An interesting read. Especially interesting after reading Memoirs of the Future. Both Grushin and Krzhizhanovsky look at the world in a dream type futuristic and /or remembrance way. The big difference is how. Krzhizhanovsky uses a 1930's understanding of space time and quantum physics to bend time. Leading to good stories but some headaches for the reader. Grushin uses dream interpretation and psychological theory to get to the same place. Grushin takes us into Sukhanov's dreams both waking and sleeping. The journey he takes leads to himself and what he has betrayed (?) yet at the same time what he won. A good read and worth the time to see how it will end. Even though with 80 or so pages left you know what the last page will say. But getting there is a wonderful ride.

A fascinating and deeply imaginative novel, beautifully written, surreal and all too real. To an American audience it may read as a high-art tale of midlife crisis, with a Russian twist. That is fair enough, and the novel is highly accomplished on that level. But it is also shot through with quintessentially Russian metaphysics. You will particularly like this book if you are a reader who appreciates writing that exploits words' ability to do more than represent a simulacrum of reality.

Amazingly well-crafted for a first novel. Labyrinthine and surreal in plot, but clear and direct in form.

There’s so much to like in this book, which is the story of a middle aged art critic in the Soviet Union in 1985 who was himself once an avant-garde artist. Grushin’s writing is lush and brilliant, and she deftly weaves between reality and Sukhanov’s inner world of memories as the book progresses until the full story is known for what happened between him, another up and coming young artist, and the daughter of a wealthy artist who produced banal Soviet ‘socialist realism’ paintings.

Spoiler alert in the next few paragraphs.

Sukhanov’s choices were made much more difficult by the constraints Soviets placed on art, and now, in middle age, he finds his world crumbling – his wife disinterested, his children adults and no longer seeing him as someone they should look up to, his job threatened, and other people showing him what being true to himself would have been like. He wants to reconnect and share personal things with his kids and wife, but finds the moments to have done so passed. On top of it all, his memory is starting to get a little fuzzy on everyday details, but haunts him about things in the past.

And yet, it’s never too late to redeem oneself. In sometimes absurd ways, life has conspired to break his comfortable life apart, to bring him low, so that he can pursue art once again. Tellingly, one of the lenses in his glasses break towards the end, distorting his impression of objects and people in surrealist ways. Sukhanov has struggled in life, made compromises, and let the dream go dormant, but ultimately he can still find himself, and live up to his father’s advice to “never let them clip your wings.”

In that way the novel feels Russian-American (which of course Grushin is) – Russian in having followed in the tradition of Gogol, Dostoevsky, and other great Russian masters in the absurd and cynical ways life plays out, and yet American in the sense of ultimate optimism. I really enjoyed her references to art and Russian literature, and she shows us that the worlds within - our thoughts, memories, and dreams - are as big a part of our lives as our consciousness and the ‘real world’ which others see. I will definitely read more from this author.

Quotes:
On art, and Salvador Dali:
“True, the man once had undeniable talent. His early visions are haunting, don’t you find – those pulpy, dripping clocks, those burning giraffes, Venus de Milo with drawers carved all along her body – great, dark metaphors for our nightmarish century. Unfortunately, after these first brilliant steps, he stopped striving and began to repeat himself – more clocks, more giraffes, more drawers, all those sleek juxtapositions of random objects that seem striking for a moment but are devoid of any real meaning, all those amusing tricks for the eye, like Raphael’s Madonna fitted into an ear, you know it? He managed to trivialize himself completely. True art, in my modest opinion, must uphold a harmonious balance between form and content, and content is precisely what he’s lost.”

On art, and medieval icons; I found this perspective interesting:
“Of course, in its technical aspects, the manner of icon painting is medieval and therefore by necessity flawed. And yet, I insist, it is perfect, insofar as by ‘perfect’ I mean simply the form most suitable to its subject. What better way is there to portray man’s unearthly aspirations, I ask you, than by ignoring irrelevant flesh with its trappings of chiaroscuro and perspective, and presenting instead these floating, pure colors, these insubstantial bodies, these luminous faces, these enormous, mournful eyes? These works create an impression of a door in our dim, mundane lives, opening for a moment to reveal an ethereal glimpse of heaven, a golden flash of God’s paradise. The effect becomes far less wondrous if one dilutes such stark, glowing purity with even the smallest dose of your accurately rendered reality.”

And this reply, a contrary view:
“Art is not about some common purpose or noble mission. It’s an expression of an artist’s soul, his individual, titanic struggle to rise above the ordinary, to speak a word unheard before, to extract an unexpected, mysterious, radiant nugget of beauty from the many obscure layers of our existence, to glimpse a bit of the infinite in everyday life – and truly great art comes to us like an ecstatic revelation, it sets our whole being on fire! And your medieval wall-painters were nothing but practitioners of applied arts, obedient illustrators of a few stale, commonplace truths about a small man’s eternity. Crushed by the weight of their own credo ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ they never took risks, never overstepped their boundaries, never tried to set vibrating some new, previously untouched chord in our souls…”

On beauty:
“Her hand felt cool in mine, and in my stunned mind, Pushkin’s immortal tribute to his beloved rang out like a clear crystal bell: Chisteishei prelesti chisteishii obrazets. The purest image of the purest charm.”

