Journalist and writer Olga Beshley about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, journalist and writer, editor-in-chief of the portal “Batenka, yes you are a transformer,” Olga Beshley shares his stories about favorite books.
In our house lived a girl Inga. She was older than me by a year or two. Inga had a wonderful grandmother who taught her to read and write. I asked to teach me too. Grandma Ingi gave me an alphabet and explained that the letters form into words, words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and so the text comes out. I remember that it was summer, I locked the alphabet in my room and folded the letters. Of all the rooms, only mine - the smallest, pasted over with yellow paper wallpaper - came out on the sunny side, and the letters formed among the heat and light.
I showed my success in the fall. My mother and I went to the post office to call relatives in the village (of course, now it is difficult to imagine that to call a long-distance it was necessary to go somewhere). And here we come to the post office - a huge, gray building - the mother holds my hand, I take a breath in the chest and read the big blue letters on the butt: WHICH THE TE LE LE VON TE LE GRAPH. We stop. Mom looks at me in bewilderment, then in horror. "I can read!" - I say. "What a nightmare," says mom. For some reason she was very upset.
I read my first "adult" book when I was eight - it was Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita". With this book, the parents had some kind of their own, gentle, student history. The publication that I took, my father gave my mother a birthday present - on the cover was a very beautiful woman in a cloud of short dark hair and a cat with a pack of cards squinting with one eye. But my attention was attracted by the cover on the back of the book — a running little man was drawn there. He was running in a huge white spot, past a distorted dark house and power lines, under a blue, quivering moon. This man seemed very lonely to me, and his position was disastrous. I suddenly wanted to know where he was running and from what. And will anybody help him?
My father once sold literature, and all the publications that appeared in the house were books that he chose for himself. My father worked a lot, and if he didn’t work, for some reason he still didn’t go home. He lived some kind of mysterious life to which none of us was involved. One could have guessed that he was and left through fresh newspapers, new books and film cassettes. When no one was watching me, I picked up all these things. So I read Marquez, Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, Steinbeck, Nabokov and countless reports from Chechnya in newspapers that were forgotten in the kitchen. For some reason it seemed to me that if I read all this, then I would understand something about my father, and then he would talk to me.
My book interests appeared in high school. So, I was very passionate about Sherlock Holmes Adventures for a couple of years and watched TV series with Jeremy Brett on TV. Then, of course, “Harry Potter” happened - I heard about this book from the news, there were no official translations yet, and I found some unofficial one on the Internet. This story led me to Russian fan fiction. It is almost impossible to believe in it, but I remember the first Russian fan fiction in the Harry Potter universe (now there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions already). I remember how the culture of Russian fikrayterstvo and the culture of translation were formed - all this grew and developed with me. And I remember how I was shaking with excitement when I made my first publication - not a single text afterwards brought me to such a state. It seemed that the soul would fly away somewhere.
Closer to the senior classes I began to be interested in everything that was laid out on the best places of bookstores. "Probably, there is something here, since everyone reads," I reasoned. Almost all of Murakami, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Paulo Coelho, Akunin and several dozen books by Darya Dontsova were read this way. This omnivorousness has been preserved for me until now: I read with pleasure both the classics and raspiarenny intellectual novels like “Shchegla”, and some hell slag with a black hole in the center of the plot. I need all this for some reason.
I decided to become a journalist after Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “Comanche Territory”. Now it is difficult for me to say why this book impressed me - it’s about military journalists, and nothing good about the profession is written there. However, I then studied at the physics and technology school at the Institute of Atomic Energy. It probably seemed to me that journalists live very interestingly. If I understand how the text is made, then for me it is a passing book. If I don't understand, this is an important book for me. If I do not understand at all, then the text is extremely good. Sometimes because of this, I start to cry. This happened to me recently with Chekhov's "Bishop".
From twenty-two to twenty-seven years old I read almost nothing. It was a very difficult period of my life. And in order to read books, you need at least a certain amount of mental strength. Now I am twenty-eight, and over the past year I have read a lot. Basically, I read great novels that I missed. Of the new translations - the same Franzen and Yanagiharu. I got the impression that all the authors of the modern big novels are distinguished by one feature - they, obviously, have gone through a course of psychotherapy. So when someone writes: “Oh, God, Franzen climbed into my head,” - I think it is. And, unfortunately, he is not alone.
Haruki Murakami
"Wonderland Brakes and the End of the World"
There is an information war imperceptible to the average man: a corporation called “System” deals with data protection, and a corporation called “Factory” - burglary and theft of information. The fact that the novel was published in 1985, you forget almost immediately. In the Murakami books, I was always touched by the details. The life of the hero is described in such a way that one immediately wants to live his life: eat his food, drink his drink, read his books and listen to his music. True, about the same degree I do not want to float in the sewage system with a hole in my stomach - these scenes are also recorded with naturalness, from which it distorts.
I first read "Wonderland without brakes" when I was in school, and then the life of the hero seemed to me an ideal. Recently, I re-read and realized that everything went of itself: I read all the books and heard all the songs from this book. I even drank all the drinks that the main character drank. I just did not eat smoked oysters, fried sardines and salted plums. But I think I still have time until the end of the world.
