Mi-a plăcut cum a dansat grațios pe linia sinusoidală dintre realitate și închipuire, prezent și trecut.
Despre un om al uitării, al evitării în încercarea de a păstra o liniște interioară imposibilă - da, am putut recunoaște câte ceva; despre alegeri, înțelegerea propriei vieți, despre nebunie. Am dat de o poveste și o scriitură surprinzător de captivante.

At first, the long, flowery sentences overfilled with adjectives put me off the story a little bit. But for just a few pages... because, somehow, the story, the writing morphed and these became beautiful, startling descriptions. Melancholy. Surrealism. Art. Life. Youth. Aging.

Truly, this book is sublime. It's like a breathtaking painting put into words. Grushin has an incredible talent for merging the real with the unreal, a current life and a dream. You smoothly drift from reality to dream and back again....

Definitely recommended, especially if you enjoy art (Grushin's art background shines here) and have at least a passing acquaintance with surrealist artists including Chagall, Dali, Magritte, etc....

Read it & savor the beauty.

lovely read, sad, ambitious... the verdict is still out if i liked it or not...

This story reminded me of the silent film, Un Chien Andalou (by film maker Bunuel & Surrealist Artist Dali), in its dreamlike transitioning and confusion. I understand what the author was trying to do & I think for a debut novel, Grushin’s is a success: nuanced characters and flawless writing. However, I was bored by the Russian setting & the failed artist story line. Grushin’s second novel, Forty Rooms, is one of my favourite books. This book was similar but focused on a male character who didn’t follow his dreams.
3.7 stars...

Is it better, more valuable, whatever, to trod a well-worn path extremely well or to try to bushwhack a path with mixed results? A moderate person at heart, when I write I try to combine the well-worn and the new. But faced with a debut novel such as this one, a third-person mid-life crisis novel with flashbacks (unusually in first person), dream sequences, and a Soviet twist, I don’t know whether to subtract points for the well-trodden or add points for doing such an amazing job with elements that, in most novels, would have caused me to put the book down. At first, I thought Grushin was too in love with adjectives, but she convinced me of her skill with them, too. The principal negative for me was the ending (the very end). I started right into Grushin’s second novel, which is very rare for me. A 4.5.

(3.5) When a book has been on my to-read list for a while, I often find I've formed a long-standing impression of what it's like without having read a single word of it, and sometimes the impression turns out to be completely wrong. So it was with this: for years I've been imagining it as highly experimental, difficult, weird. It was rather a shock to discover it's actually a rather conventional historical novel. Once I settled into it, however, it felt like a pleasant change of pace.

It's 1985, and Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov appears to be a man at his peak. He's editor-in-chief of Art in the World, Russia's leading art magazine. His wife, Nina, is beautiful and elegant. His children, Vasily and Ksenya, are brilliant and charming. He commands respect and moves in powerful circles. But, over the course of a very short time – starting with the disappearance of his chauffeur from outside a party – Sukhanov finds his life unravelling. (The disappearance of a chauffeur also sparks a disastrous chain of events in Dostoyevsky's short story 'A Nasty Business', and having read it recently I can't help but wonder if that's where Grushin got her inspiration from.)

What Grushin does particularly well is the switching of perspective. Throughout the book, we find Sukhanov prompted to revisit memories which remind him of all the things he's suppressed in order to conform and gain power. Whenever this happens, the narrative slips from third person into first, sometimes halfway through a sentence. It's a really effective way to show how the character loses himself in these recollections; it often happens suddenly, but it's never jarring.

Of course, Sukhanov's editing of his own history mirrors his country's, and his breakdown coincides with the dismantling of much of the state apparatus that made his success possible. As he tries and fails to accept this, the world through Sukhanov's eyes becomes strange and distorted, and by the end the narrative realises the surrealism I had expected of it from the start. This is a very accomplished novel, one I liked drifting into whenever I sat down with it, though I found it comfortably enjoyable rather than stunning.

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Best book I read in 2009. Wonderfully layered and immersive novel looking at the compromises and sorrows and memories of a Russian art-bureaucrat who used to be an artist. Echoes of his father's death in his life. Lots of psychological and historical depth.

Beautiful, absorbing prose. And she absolutely nails the look and feel of dreams.

Olga Grushin's first novel delivered one wonderful surprise after another. I still can hardly believe that English wasn't her first language. "Dream Life" is the delicate story of the mental and social decline of Sukhanov, an influential Russian art historian during the waning years of the Soviet Union. Against this obscure and changing political background, a distant but constantly demanding family, and his foggy memories, he becomes aware that his life has been a series of choices he doesn't fully understand. As Grushin seamlessly weaves dream and memory with reality, Sukhanov slowly discovers the significance of his past, and the key to restoring the life he thought he had lost.

Anatoly Sukhanov seems like an unappealing protagonist for this novel set in Moscow at the dawn of perestroika. He's an emotionally detached, party-line-spouting cultural bureaucrat, and when his life starts going awry in subtle ways, it seems deserved. But as this novel digs deeper into Sukhanov's past as an artist, son and husband, you gradually get a picture of a man who gave up a rich artistic life...for some very good, or at least very understandable, reasons. Really an amazing, brain-shaking and heartbreaking read.

Wow! Best novel I've read in quite some time, and it's a first novel. Echoes of Tolstoy, Nabokov, and Bulgakov. English is Grushin's 3rd language, but you wouldn't know it. Story of a 55-year-old man in 1985 Soviet Russia, having a nervous breakdown as his work and family life fall apart and as Soviet Russia is on the brink of falling apart. As a young man, Sukhanov showed promise as a Russian surrealist in the tradition of Dali and Chagall, but in fear for his life and career, he suppresses his guilt and ultimately becomes the editor of a Soviet art magazine, promoting "Soviet" art and denigrating Western art as immoral and supportive of capitalism. The novel seamlessly weaves past and present in a pastiche of surrealistic images from Sukhanov's "waking" dream life. A must read!

Normally I avoid most contemporary literature, especially written by female authors who can turn a phrase, but fail to deliver much more than that. Pretty writing and clever phrasing with flat characters and a contrived experience do absolutely nothing for me. Thankfully, this book is different.

I'll admit that a few florid descriptions at the start made me want to quit ("Streetlamps swam through the liquid mist, their pale reflections drowning in an inverted world of running asphalt"). But I am so glad I continued. While this wasn't the most profound study of a troubled man, the book presents a remarkably mature perspective of Anatoly, a 56-year old man who gave up his dreams for the stability of a Government-sanctioned position ("Once he created art; now he censors it"). I would have preferred more character study through Anatoly's thoughts and less through his dreams, but that's just my preference. Russian society is also presented in such careful, well chosen detail--the reader can't help but think about the plight of the Russian artists, long after the book is finished. Ms Grushin writes as if she's lived far more than her years, making for a meaningful, informative reading experience. And some of the writing is downright, read-it-again brilliant. This isn't just pretty, vacuous writing--it's a dark story that resonates--not as much as I would have liked it to resonate, but there is so much promise for this author's future work. Highly recommended, and I look forward to reading more.