And this one, on the timelessness of the beauty of art:
“And so I sat alone in the theater, and the lights began to come on while pale angels and saints were still passing before me, and I thought, yes, you were right about that day, our world really is dark and ignorant, just as it was in Rublev’s time – but you were also wrong, because in spite of all the injustices, and horrors, and stupidity, beauty always survives, and there will never be a higher mission than making the world richer and purer by adding more beauty to it, by making one single person cry like a child and the age of fifty-three…”

On decisive moments in life:
“Today she wore no sparkling earrings, no clinking bracelets, and her features, bereft of the glossy glamour that makeup lent them, seemed soft and hazy, as if glimpsed imprecisely through a light curtain of rain. Suddenly, prompted by an oddly urgent impulse, he swore to himself that if she looked up, if only for an instant, he would reenter the pink stuffiness of the room – and talk to her, talk to her, for the first time in who knew how long. He would confess what he had felt when he had seen Belkin walk away in a downpour; he would share with her the happy childhood memory of his father and the upsetting dream about her flying away; he would take her in his arms and tell her that she still looked beautiful, in spite of those resentful lines tugging at her mouth … For a long moment he waited, but she did not look up.
He nodded curtly and left.”

And this one, while seeing Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ for the first time, is fantastic:
“In anyone’s life there can be only a few such moments – moments when a long, ringing hush fills your hearing, the world stands still as if under a magic spell, and thoughts and feelings course freely through your being, traversing the whole of eternity in the duration of a minute, so that when time resumes and you return from whatever nameless, dazzling void you briefly inhabited, you find yourself changed, changed irrevocably, and from then on, whether you want it or not, your life flows in a different direction.”

On solitude, on a crowded train:
“…random lives thrown together for one moment, squashed against each other in the dim, narrow confines of a crammed car, sharing space and time, mingling their breaths in a parody of human closeness, yet each of them remaining tragically, eternally alone…”

On youth, and aging:
“You remember, don’t you, Tolya? Our days flowed into nights, our nights were endless, and every windbag who talked about Russia, God, and art was a brother, every artist a genius, every painting a miracle – and the world did not know us yet, but we were together, we were brilliant, we were destined to light up the skies … And then you blink, and all at once you yourself are in your fifties, still poor but no longer so sure of all those eternal truths, and alone now, because most of your old friends have crawled into their own nooks and crannies of misery and your wife has left to have children with another man. … And then all those things that seemed so earth-shattering in the past, all those experiments with religion, eroticism, surrealism, abstraction, all those exuberant departures from the commonplace, appear for what they are in the harsh light of the day – self-indulgent exercises in passing time, pathetic imitations of fashions the West tried and discarded decades ago.”

Beautiful and lyrical and satirical all at the same time. It's clear that Grushin has read the Russian masters - Bulgakov, Gogol, Dostoevsky - and it shines through in this gorgeous little book. I picked it up from the library, but now I wish that I'd bought it...

My other comment is that it frequently reads like a Chagall painting. And while I didn't necessarily care for Chagall before I read this book, I think I like his work now. I need to go to the MOMA to check.

Years ago as a young man Anatoly Sukhanov gave up a life in which he painted as a true artist, for one in which he was guaranteed a good salary, nice apartment, and cushy art critic job praising art that conformed to pro-Soviet ideology. Now in 1985 he is middle-aged, his wife is cold and distant, both his adult children scorn him, and we the readers are subjected to a narrative which porously and without warning travels between present and past, third and first person, reality and fantasy. Grushin's writing is disagreeably lush and I am one-and-done with her.

I found it a very frustrating read. I was more okay with it once I understood that it was a story of mental breakdown, but I had a hard time empathizing with or buying into the character of Sukhanov. It's such a passive and reactive character, I kept thinking of a pinball machine. I had much higher expectations of Grushin, especially having read an excerpt from her other book Exile, which I liked!

