny while doing so.
Jeffrey Bilbro, Current Magazine
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Vodolazkin is a contemporary writer only as by accident of time; …He is more of a medieval than a modern, and many of the paradoxes that perplex us today are, in his hands, playthings. He juggles his symbols dexterously, weaving an airborne pattern that we thrill to follow, and then just when we begin to feel rather clever for seeing what he is doing, he slips in a line gently mocking us.
The European Conservative
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Eugene Vodolazkin, a Ukrainian writer who lives in Russia, is known throughout Eastern Europe and beyond for being a wise and decent voice. A modern Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, perhaps? Perhaps time will tell.
Hearts and Minds Bookstore
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Beyond a simple allegorical reading, A History of the Island reminds readers in a darkly entertaining way to question the foundational assumptions in any project of history-building.
Full Stop
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Ukrainian-born writer Eugene Vodolazkin takes up this myth of the hereditary ruler as the holy and righteous protector of the people and sets it at the center of an investigation into the nature of history and time... Vodolazkin once again makes the case for living in the present, this time on a grander scale.
Fare Forward Magazine
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Vodolazkin’s history of the “island” hilariously skewers our pretensions to originality. … He is at his funniest when he fights fire with ironic fire. No matter who governs the island’s post-medieval government and no matter what their reigning ideology, we’ve seen it all before; we know the ignominy, brutality, and absurdity in which it will end. … However, as Vodolazkin recognizes, satire’s function is to clear away the drivel, to make way for something else.
Aaron Weinacht, Front Porch Republic
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A History of the Island powerfully demonstrates the constructed nature of historical narratives and shows the dangers of a single dominating story. …Though the original novel was published two years before the invasion, the history of the imaginary island, echoing those of medieval Rus’, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation, becomes an ever more poignant allegory for these histories and the real discontinuities they present.
Venya Gushchin, Full Stop
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A History of the Island is Vodolazkin’s latest novel to be translated into English and the most overtly concerned with the idea of history. … Italo Calvino might be the nearest cousin to Vodolazkin. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, a quasi-allegorical tale of Britian, present and past, might be the nearest thing I’ve read to A History of the Island. … The book is a formal success because of its narrative strategy: the monk’s chronicle, able to reveal meaning where modern scientific history cannot.
Jonathan Geltner, author, Absolute Music
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Tragedy and farce commingle in Vodolazkin’s protracted fable about the uses and abuses of history. The narrative is framed as a chronicle of a fictitious island nation with annotations from deposed monarchs Parfeny and Ksenia, who, at 347 years old in the present day, have witnessed many of the events described.
Publishers Weekly
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Eugene Vodolazkin has emerged in the eyes of many as the most important living Russian writer. A literary scholar as well as a novelist—or, as he puts it, an ichthyologist as well as a fish—Vodolazkin draws heavily on the Russian classics in novels of ideas addressing what Russians call “the accursed questions,” including the meaning of life and, especially, the significance of death. … For Vodolazkin, the key to all such mysteries is time. … We must change our understanding of time, Vodolazkin believes, and that is what his novels try to accomplish.
Gary Saul Morson, New York Review of Books
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An engrossing read, Brisbane is lightly melancholic, a pale late afternoon of a story. Vodolazkin’s strength as a writer is his lightness, humour and wryness.
The Catholic Weekly, Australia
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Vodolazkin, a Kyiv-born Russian who attended Ukrainian-language school before moving to St Petersburg as an adult, is steeped in ethnic and linguistic dualism. … Of Vodolazkin’s four novels, this is his most contemporary – and autobiographical. … Brisbane is a richly polyphonic novel.
TLS (Times Literary Supplements), UK
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Compelling reading: brilliantly vivid and inventive, it combines magical-realist mischief with a compassionate, radically Christian perspective on the self-destroying idiocies of human history and political posturing. A masterpiece by one of Europe’s finest contemporary novelists.
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury
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Brisbane explores what it means to be human, and to be Christian, especially in the face of death. It’s about the universal experience of learning how to live.
