Maidenhair

(Paperback)

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Description

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.'

Reviews

"The first reading of Maidenhair is like tipping the pieces of a 1000-piece jigsaw out of the box and turning them all picture-side up . . ."Slightly Booklist "[Shishkin] takes Nabokov's remarkable linguistic flexibility but none of his arrogance; like Chekhov, he looks on humanity with humor and compassion. Shishkin's Baroque turns of phrases seem written out of necessity and joy rather than pretention; he respects his readers, he delights in language, and he does not need to show off."Madeleine LaRue, The Quarterly Conversation "Shishkins work has been described as 'refined neo-modernism.' His dense, lyrical prose suggests the influence of 'Ulysses', but Shishkin objects that 'Joyce doesn't love his heroes'; in Maidenhair love is the crucial answer to most of the hundreds of questions."Pheobe Taplin, Russia Beyond The Headlines "In short, Maidenhair is the best post-Soviet Russian novel I have read. Simply put, it is true literature, a phenomenon we encounter too rarely in any language."Daniel Kalder, The Dallas Morning News "Shishkin is fascinated by the concept of the narratives we create for ourselves, whether entirely imagined, or based on what we think is memory and fact. Yet he doesn't ram that idea down readers' throats; he merely offers it here, in many variations, but also allows the stories themselves to be spun out. It makes for an unusual novelunusual in the sense that it is unlike what one has encountered before, and unlike what one has come to expect. It expands, in a small but significant way, our understanding of what the novel can be and doquite a remarkable achievement."Michael Orthofer, Complete Review "Maidenhair is likely a work of genius. . . . If Shishkin is right about the power of words to resurrect the dead, Maidenhair has all but secured his immortality."Christopher Tauchen, Words Without Borders "Most of the critics agree that 2005 will go down in the history of Russian literature as the year when Maidenhair, the new novel by Mikhail Shishkin, was published."Literaturnaya Rossia "Maidenhair is a kind of book they give the Nobel prize for. The novel is majestic."Nezavisimaya Gazeta

Author Bio

Mikhail Shishkin is one of Russia's most prominent and respected contemporary writers. When Maidenhair was published in 2005, it was awarded both the National Bestseller Prize and the Big Book Prize. Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian. The winner of a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Heldt Translation Prize, Schwartz has translated classic literary works by Nina Berberova, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Bulgakov.