Tag Archives: Fiction

Review: Russian Winter, Daphne Kalotay

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Daphne Kalotay’s Russian Winter is a beautifully written book. The pacing is a bit slow, but that somehow fits with the book’s reflective, nostalgic nature. And once in a while, Kalotay injects a cheeky line or two into an otherwise serious scene. Take for example a character whose ex-fiance’s new woman had “all her ducks in a row.” The character’s mother “let slip” that the ex-fiance was moving to Seattle with “the woman with the ducks.” It’s a toss away phrase, but one that turns a cliche into an opportunity to giggle. Later, a solemn TV interview scene includes a nurse who sneaks into camera view, waves, and scurries back off screen. It’s farcical, and definitely welcome, keeping the book from taking its heavy subject matter too seriously.

Nina Revskaya is an elderly former dancer from the Bolshoi ballet. Now living in Boston, she has decided to auction off her jewelry. This dredges up memories she would rather forget, of her life in Stalinist Russia. The auction also reveals a mystery in the present — why is Nina so reluctant to meet Grigori Solodin, a Russian professor with an amber necklace so apparently part of a set Nina owns?

The Russian scenes are beautiful and captivating. I loved reading about Nina’s rise to principal dancer. Kalotay describes ballet with a storyteller’s eye. We are drawn into Nina’s dancing because Kalotay goes into such detail that we can almost imagine we’re watching the ballet and feeling the magic of live theatre. Take for example:

Nina revels in the leaps and kicks and high jumps her body loves. […] She greets her Spanish girlfriends in mime and flirts with some of the young men, all the while aware that Stalin is watching–yet even as she makes her sequence of leaps around the square, slapping the ground firmly with her fan, Nina feels fully in control. When she dances her first variation, clicking her castanets defiantly, her sissonnes are fully split, so that as she arches her back in midair, her head points back parallel to her leg and her arm behind her almost touches her outstretched back foot.

We can practically see Nina happily flirting with men onstage. Her joy is marred by the presence of Stalin in the audience, the man responsible for her friend Gersh’s fall from grace and eventual arrest. Yet, with that final pose, Kalotay presents us with such a beautiful image of triumph. It may not mean anything in practical terms, but, reading that passage, we can believe that Nina has defeated Stalin, that she is free from his regime’s control. And we realize, isn’t that the power of art? Doesn’t art provide us with a sense of freedom, of transcendence? It’s idealistic, and as Nina’s story reveals, only temporary. But in passages like that one, we not only believe in this power; Kalotay makes us feel it.

I was drawn into Nina’s story: her romance with the poet Victor Elsin, the complexities of her friendship with Vera, and, in the present day, her overwhelming desire to both confront her past and forget it. I loved reading about her friends in Russia. Set against the backdrop of the Stalin regime, yet full as well of personal drama, their stories drew me in.

Less compelling are the scenes in the present. Kalotay does a good job fleshing out the other two main characters, the Russian professor Grigori and Drew, the woman organizing the auction of Nina’s jewelry. The mystery of why Nina refuses to acknowledge Grigori’s necklace as part of her collection is intriguing, and certainly what kept me interested enough in the present day scenes. Grigori and Drew are likable enough characters; they just pale in comparison to Victor, Vera, and even Nina’s nurse Cynthia. I was more interested in Grigori, mostly because his necklace shows some kind of link between him or his family and Nina. Drew’s story mostly just bored me.

That being said, it was a present day character, Zoltan, an immigrant in America, who said one of my favourite lines in the entire novel:

This country has been good to me. But it doesn’t hold the indentation of my body on the mattress, if you see what I mean.

What a beautiful, striking image! An immigrant myself, I do see what he means. I don’t necessarily feel that way all the time, but when I read that passage, my immediate thought was: that’s it exactly.

Russian Winter is very much Nina’s story, and she’s a fascinating woman with an even more exciting past. Zoltan’s sense of not being truly home is an echo of Nina’s own situation — a woman who has broken free from Stalin’s government, yet in doing so, has also given up the life of dance that had come so naturally to her. Elderly, with arthritic knuckles, Nina is as much a stranger in her own body as Zoltan feels in his current home. We feel Nina’s pain, as she remembers the wonder of being able to dance even as she struggles now to walk. We fret with her when she realizes mistakes she’s made and feels it’s too late to fix them. And we hold on as tight as she does to the memory of that young dancer, triumphant in her pose mid-flight.

 

Review: Blood Red Road, Moira Young

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I’d heard that Moira Young’s Blood Red Road was very similar to The Hunger Games, so as a Hunger Games fan, I was eager to check it out. There are certainly similarities: Blood Red Road also takes place in a dystopian future, the heroine Saba is an archer like Katniss, and Saba has to compete in a gladiator style Cage Match to the death like Katniss has to survive in the Hunger Games. Overall, however, I don’t think Blood Red Road quite matches up, at the very least in terms of the breadth of social commentary in Hunger Games. While Hunger Games delivers a scathing portrayal of contemporary society’s obsession with consumerism and voyeurism, Blood Red Road reads more like a straightforward action-adventure story, with its social commentary focused on the dangers of drug addiction.