– Opreşte aici, zise Anatoli Pavlovici Suhanov de pe bancheta din spate, adresându-se
perechii de mănuşi din piele fină aşezate pe volan.
Afară, coloanele albe şi galbene îşi încetară defilarea monotonă, încetiniră ritmul şi,
câteva clipe mai târziu, se opriră cuminți, fiecare la locul ei. Lumina unui felinar din
apropiere se strecură, aidoma unui tentacul portocaliu, în întunericul catifelat care îl
învăluia, iar Nina, care tăcuse tot drumul, se mişcă uşor, parcă trezită din somn.
– Deja? întrebă ea cu gândul aiurea, aruncând o privire afară.
Ajunseseră. Nina scoase un mic oftat şi se apucă să caute ceva în geantă, cum făcea
întotdeauna când ajungeau undeva. Suhanov o aşteptă răbdător să îşi deschidă pudriera, să
legene în palmă tipsioara cu sclipiri întunecate, să tragă un baton de ruj de culoarea
piersicii din inelele aurii care îl încolăceau ca un şarpe şi să îşi aplece capul într-o parte şi
într-alta, încercând să scape de umbrele care îi acopereau chipul. Pe neaşteptate, zări un
ochi discret fardat alunecând pe suprafața oglinzii, dar ea mişcă mâna şi ochiul clipi şi
dispăru. Întoarse privirea, fredonând o melodie în gând. Deşi erau căsătoriți de douăzeci şi
opt de ani, întotdeauna se simțea stânjenit în astfel de momente, de parcă l-ar fi prins
cineva trăgând cu ochiul la un ritual intim. În cele din urmă, imaginea fugară fu prinsă de
raza unui felinar; ea îşi desenă conturul buzelor pline din două mişcări iuți ale încheieturii,
îşi lipi buzele cu un uşor plescăit şi puse rujul la loc în geantă. Încuietoarea se închise cu un
clămpănit lacom, iar el zări cu colțul ochiului o sclipire de foc – un cercel de diamant
trecând prin lumină; apoi, cu foşnet prelung, ea ieşi singură, ca de obicei, fără să aştepte să
îi deschidă cineva uşa. În urma ei rămase o mireasmă, parfumul elegant din acea seară care va fi fost acela, adăugat peste amintirile multor altor parfumuri care se adunaseră cu
timpul în bancheta din spate a Volgăi, tot atâtea năluci plăcute, abia sesizabile, ale serilor
petrecute în oraş.

Anatoly Sukhanov is a Soviet apparatchik, editor of Moscow's Art of the World magazine and author of such Party-approved works as "Surrealism and other Western "Isms" as Manifestations of Capitalist Insolvency". As the novel begins, in a Soviet Union shortly after the ascension of Gorbachev, he is simply another soulless Soviet official ready to be mocked and condemned by another Russian novelist. As the novel unfolds, however, that is not what happens. As glasnost begins to thaw the political environment around him, Sukhanov's past, which he has long frozen out of his consciousness, also thaws and bubbles up first through his dreams, then takes over his waking life as he suffers what appears to be a nervous breakdown.

Grushin's novel ultimately raises interesting questions. In a totalitarian society, is it more admirable to stay true to yourself, or to do what you must to provide for those you love? If it is admirable to risk severe hardship for your ideals, does that remain the case when your family shares your fate with you? And what cost can those choices exact?

A very good book, especially if you have an interest in art and Russia.

Lyrical, but strangely uncompelling, this is the story of a moral and mental breakdown. An artist of brilliant promise in his youth, Sukhanov sells out to the Soviet way, becoming an art critic/apparatchik promoting 'Russian' art as opposed to decadant Western art. In 1985 at age 56, the combination of mid-life and glasnost brings his past crashing down on him. As in European literature of the 20th century, politics shapes life in a way that is unknown in this country.

One of the best books I've read this year. Gripping, yet feels instantly like a classic, feels slightly like Bulgakov. Just simply loved it. Wish more people could write like this.

Second installment of "Novel on the Globe" course.

I really enjoyed this novel and would give it four and a half stars if the website so allowed me. Following in the tradition of most Russian novels, I feel like I could read this novel a few more times and still not entirely obtain all the symbolism and meaning behind it. There are certainly layers upon layers within this text.

The story revolves around the middle-aged character Sukhanov during glasnost period Moscow. At first, we learn that Sukhanov lives a very comfortable, upper-class lifestyle that is anything but an example of socialist-communist life. He has obtained this position by being the editor of a Soviet-art publication. As the story unravels, so does Sukhanov's life and mind. Marked by many flashbacks, commentary on art, russia, and soviet life, Grushkin develops a story that essentially questions the importance of artistic integrity versus towing party-lines to obtain a life of comfort and stability. Don't worry she leaves the answer up to you.

Weaving together Sukhanov's perception and his memory with strange transitions between 1st and 3rd person narrative, the novel unfolds into a story that at times can be as surreal and maybe confusing for the average reader. Nevertheless, "The Dream Life..." finds its greatest strength in being able to weave together such surreal elements within the structure of a relatively linear narrative.

Overall, probably one of the better contemporary novels I have ever read. Mind you, I am not very well-read in contemporary fiction. Plus, I really like the topic of art and culture...this book examines that a lot.

Highly suggested, however, dont expect a highly surrealist and unstructured novel but rather one that utilizes these elements within the confines of a linear narrative.

Imagine a less fantastical Bulgakov with a hint of Gogol...