The Dream Life of Sukhanov by olga grushin

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

I'm not quite sure why I persevered with this book for as long as I did. It took me until about halfway through until I was fully grasped by it. I'm glad I did because the language was hauntingly beautiful and I often had to pause so that I could fully appreciate what I'd just read. I wouldn't give it higher than a three however, it was hard to see where the book was going at times and the jumps between time frames were sometimes hard to keep up with - although that is characteristic of a psychological fiction. I often felt as disoriented by this as Sukhanov must have been.

Some of my favourite quotes:

"He felt his whole being expanding with grief for things misplaced, and forfeited, and possibly missed forever - and where such grief reigned, petty anger could find no place"

"And all at once he knew that the sunlit birch grove of his summer recollection had long given way to the oppressive, cathedral-like woods of his recent nightmare"

"The old anger, the anger of the deprived and the dispossessed, reared its righteous head inside my soul"

Read time: 4 hours 50 minutes

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MIDOKUMO

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

3,5 estrelas

Esta é daquelas opiniões em que sinto alguma dificuldade em exprimir o que achei do livro. Tentarei fazê-lo da melhor maneira possível e peço desde já desculpa caso não o consiga fazer. Em caso de qualquer dúvida suscitada pela minha opinião, não hesite em perguntar.

Começando pela ideia base da história, foi algo que me agradou, até porque lhe confere uma certa faceta real. O herói não é perfeito, abriu mão de muitos dos seus sonhos e fez escolhas erradas. Ao longo do percurso, tornou-se snob e altivo, “bloqueando” o que considerava irrelevante do seu passado, ignorando tanto a família como aqueles que considerava “inferiores”. Agora Sukhanov começa a ser atormentado pelas recordações do passado que tanto se esforçou por esquecer e que o levarão a analisar o presente...É essencialmente neste momento crítico da vida de Sukhanov que a acção se desenrola, o momento em que passado e presente se misturam e novas e importantes decisões têm de ser tomadas. A nível familiar também se denotam alguns problemas. Não é retratada a família perfeita, o que considerei um ponto a seu favor.

Passando para a arte, este não é um tema que eu domine nem pelo qual tenha particular interesse. Quando vejo um quadro só me interessa saber se ele é bonito ou não- oh que comentário ignorante! dirão alguns..- mas no livro há um grande foco na arte, especialmente na pintura. Fala-se muito no surrealismo de Dáli e da perspectiva do povo russo- incluindo do protagonista- sobre esse estilo em particular, sendo que existem personagens que o defendem e outras que o rejeitam. Também existem referências históricas ao meio artístico- o que era aceite, o que não era aceite, perseguições a artistas, etc. que pode ser apelativo a quem se interessa/estuda o tema.

Por fim, e este foi um dos aspectos que mais me desagradou, o livro é muito descritivo. A meu ver, descrições menos pormenorizadas e menos extensas seriam o ideal.

Este livro foi a minha estreia com a autora e, em geral, foi um livro que me agradou.

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poirotto

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

What is this book about--a compromised life, the fatal flaws of a corrupt regime, lost love? Can't be sure. It looks more like a book about a man who misread life's signals, his wife's intentions, his father-law's offer, and worst of all, the stability of the Soviet government. I, too, would hallucinate.

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ArkonBlade

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

This is the best novel I have read that was published in the last 45 or so years (ie after Steinbeck and Salinger). Go read it.

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Simonian

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

I tried to read this book - I really did but gave up after 200 pages of boredom. There are too many good books to waste time with this one.

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natsusa

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

There's something special about this book. The excess of adjectives and adverbs initially put me off, but then I submitted to its magic-tinged realism and was transported into the wonderful mid-life crisis of a Soviet apparatchik. His dream life doesn't begin until he comes out the other side into the real life he should have always been living.

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OriginalRudeBoy2

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

Goodness me, those Russians can write, can't they? Just a lovely book about art and compromise. A bit like Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time, but with more humour and flights of fancy.

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naels

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

A remarkable, remarkable first novel. I wish I could go from nowhere to such profundity in a first novel. I wish I could do it in my fifth novel, come to that. It’s one of those works where, in plot terms, not a lot happens, but notwithstanding, where everything seems to happen: if it wasn’t a bit precious to say it, I’d say its surrealism compares it with a Chagall painting, with a bit of Master and Margarita mixed in.

Hats off to Olga Grushin. She sets out to write a book that takes the essence of humanity, as expressed (or not, as the case may be) with art as its theme. For the most part it comes off too, a dreamy immersion in whether we test ourselves to the full, deliver our potential to the full. In her first novel. Blimey.

Her use of language is really important here, as she seeks to paints her dream-like picture. I found good news and bad news in that.

As others have mentioned, she seems to have missed the class where the lecturer explained that to get the right effect, you write the first draft - and then you strike out all the adjectives and adverbs. Her text bristles with overloaded and lengthy sentences, and you can’t help feeling it would be even more effective if she had trimmed a few out. Here’s an example:

n “The stairwell split the grey monstrosity of the building in half, laying it open like an enormous, overripe fruit, with the imposing leather-padded , nail-studded doors, two on each floor, embedded in its yawning pulp like dark seeds, every one of them containing its own luxurious blossom of success”.n

Ponderous eh? There’s a lot of that. I wondered at one point whether it was the sign of a slightly cautious translator, but I read somewhere that OG in fact wrote it in English. If so, it’s a massive achievement: but I’m still looking forward to reading her fourth or fifth novel, when she’s become a tiny bit less self-conscious in her use of language.

But there’s firmly good news too. This prose does actually begin to work, insistent overuse of adjectives and all:

n “And all at once, as he stood listening and watching, breathing deeply, the night seemed to him so full of hidden movement, so poignantly alive, so unlike the habitually stuffy stillness hanging, thick and immobile, at the room at his back, that he felt startled, just as he might if, leafing through the sixth edition of his textbook on Soviet art theory, he discovered a poem printed discreetly between two authoritative paragraphs.."n

And there are many moments when her use of language is quite attention-grabbing. She has a lovely turn of phrase when she’s not trying.

But it made me think also that you do sometimes need to modify the use of language to suit the mood and moment of the book. There was one phase in particular (chapter 16) when I thought this overuse of adjectives in the name of descriptive lyricism a bit too much. At a moment when we ought to be experiencing high drama and tension I thought she made it all sound a bit Mills and Boonish as a consequence. Pity, as it’s approaching the climax of the narrative in a way. The many dream sequences work a treat, and indeed that use of language is best suited to them. It’s when she’s simply delivering narrative, taking the plot forward, that she stumbled a tiny bit in my view.

But either way I must close by stressing that I’m being really picky here. But it truly is a compliment, to a fine piece of work. I’m judging her as if she was one of the greats. If she carries on like this, I imagine she will be too.

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The Dream Life of Sukhanov

olga grushin

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