That being said, Blood Red Road is still a very good book. It has a heroine much fiercer than Katniss, UFC-style fight scenes, language that reminded me of the dialogue in The Grapes of Wrath and a landscape and drug culture that reminded me of Dune. Saba’s twin brother Lugh (the “light” to Saba’s “shadow”) is kidnapped and Saba sets off to rescue him. Along the way, she is captured and forced to compete in no-holds-barred cage fighting, where she earns the nickname Angel of Death: when she fights, the “red hot” takes over and she can’t lose. People are addicted to chaal, a drug controlled by a King, and this addiction makes them either suppliant or, after a certain point, filled with bloodlust (hence the need for deathly cage fights). Saba also encounters a group of young female warrior rebels and a handsome young thief called Jack.

Young writes well. This type of writing (filled with intentional misspellings and grammatical errors) usually grates on me, but, as with Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy, I thought it worked here. Blood Red Road is a fast-paced, action-packed, exciting read. It’s already been optioned for a motion picture by Ridley Scott, and I can certainly imagine some of the scenes playing out on screen. The secondary characters are well developed and likable. I especially liked Jack, who is charming, funny and sweet. Saba’s younger sister Emmi is usually the kind of character I’d hate in books and movies, the kid who always gets involved in things and so has to be rescued several times. But I really felt for Emmi in this book, and I think it has a lot to do with my major problem with the book: Saba.

I liked Saba as a narrator, but I don’t really like her as a person. I do like that her survival instinct is so strong that she dominates the cage fights. I also like that she is so devoted to her brother, even though it’s clear (Jack even tells her so) that she puts him on too high a pedestal. We do see her vulnerability at times, and also her protective instinct toward Emmi.

Thing is, as one character says, Saba is “prickly.” Beyond that, she can be downright mean, especially to Emmi. A lot of the time, other characters were offering Saba help and friendship and she kept turning them away, preferring to be a lone wolf even when it wasn’t practical. She has to be forced to accept help, and for me, at least, she hadn’t shown enough of her vulnerability to make this anything but annoying.

I was most annoyed by Saba’s relationship with Jack. It followed a standard “I hate you (but secretly I love you)” type love story. But after a while, Saba’s insistence that she really, really hates Jack just felt forced, like the author just wanted to stretch it out just a bit longer. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t really see why Saba was so defensive, unlike in Hunger Games, for example, where I could really understand how Katniss’ society had made her so defensive and afraid to trust anyone.

Overall, however, Blood Red Road is a really good book. Definitely worth checking out for fans of The Hunger Games or Divergent or kick-ass heroines and dystopian fiction in general.

Review: Spycatcher, Matthew Dunn

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Fan of John Le Carre? You’ll love Matthew Dunn’s Spycatcher. Written by a former MI6 field officer, Spycatcher takes us right into the mind and heart of master spy Will Cochrane. Cochrane is a highly skilled operative, tasked by MI6 and the CIA to locate and stop an Iranian terrorist named Meggido from launching a massive international attack.

Dunn’s background in espionage is evident. Spycatcher has an action-packed story, with some of the best fight scenes I’ve ever read. They remind me of the Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr, where a voice-over narration details all the moves Holmes will make and the reasons behind them (like “fake to the eye to distract, then strike to the throat to incapacitate”). When Will takes a guy out, we see exactly how he does it, and we believe in Will as a killing machine. As a fan of action movies and MMA, I loved reading such scenes of realistic, efficient hand-to-hand combat.

I also love the way Dunn describes the operations carried out by Will and his team of CIA agents. In some scenes, they seem almost unbeatable. For example, when Will has to break into a building, he has Julian, a member of his team, giving instructions in his ear. The instructions are split-second precise, with Julian telling Will where to face, when to go and when to stop and hide. They move with clockwork precision, and so even when things go wrong, we just know that such a highly skilled team can come up with a viable Plan B on the fly.

What really makes Spycatcher work, however, is the depth of insight it gives into the personal lives of spies. The CIA team and Will’s MI6 and CIA bosses are all engaging characters, but Will, in particular, is a very lonely man. In one scene, he runs into his sister, who he hasn’t seen in eight years, at a cemetery, and she comments that it’s just like him to visit the dead and not the living. It’s a striking observation; we realize that, in choosing the life of a spy, Will Cochrane has given up the chance to have a family, and even to be with the family he already has. We also get some flashbacks to Will’s childhood and the traumatic events that have made him such an effective spy and efficient killing machine.

So when Will meets Lana, a woman who can help him get Meggido, and whom Will wants to protect because of all she’s suffered in the past, and when Will realizes he isn’t as lonely with her around, I really wanted them to end up together. I don’t usually care much for the romantic subplots in thrillers; I prefer to focus on the action. But in Spycatcher, since Dunn makes such a compelling portrait of Will’s humanity and loneliness, I just wanted Will to find happiness.

In one of my favourite scenes, Will hesitates to kill a man whom he respects for his courage: “For the briefest of moments, he wanted to leave the brave man alive, just turn and walk away. But he knew he could not allow the man to live. He shot him.” So many action movies or thrillers have clear good guys and bad guys, and if a good guy hesitates at killing a bad guy, it’s because they have some kind of history. But Will had never met this man before, so it was just his behaviour in combat that made Will respect him. Will’s hesitation at killing this man, and yet killing him anyway because it was necessary, is such a wonderfully complex, emotional portrait of Will as both vulnerable human and professional spy at the same time. We feel for Will, and can relate to him, even as we admire his skills as a deadly machine.

In the book trailer on the Harper Collins Canada website, Matthew Dunn says he’s been told to write what he knows, and what he knows is espionage. Reading Spycatcher, I can definitely see it. Dunn takes us into the heart of a spy. Will Cochrane’s adventure is thrilling, but it’s his personal life that keeps us hooked, and his personal demons that we really want vanquished.