Rights sold to: Italy – VOLAND, Russia – VREMYA
Long-listed title for the Big Book Russian National Award (2006)
Marina Palei's Klemens is an extraordinary and highly unusual book. Its plot is focused on a strange and violent history of love of Mike, a male translator and photographer from St. Petersburg, Russia, to a mysterious German youth Klemens.
The novel might be considered as a homosexual literature, but only to the same extent as Nobokov's Lolita was considered once a pornographic literature. In fact, Palei's book is a logical continuation of Nabokov's aesthetics and poetics. Her Klemens is a mesmerizing work of art, thanks to its stylistically impeccable descriptions of emergent evolution of feelings, of love and hate in their extremes.
It is an innovative Russian-European novel of the new millennium, in which Marina Palei spontaneously plays with Martin Heidegger's paradoxical ideas.