Foreign cars: issue 5

Admit it, you thought that Pelevin did not care about his domestic fans and treacherously composed as many as two new masterpieces in English. Take comfort. The confusion is caused by foreign translators who want to sell our national heritage at a profit. “Little Finger of Buddha” is actually “Chapaev and Emptiness”, and “Babylon” is “Generation “P”. A flurry of enthusiastic responses. Top lists are falling on their faces. It seems that Pelevin’s hour has finally struck in the West.

Our arrow clearly points towards Bolmat . The earth is round: when it is day here, it is night there.

Henri Troyat. The ballerina from Saint Petersburg. - 198 pages. - Plon; ISBN 2259192807.

Russia, 1885. Through the eyes of a young student of the imperial dance school, the flourishing of Russian ballet at the turn of the century is shown. Intrigues and adulteries, people and lodges, Batmans and arabesques. Petipa and Diaghilev, sticking out like scarecrows over the endless plantations of spreading cranberries. Henri Troyat, like Charles Aznavour, is Armenian by origin; both enjoyed considerable popularity in the USSR, but were half-forgotten in the Russian Federation. Terribile ductu: well deserved.

An eccentric Jewish family. The father is passionate about Kabbalistic interpretations of the Torah, the eldest son has shaved his head and mouths “Hare Krishna”, the mother has sacrificed herself to pro bono advocacy. And nine-year-old Eliza suddenly, out of nowhere, begins to imitate the buzzing of bees and quickly achieves truly Mozartian success in this original field. And Maila Goldberg’s prose matches Eliza: it hums like a bee, dances, and flows honey.

The debut novel of a young American woman, which one would like to compare with the heights of lyrical and psychological prose of the New World - with To Kill a Mockingbird, for example. Or with "Voices of the Grass".

A medieval Genoese merchant who settled in the East goes in search of a book in which, according to legend, the secret - “hundredth” - name of God is inscribed. During his “around the world” voyage, Baldassar visits various corners of the ecumene - from Constantinople to London - and in each of them he learns something new: horses eat oats and hay, the Nile flows into the Mediterranean Sea, the Lord is within us. Another intellectual blockbuster from Goncourt laureate Amin Maalouf, who comes up with plots a little more inventively than Umberto Eco does. And a little less ambitious than the author of The Island the Day Before. Yes, just a little bit. Natives of the Maghreb are generally characterized by adequacy and self-irony. The same cannot be said about Italians, alas.

Edward Rutherfurd is a master of the titanic swing. fell upon it with all the baobab power The public had barely caught its breath after his megachronic novels "Russka" (1991) and "London" (1997) - "The Forest" . In full accordance with the title, we have before us the biography of a certain forest that lived in Southern England from 1099 to 1999. And, it goes without saying, he has seen a lot. William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Jane Austen, Carlists with horse ears, Esquires with long noses...

I remember Anatoly Korolev wrote a story called “Genius Loci.” About a park in the vicinity of St. Petersburg/Leningrad. A very good story. So soulful. Short, that's the main thing.

Before RJ had time to review the Russian translation of Sex and Fear, the fashionable prose writer and essayist Pascal Quignard released A Terrace in Rome . Unlike "Sex...", this is not a thoughtful non-fiction, but a novel. However, the autobiographical nature of the book is obvious. The protagonist is a modern Aschenbach, so exhausted spiritually and physically that he might be happy to pick up some Tadzio on the Appian Way, but his health does not allow it. And so, like Oleg Tabakov in the film “Three Stories,” he looks, looks at the eternal city from his terrace and reflects, reflects on how young he was yesterday and how dead he will be tomorrow. Although Kignard does not directly talk about the reasons for the character's exhaustion, we can guess: he recently completed work on a reflective non-fiction about sex and fear in ancient Greece and Rome, about how one flowed into the other, and one into the other. And he strained himself until there were bloody petronies in his eyes. Of course: sixteen chapters, all of them exclusively about fascinus. After this, Boris Paramonov would have been on disability.

Phyllis Dorothy James (b. 1920) is called the successor of Agatha Christie, and is called incorrectly. Firstly, the main thing in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Orient Express is formal audacity, plot tricks. In "Unnatural" "reasons" and "Taste for Death" the criminal plot is only a pretext for non-standard conclusions about human nature. Secondly, in addition to detective stories about Inspector Dalglish, James wrote the moral thriller “Sinless Blood” and the gloomy dystopia “Children of Men.”

And now her genre herbarium has been replenished with a memoir novel. “It’s time to retire” - a chronicle of one single year in the life of Ph.DJ: 1997. Deliberately detailed descriptions of banquets, business trips and routine howdoyoudows are interspersed with emotional flashbacks: sunny Cambridge in the 1930s; childbirth that coincided with an air raid alert; the trembling mouth of a crazy husband, the nervous trembling of the pen over the draft.

The title is a quote from Samuel Johnson, who said Time to be in earnest on his 77th birthday. Autumn of the patriarchs, crystal barren, not pregnant in winter.

Essays on sexual abstinence. From bottom to top on the ladder of time: Pallas Athena, Artemis, Hestia; Olympians of Ancient Greece; Vestals; harem eunuchs; celibacy of the Catholic clergy; Joan of Arc; Isaac Newton; 18th century shakers; Elizabeth I of England; Farinelli il castrato; voodoo sorcerers; Lewis Carroll; Florence Nightingale; Mahatma Gandhi; life prisoners; AIDS patients - a total of 120 carefully analyzed incidents, eight years of hard labor at a desk.

Or is it top to bottom? True love waits. “When sex turns into an emblem of destruction, celibacy is perceived as a safe conduct . ”

Elizabeth Abbott is the dean of Trinity Women's College (Canada). Single.