Special Medusa correspondent Sasha Sulim about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask heroines about their literary preferences and editions, which occupy an important place in the bookcase. Today the special correspondent of "Medusa" Sasha Sulim tells about favorite books.
In my life, it all started with text. When I was a child, I treated typewriters with special trepidation, I really liked the sound of their keys, I adored typing something, imagining that I was writing a long, long book. When I had already learned a little about the profession of a journalist, I was very happy: I confessed that I wanted to be a writer, it was somehow immodest, but the dreams of journalism did not look so self-confident.
After the second course of journalism, I decided to surrender to another hobby - cinema. For three years I studied at the Sorbonne as a film expert, until I realized that the real stories are much more interesting to me than the invented ones. So I returned to journalism.
I have a very reading family. In the apartment of the grandmother there are huge shelves filled with books. I remember how in my childhood I looked at multicolored roots for a long time, rereading the names of several hundred books many times. Parents constantly advised to read something from the home collection, but for some reason none of those books did not capture me. A few years later, having already moved away from the family library, I read Hermann Hesse's Steppe Wolf - I think this particular book has become a turning point for me. Thanks to her, I realized that the book can turn the perception of themselves and the world. Since then, reading is the most important part of my life.
I am a little afraid of wordy people: the accuracy of the selected words is very important to me. Sometimes how a book is written is more important to me what it is about. So it was, for example, with Evgeny Vodolazkin's Laurel: the life of an Orthodox saint is not my favorite genre, but the language of the novel, or rather the combination of modern and ancient Russian languages, cannot leave indifferent. Books are a powerful resource of inspiration and an opportunity to disconnect from the usual rhythm of life.
I rarely reread something or review it - I am afraid to destroy the first impression. For me, it is more important to get new emotions than to experience old ones. I like to learn something about culture or just about life in other countries or in another era through literature, it helps to understand and accept all kinds of people in real life.
LARS SOBY CRISTENSEN
"Half-Brother"
It seems to me that this is almost the only work of Norwegian literature that I read. Christensen’s novel helps to touch the Scandinavian world description with its completely unfamiliar melody of names, names of cities and streets - it is fascinating in itself and immerses into another era and another linguistic and cultural environment.
The story described in the book begins on May 8, 1945. On this very significant day for all Europeans, trouble happens to one of the main characters of the novel. The seemingly limitless happiness of this day, the universal joy, is confronted with her nightmare. I always believed that Victory Day is more a day of grief than a day of reckless joy. But the book is not only about this - it is first and foremost a family saga, the main character of which reflects on himself, about the family, about his father, about the half-brother - a boy who is born from a tragic accident on Victory Day; and about what place in life they can all claim.
Stephen King
"How to write books"
A few years ago, I decided that I really wanted to write scripts, and I loaded into the e-book a dozen and a half books on drama and storytelling - among them was essentially the autobiography of Stephen King. In "How to write books" there is not a word about scripts and, what particularly pleased me, not a single recipe for how to write a good book. But on his own example the classic of modern literature shows the reader one simple thing: to achieve a goal, you need not to read about how to achieve it, but just go to it.
For the author, who is at the beginning of the journey, it is very important to find out how still very young, early married Stephen King worked in the laundry room, came home exhausted and sat down at the typewriter he put on his knees, because there was no such thing in their tiny apartment writing desk. This is the story of a person keen on his business who, through faith in himself and the support of loved ones, was able to realize a dream. Personally, such examples inspire me and charge for work.
Svetlana Alexievich
"War has no female face"
I was born in Minsk, lived and studied there until the age of nineteen. Svetlana Aleksievich books may not be in the school curriculum, but I first heard her name and the names of her books in the tenth or eleventh grade. I confess: I didn’t want to read the book “War has a non-female face”. The fact is that in Belarus both now, and ten, and twenty years ago, they talked and are talking a great deal about the Great Patriotic War. Perhaps that is why as a child I had developed a denial of this topic, for a long time I consciously did not want to watch films or read books about the war, it seemed to me that I had “eaten” this at school.
The myths associated with the war seemed to me artificial, implausible and, as a result, not very interesting. I read the book “The War doesn’t Have a Woman's Face” when Alexievich had already received the Nobel Prize. It was awful to talk about it and focus on it, but every time I opened this book, tears began to flow. The war described in the book is very personal, very real - the one about which I have been lacking all this time. "The war has no female face" is a necessary truth about global calamity and misfortune, which did not end after the cessation of hostilities. The war ended, the people survived, but happiness never returned to them.
Gennady Shpalikov
"I walk across Moscow"
For a person who is interested in movies and screenplays, Shpalikov is a completely separate hero of his era. In the 1960s, many great films were shot in the Soviet Union, watching and revising which is still a great happiness. Movies based on Shpalikov’s scenarios are always special, some timeless atmosphere. When you look at “I walk across Moscow” or “Ilyich's Outpost”, you are completely lost in space and time. You see in them the sixties Moscow, but the characters of these films are not much different from the heroes of the French new wave - they are just as beautiful, thoughtful and internally free.
In general, I don’t like to read letters and diaries of other people - it seems to me something forbidden. But Shpalikov, unfortunately, managed to do so little in his life, that his notes became almost the only opportunity to learn more about him, to touch his thoughts and feelings, his very sensitive and sad perception of life.