Eugene Ionesco
"Rhinoceros"
Shortly after taking the Crimea, my mother, who at the time was working behind the counter of a tiny shop, called me in mild anxiety and said: “Olya, I can’t understand anything. I have known all my customers for many years - these are quiet, intelligent people who always they avoided political topics in the conversation. Imagine - today they burst into our store in a crowd, waved banners and said that they were going to a rally in honor of the annexation of the Crimea. What became of them? I don’t understand anything! " And I immediately thought: "Ionesco!" I also believe that each of us at least once in my life was a rhinoceros.
Nikolay Leskov
"Iron Will", "Sealed Angel", "At the End of the World"
Reading Leskov, I enter a state of sadness, tenderness and compassion. I love "Iron Will" very much. This is a story about how the German Hugo Pectoralis and the Russian drinker Safronych came together in the most stupid opposition. The Russian man won, but he died at the same time. I really like a quote from this story - supposedly one Russian general about the Germans: "What a misfortune that they cleverly count, and we will let them down such nonsense that they won't even have time to open their mouths to understand it."
Another favorite story - "The Sealed Angel" - reading winter, Christmas. However, for me, the whole Leskov is a winter writer. Like the story "On the edge of the world" - and there, and there the story falls on Christmas time. And if “Iron Will” is about the tragic invincibility of the Russian people, then “Angel” and “At the End of the World” - about the test of faith and the test of faith. For me, these are important topics.
Umberto Eco
"Foucault's Pendulum"
"Foucault's Pendulum" - the work of redrawing history. Detailed guidance on how to subordinate the story of any, even the most insane idea. In the eyes of the reader, all significant historical events fit into the Templar plan, so cleverly that at some point the nonsense becomes convincing. Reshaping the story is a dangerous game. In the "Pendulum" heroes are victims of their inventions. And this in one way or another awaits everyone who juggles the facts and is engaged in idle talk. I remember this novel with about the same regularity as the "Rhino" Ionesco. And if I find myself in Paris, I definitely go to look at the pendulum in the Museum of Arts and Crafts.
Fedor Dostoevsky
"Writer's Diary"
For me, the Writer's Diary forever crossed out the equal sign between the person who wrote the book and the person who wrote it. In the works of man goes beyond the boundaries of his personality. Outside of creativity, your favorite writer can be arbitrarily less than our ideas about him, be a close, unpleasant person to you. I understand that Dostoevsky's journalism should be read with an eye to the cultural and historical context, but still from the present time is not done by itself: our Crimea, Constantinople will be ours, the West is rotting, the Poles are bad, the French are bad, Catholicism is heresy, and the Russian people - cool. Well, my favorite: "Is it because they accuse me of" hate ", what do I sometimes call a Jew a" liquid "?"
Tom Stoppard
In one of the interviews, Stoppard said that he did not go to church, but was constantly in a state of conversation "with something that was not material." This conversation leads all the time and his characters. They ask the most difficult, most difficult questions. And they demand answers and accuracy of formulations where it is almost impossible - among the fragile, crumbling world. I also love Stoppard and for how freely he violates the unity of time and space. "Do not worry, I will not fall!" - says poor Sophie, going down the stairs in the seventh scene, and already in the eighth - a few years later - is thrown out of the window.
Rudyard Kipling
"Pak from the Magic Hills"
If Foucault's “Pendulum” is a book about how not to handle history, then “Magic Hills Pak” is about how it should be. And as we, unfortunately, do not know how. In my book there is a wonderful preface by the translator Gregory Kruzhkov, who, before taking up the translation, went to the Kipling house-museum in Sussex, because all the places mentioned in the book are Mill Creek, Magic Hill, Otm Otter, Witches Circle, are real existing locations where the children of the writer played.
They have existed here for hundreds of years before Kipling bought this house, and they still exist there. “Not just a meadow, not just a forest,” writes Kipling in a poem opening the first book of fairy tales. Everything around — at the mill, at the pond, at the well — has a story that a local old-timer, a Roman centurion, a Norman knight, and even the old spirit of these places — Pak from the hills — could tell. Envy!
Jerome David Salinger
"Nine Stories"
I really love his nine stories - they have a lot of uncertainty, non-obviousness, dark places. Someone is trying to figure out by restoring the chronology of the life of the Glass family, someone is analyzing stories through Zen Buddhism, which Salinger was fond of. I never really tried to explain for myself why, for example, Simor shot himself from the story "The Banana Fish Is Well Caught." These explanations can be any number, and none matter. In Salinger's stories there is a lot of loneliness, restlessness, irresistible unhappiness. And the dialogues that I admire.
Johan Borgen
"Little Lord"
When I read Borgen, I remember Bergman, when I watch Bergman - I remember Borgen. Wilfried Sagen trilogy is a psychologically difficult book. This is a very accurate, stressful text through which in places you simply don’t want to go through in order not to have strong feelings. I was impressed by one of the key images of the trilogy - a glass egg that got Wilfred from his father - a simple toy, with artificial snow and a small house. At some point, Wilfred feels that he himself is inside such an egg. The isolation of the world - real or imagined - is in fact not at all comfortable. She's scary, scary, scary.
Stephen King
"Raft"
If for some reason you turn up your nose from his books and do not consider King to be an outstanding writer, read though “Raft” - a story about how a group of guys went swimming in a deserted lake. Immediately, I will say a spoiler - everybody has been devoured by a huge stain. And if, while reading Kafka and Ionesko, you still somehow wonder why people suddenly turn into beetles or rhinos, then, reading King, the question "Where did the stain come from that devoured everyone?" does not even arise. First, because King has nothing more natural. Secondly, just do not want to know the answer.