Sarah Clark, Fare Foreward
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Russia and Ukraine fight over territory and national identity, but Vodolazkin’s novel does not pick a side. Instead, he troubles our idea of the separation and difference that make a “side” or a border. As countries and bodies are torn apart by nationalisms and sectarianisms of every sort, Vodolazkin raises the question of survival itself – will there be a future?
First Things
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Brisbane is deep, ambitious. With its constant questions about whether one can be simultaneously Russian and Ukrainian, it is a timely novel. At the same time, it is also an investment – of time, of emotional stamina, of a willingness to look beyond one’s own understanding of humanity, the arts, and language. … Brisbane gives one message to readers seeking for a more meaningful reading and existence: live every moment – to the fullest.
Southern Review of Books
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With Brisbane, Eugene Vodolazkin, the artistic grandson of Dostoevsky, continues to develop his novelistic philosophy exploring how death contributes to life’s baffling meaningfulness.
Englewood Review of Books, feature review
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Brisbane is, in a few words, a damn good novel. Beautifully translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, I enjoyed it immensely, and will probably seek out more books by Vodolazkin. My very highest recommendation.
Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, Booklover
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Brisbane is an ambitious novel: a meditation on the nature and staying power of music (and art in general), a love letter to the written word, and a nascent inquiry into whether one can be simultaneously Russian and Ukrainian. … Vodolazkin’s pleasure in skewering convention and received wisdom is evident throughout his novels.
Katherine Young, On the Seawall
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Great prose recommends itself, and Vodolazkin’s needs none of my poor lauds. [His] novels do for time what Wendell Berry does for space: we can’t just live where we are, we have to live when we are, too.
Aaron Weinacht, Front Porch Republic
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As the [war] has unfolded, Vodolazkin’s depiction of these two languages as part of one and the same person, as brothers and foes simultaneously, while not completely new for me, has introduced more nuance into my thinking. For an English reader less familiar with the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, the novel may well be a revelation.
Marian Schwartz, LiteraryHub
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Each [of Vodolazkin’s novels] is its own song, and these songs heard together become greater than the sum of their parts … The worlds of Laurus and Brisbane do not harmonize; instead, they sing to each other. Sometimes they shout at each other. But through it all Vodolazkin probes his central theme: the mysterious relationship of time and salvation, the bleeding back and forth of joy and grief across life and history, the never-ending exchange between our end and our beginning.
Jane C. Scharl, The European Conservative
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Intensely lyrical and tender, while punctuated by moments of transfixing beauty, violence, ecstasy, and pain, Vodolazkin’s masterpiece is at once relatable and transcendent, straightforward and multilayered, rational and mystical. But what makes it especially relevant and poignant today, is its examination of the intertwined fates of two nations, Russia and Ukraine, through the lens of changing political regimes and complicated family relations.
Dr. Marina Alexandrova, Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas at Austin
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Using two narrative voices – Kyiv-born guitarist Gleb Yanovsky’s and his alcohol-sodden biographer Nestor’s – this novel counterposes past and present, self and other. It can be defined as an exercise in Dostoyevskian polyphony, and certainly few contemporary writers are as steeped in the Russian greats as Vodolazkin. But it’s also a sophisticated and frequently moving study in dissonance, dedicated to pointing out contrasts between art and life, beauty and decay, intention and outcome. And, yes, between Ukraine and Russia.
Booklist
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The magic of Vodolazkin’s talent takes place in the level of ideas and plot… and in the level of words and sounds. Vodolazkin plays with both Russian and Ukrainian languages that were not lost in translation.
Alexandra Guzeva, Russia Beyond
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Vodolazkin’s writing is symphonic in its abundance of descriptive detail.
Michael Kurek
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Vodolazkin can be very funny in the mordant Russian way. His depictions of Soviet-era academia are wry. . . . Although funny in places, the overarching mood of Brisbane is one of nostalgia, the emotion that pines for what is lost. Vodolazkin creates an atmosphere of suspicion that one is missing the most important moments, seeing the most important truths only in passing glances.
R. R. Reno, First Things