Kazuo Ishiguro
"The rest of the day"
I love books and movies that capture you not from the first pages or frames, but gradually. At first it seemed to me that the story of the English butler could not interest me - there are too few points of contact with him. But the further I progressed, the more clearly I understood how much personal I have in this novel.
Everything begins easily and playfully: an aging gentleman shares memories. From his story, we learn that he devoted his whole life to work, not wanting to be distracted either by his relatives or feelings - but behind the desire to become the best in his business, it seems he irretrievably lost something very important. This is sad and very recognizable.
Elena Ferrante
"Neapolitan Quartet"
I like to share books and movies with friends and family and with great pleasure I fill up my list of recommendations. Not so long ago, Ferrante’s novels were included. I myself learned about this cycle by chance, only two out of four books were then translated into Russian, so I had to finish reading in English - it was absolutely impossible to tear myself away. If you begin to retell the plot of the novel, it may seem that we are talking about some literary “soap”, but this, in my opinion, is the power of this text: the author hides a serious study of human destinies for seeming lightness and sometimes excessive narrative.
In the center of the story - a very difficult relationship between two girls from a poor district of Naples. I deliberately do not say that we are talking about friends - their interaction is much more complicated. It seems that their relationship is built on constant rivalry: and if this one does not seem to bother this rivalry, then the other is haunted all his life. Interestingly, the final of the novel in Russian and in English are slightly different. It seemed to me that in the English version the words were more precisely chosen to describe the state of the heroine, who at the end of the story, in fact at the end of her life, understands that the one with whom she compared herself all her life is an ordinary person, far from ideal.
This “release” was very important to me, because usually multi-volume works end with something like “and they went into the sunset”, but here the point is very powerful.
Vladimir Nabokov
"Lolita"
The first time I read Lolita was still at school — after watching television on the screen with Jeremy Irons. I do not remember that a book or a film made a strong impression on me. After school, I went to study in Paris at the Faculty of Cinema Studies and there I saw the first adaptation of the novel, which was released a few years after the book was published, and then I decided to re-read Lolita.
In both Russian and English, the novel is written in an amazing and very precise language. I admire when a person from another cultural and linguistic context masterfully masters a new language and writes on it as brilliantly as in his native one. "Lolita" - no matter how strange it may sound - I take it as a very sincere declaration of love. Yes, this recognition belongs to a very controversial (for many - negative) hero, but after all the opportunity to get into this in the head is one of the privileges that a good novel gives us.
Agot Christoph
"Thick notebook"
Agot Christoph, like Nabokov, perfectly mastered a non-native language: a writer of Hungarian origin, all of her works - in French. The novel "Fat Notebook" is written in the form of a diary, which are two twin brothers. The action takes place during the Second World War, wait out the fighting boys sent to the grandmother, in the border of the Hungarian town.
The first chapters are written in short, somewhat primitive phrases - but this is only an imitation of children's writing: a simple enumeration, a statement of what surrounds the boys in an occupied city, makes a strong impression. As the characters mature, the text of the novel becomes more complicated; Christophe was able to show the evolution of the characters not only through their point of view, but also through their speech skills.
Jonathan littell
"Benevolent Women"
Reading this book, you constantly struggle with feelings of disgust and horror. Incidentally, this is also a diary written during the Second World War, only this time on behalf of an SS officer. The main character becomes a participant in almost all the main (terrible) events of this war: from the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar - along with the hero, we literally find ourselves at the firing pit - to the Battle of Stalingrad.
In the "benevolent" described the very "attractive" evil. Not in the sense that you go over to his side or begin to empathize with him - here you seem to be opening the usually tightly closed curtain, and you can trace the mechanism of the birth and spread of this evil. There are about a thousand pages in the book, and when you leaf through the last, then besides a sense of pride (for yourself) that you have finally mastered it, you experience something like liberation: at last this terrible, terrible (alien) dream has ended.
Boris Vian
"Foam days"
The amazing novel of the French modernist. A French girlfriend recommended me to read it when I was studying in Paris. Viana generally loves the French university youth, I think, just for the spirit of avant-garde and non-conformism, which has not disappeared from his prose. Vian himself called "The Foam of Days" "a projection of reality, but shifted to a different plane." The world in his novel functions according to its own laws: the nymphea's water lily is smothered from inside by the heroine, and the Parisian apartment is gradually decreasing in size.
Foam of Days is a poem dedicated to the best city on earth (Paris) and its beautiful inhabitants (young lovers). A few years ago, the novel filmed Michel Gondry - probably the most suitable director of the living. The film tried to literally reproduce the one described by Vian, but the magic was lost on the screen. Still, not all fantasies should be realized.
Vincent Bougliosi
"Helter Skelter: The Truth About Charles Manson"
Vincent Bougliozi represented the prosecution at the Charles Manson trial, and then wrote a book about the case and the process. From the point of view of literature, there is little interesting in it, but the texture is the richest: two nights of terrible murders are described in great detail, and how the search for criminals took place and how their guilt was proved. In general, I like books, films and serials about serial killers - several of my journalistic materials are devoted to this topic - that is why I included the book of Bougliosi in my list.
When I read it, I could not help but draw parallels with what I encountered in my work. The Angarsk maniac, about which I wrote several texts, could not be found for as many as twenty years, including because some policemen and then the police did not do their job well. According to Bougliozi, in the seventies of Los Angeles, too, everything was not perfect. For several months they could not check the pistol transferred to the police station, which eventually turned out to be an instrument of crime. But there still it was not about the years, but about the months - a significant difference when it comes to serial killers.