Best of the year: Lisa Birger advises landmark novels
2015 IS FITTING THE END. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the year turned out to be saturated, including culturally. To dot the “and” and make sure that nothing important had passed by, we asked experts in various fields to tell about the brightest books, films, albums and other cultural events. In the thirteenth issue, literary critic Lisa Birger recommends several novels at once, published in 2015.
Lisa birger
literary critic
2015 did not give birth to the novel conditionally "main" - such who would like to read, dying of delight, and immediately rush to recommend and reread everything. But in it there were at once several books of really big, simply historical encyclopedias in the novel form, exhaustively painting to us other eras. This is Valeria Zalotukha's Candle, Adoration of the Magi by Suhbat Aflatuni, Leonid Yuzefovich's Winter Road. The latter, perhaps, is my favorite, because it has this unique feeling, when you can literally reach out to a hero who lived a century before you in some very different space and time. We need such books today, because we are able to build a connection between the present and the past, broken in the public consciousness: ask us how we imagine Russian life, not only a hundred, but fifty years ago, and get terrible mess of myths and pop culture . In this sense, perhaps, we need literature in order to stand stronger on the ground.
For me, the main event of last year’s literature was the emergence of strong female novels: “An enviable feeling of Vera Stenina” by Anna Matveyeva, “Zuleikha opens her eyes” Guzel Yakhin. These are smart and non-assertive books about the search for so-called female happiness in difficult historical circumstances: Russia in the 90s and the USSR in the 30s. Such an awakening of the feminine, an awareness of the value, non-completeness of one's own experience, aspirations and desires seems to me really important.
The photo: Vasily Shaposhnikov / Kommersant