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This novel by a Ukrainian-Russian author sheds light on the experiences of millions with both Russian and Ukrainian roots.
Gold Medal, 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) for Literary Fiction
Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award
Winner of the Ivo Andrić Grand Prize for best novel of 2022
“This novel – which is ostensibly about music – digs deep into the role the Ukrainian and Russian languages play in people’s lives and through language manifests the visceral connection between these sibling cultures.” —Marian Schwartz
From the author of the international bestseller, Laurus, comes a richly layered, universal coming-of-age story in which a musical prodigy robbed of his talent by an incurable disease attempts to overcome his mortality. Through well-wrought vignettes and dialogue in the original Ukrainian, Vodolazkin shows us the ways in which these identities are inextricably linked and expressed through the push and pull of loyalties big and small.
After Gleb Yanovsky, a celebrated guitarist, is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at age fifty, he permits a writer, Sergei Nesterov, to pen his biography. For years, they meet regularly as Gleb recounts the life he’s lived thus far: a difficult childhood in Kyiv, his formative musical studies in St. Petersburg, and his later years in Munich, where he lives with his wife and meets a thirteen-year-old virtuoso whom he embraces as his own daughter. In a mischievous and tender account, Gleb recalls a personal story of a lifetime quest for meaning, and how the burden of success changes with age.
Expanding the literary universe spun in his earlier novels, Vodolazkin explores music and fame, heritage and belonging, time and memory. In a dueling interplay between Gleb’s first-person recollections and Nesterov’s interpretation, the carefully knit stitches unravel into a puzzle: Whose story is it – the subject’s or the writer’s? Are art and love really no match for death? Is memory a reliable narrator? In Brisbane, the city of our dreams, as in music, Gleb hopes he’s found a path to eternity – and a way to stop the clock.
I am finding it hard to describe this novel. A character piece? A literary delight? A story of a life? The book is about a man who played a guitar and those surrounding him, but so much more than that. I was engrossed from the beginning. I know nothing about music beyond that I like to listen to it and many times danced to it. The descriptions encompassing playing and singing were numerous and beyond my expertise, but just as the music of this man captivated all who listened, so was I captivated by the words. No spoilers here. I am sorry the book ended. I wanted so much more. I was not ready to say goodbye.
The story goes back and forth between past and present, making each compelling and surprising as we see what shaped this Russian-Ukrainian music star who now faces the fact he may have to stop playing music entirely. Tender, melancholy and yet hopeful
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.
Brisbane by Eugene Vodolazkin is a marvel. Timely in its setting and characters - Russian and Ukrainian - and steeped in music, childhood and illness, it reveals an author who can move deftly from the luminous and mystical Laurus to a layered and contemporary tale. It has been said that "Vodolazkin explores multifaceted questions of "Russianness" and concludes...that Russia cannot be rationally understood." But the reader can nibble around the edges and be entranced.
Vodolazkin’s writing is symphonic in its abundance of descriptive detail, as his musician-protagonist, Gleb Yanovsky, recalls the past people and places of his life in an often musical reverie of poignant and sometimes bittersweet vignettes. However, this detail is not orchestrated merely as superficial trills of literary ornamentation. It has a deeply organic purpose – to demonstrate in the author’s prose itself Gleb’s passionate philosophy about music. As Gleb explains to his biographer, Nestor, “the musical stems from the human,” and “It’s the musician’s life that needs describing, not the music. After that comes the music.” Gleb later describes how a guitar solo he is playing, for him, tells the very specifically detailed story, purely in musical sound, of an intense conversation between two lovers. Music, he says, "exists only because the word exists." Yet, "where the word ends, that’s where the music begins.”
