Editor’s note: We’re (still) catching up on suggested summer reads from 2022. But please send us a note to tell us what you’re reading now.
“I’m on vacation listening to the waves of a lake, and I’ve been reading a 600-page Russian novel for hours a day, transported into the mid-19th century, but not by Tolstoy. This remarkably crafted novel, titled “Monkey: A Russian Novel,” was released this spring (2022) by Portland, Maine’s novelist, poet, and publisher, Agnes Bushell.
“The novel begins when the finest woman poet of her generation withdraws from the world to mourn the disappearance of her son, allowing only her granddaughter to visit. We, the reader never meet Nikolai, the missing hero, but we follow the circuitous paths of his friends, family, traveling actors, mind readers and secret police in a race to find him and his mysterious novel Monkey. These eccentric travelers search across Russia, from peaceful country estates, to a séance in a bordello in St. Petersburg, to a palace in Moscow, to catacombs beneath Odessa, to a kidnapping on the Black Sea, and a sinking ship on the Baltic.
“Living in a country of 60 million serfs, where only 1 million people are ‘free,’ the characters are constantly talking about the great dilemmas of politics and philosophy: how to resolve the gross inequity, how to live a meaningful life, and sometimes they venture into occult questions of doorways into parallel worlds.
“If you’ve read widely in Russian literature, the book is laden with literary echoes: of Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin,’ Turgenev’s country life, Dostoyevsky’s slums, and the author and characters from Bulgakov’s ‘The Master and Margarita,’ although that book was written and hidden in the 1930s. (If you haven’t read Bulgakov, you might be compelled to after you finish this book.)
“This novel is not simply a complexly plotted delight of magical worlds, marvelous characters and political commentary, the novel becomes a powerful portrait of a sensitive young man who refuses to fit into the confines of his culture. He rebels against his father’s owning serfs, thrives on larger-than-life adventures, and becomes a street fighter, a smuggler, a lover of powerful women, sometimes a heavy drinker; a man who yearns to expand his consciousness beyond all limits, until he disappears. While the others search for news of Nikolai to bring his mother hope, ultimately, they learn about themselves. In a world where secret manuscripts are lost, hidden, or burned, only the old mother poet’s lamentations are saved from the flames.” — ELIZABETH GARBER, Belfast
Mainers, please email to tell us about the book on your bedside table. In a paragraph or two, describe the book and be sure to tell us what drew you to it. Do your reading habits lighten up in summertime? Is the book on your nightstand a devour-in-a-single-afternoon beach read or a long, leisurely read you can delve into on long summer afternoons? We want to hear what you are reading and why. Send your selection to pgrodinsky@pressherald.com, and we may use it as a future Bedside Table.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
