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The Detector, a novel by Ksenia Buksha
Rights sold: Russia - AST
Longlisted for the 2018 National Bestseller literary award
Ksenia Buksha’s new novel The Detector is an anti-utopia dressed up as a classic closed-circle murder mystery, where biting sociopolitical satire on a police state alternates with profound poetic lyricism. The action takes place in Russia in the near future, where everyone in the land is preparing for the tsar’s coronation. The ceremony is to take place in an ancient monastery on the “Islands” (invented by the author, they are an evident allusion to the Solovetsky monastery beloved by Vladimir Putin). With thousands of people thronging to the locale, a walk-through security screener – the Detector – has been installed at the landing pier as one of the event’s many safety measures. Ten visitors set it off, for reasons none of them can fathom, and they are divested of their possessions and taken into custody inside the island fortress.
This is the mismatched band of strangers that ends up locked inside one of the Island Monastery’s cells, awaiting “clarification of their circumstances:” an oppositional journalist; a serial foster mother; a successful Central Asian businessman; a normalization-chip developer convinced that his implants, embedded in citizens’ brains, can maximize human productivity; a femme fatale/professional wedding organizer; an aging hippie who can predict the future; an earnest Frenchman who runs a Russian Down syndrome support group; a Jewish grandma who speaks Dog; a kind man who tries to get in to the ceremony on his dead brother’s ticket; and a woman who wants to have the tsar’s baby. They squabble over everything from which of them must be guilty of wanting to kill the tsar, to how to divide up their rations, to the childlessness tax and the ban on resuscitating anyone who is reproductively disabled or of retirement age. Here, in this closed space, they display both their own individual characters and the character of the country they live in, the character of today’s Russia.
The lives of all ten of these dissimilar individuals depend on whether they can solve a mystery: what shared trait made them each set off the Detector? And what is going to happen to them after the coronation?
Praise for Ksenia Buksha´s The Detector
As usual, Ksenia Buksha’s new novel isn’t anything at all like her previous ones. As usual, it is dazzlingly brilliant, fresh, and disturbing. And as usual, it’s full of black comedy, ruthlessness, and that special kind of elegance and grace found only in Petersburg prose. And the fact that these days, lots of people are having similar thoughts and feelings? Well, that’s what makes writers writers: while we haven’t even admitted it to ourselves yet, they’ve already said it out loud, and it left our ears ringing. -- Dmitry Bykov, literary critic
Buksha is talented and fizzing with ideas, with her own idiosyncratic metre and vernacular, which makes for an exciting read. The Frame / Ramka throws together ten characters (all determined by the metal-detector-like "frame" to be a danger to the mass spectacle they've all come to attend, and consequently temporarily incarcerated together) and uses them, with their individual narrative dialects to voice, interrogate, and kick around a host of ideas ranging from the surveillance state and imminent technocracy to human rights, consumerism, identity, the corruption of power, and the chaotic perils of modern life. She owes a debt to both Sorokin and Kafka, but writes with a manic energy all her own. Beyond the clever device of the frame as an impassive automated bureaucratic separator of the wheat from the chaff, there's no meaningful overarching plot, but there needn't be - like a spliced-and-diced video-game Canterbury Tales on acid, the otkazniks' individual stories crash into a kind of mosaic whose nuance may be hard to discern but whose overall impression is one of wild colour and eye-popping, nerve-shredding lights. Towards the end the sheer multiplicity of characters and vectors spins out of control and explodes, but perhaps to wish for a less messy ending is beside the point. With the stories flipping between monologue, stream-of-consciousness, dialogue and exchanges often resembling texting rather than conversation as they unfold, the whole text comes intriguingly close to a prose poem. The Frame is hyper-active, funny, idiosyncratic and exhausting - but certainly never bland. -- Ilona Chavasse, literary critic and translator
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The House That, a novel by Mariam Petrosyan
Rights sold: Belarus - GUTENBERG, Brazil - EDITORA MORRO BRANCO, Bulgaria - HERMES, Czech Republic - FRAGMENT, France – MONSIEUR TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE, Hungary – MAGVETO, Italy – SALANI, Latvia – JANIS ROZE, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Poland - ALBATROS, Slovenia - CANKARJEVA ZALOŽBA, Spain - EDHASA, Ukraine - KNIGOLOVE, World English - AMAZON CROSSING
2016 Lire Magazine Award for the best SiFi/Fantasy book (France)
2010 Russian Student Booker Award
2010 Russian Literary Award for the best novel
2010 NatsBest Literary Award nominee
2010 Russian Booker shortlist
2009 Big Book Russian National Literary Prize readers' open voting bronze-winner
The House That... is an extraordinary book, unexpected, fresh, of those which are impossible to put down. It is interesting that it has been published just now, when world literary trends are showing interest towards the enigmas of adolescence and the use of means far from pure realism to closely consider them. It is a current book but nothing transitory.
“The House” is the name given by the children and adolescents to the center for disabled minors they are residing, or rather interned in. The universe of The House has little, if anything, to do with that of outside; there within they've created laws, myths and their own rules, until nature itself has been become unique, independent. The resident pupils of The House haven't names, only nicknames, and are divided into groups, or better said, into packs or gangs, whose leaders fight to the death for supremacy. Their deficiencies are no more than a condition, almost a symbol, which establish their belonging to this other reality of their own design. Through the stories of various characters, the chapters separated in time, a panorama of the world of these youths has been created; limitless, fantastic, cruel, tender, completely isolated and cut-off from communication with the “real” world of the adults.
Focal points of Petrosyan’s novel are Friendship, adapting to the group, power, confrontation between the concepts of the individual freedom of the youths and the rules imposed by the educators, psychological growth, self-definition, choosing between “right” and “wrong”, love/sex/sexuality/sensuality..
The House That..., with no place for doubts, is a literary event which exceeds the borders of national literature. The work stands out with its harmony and fullness; all of the elements – language, rhythm, character development – are in perfect synchronization. The narration flows, envelopes, hypnotizes. The impact is profoundly emotional. Perhaps for this reason, difficulties arise at the hour to “explain” the work, the literary critics have had to turn to examples and have created a long list of “predecessors”: Salinger, Golding (Lord of the Flies), Faulkner (Light in August), Ken Kesey, Lewis Carroll, Ruben Gallego, Haruki Murakami, Philip K. Dick, John Steinbeck, etc. Rational, verbal resources come up short.
Petrosyan's award-winning debut novel ... is a wildly imaginative tale of epic proportions. The House, which sits overlooked on the outskirts of town, is a boarding school for disabled children and teenagers. Isolated from the Outsides, the residents of the House are enmeshed in a carefully constructed world of unspoken rules and thorny histories. The meandering narrative moves back and forth in time, alternating narrators and tenses, to paint an intricate portrait of a social order that appears ultimately dictated by an unknown force, understood by its inhabitants to be the House itself. When student deaths begin to pile up over the course of the narrative, readers can identify with newcomer Smoker as he tries to understand the mysteries of the House and the source of its power over its inhabitants. Petrosyan has created a painstakingly three-dimensional, fully inhabited world. Slowly but surely, the plot reveals itself through a gradual process of unraveling, leading readers down a sprawling rabbit hole of intrigue and mysteries, accompanied by a dizzying array of quirky denizens. Petrosyan's prose is wildly imaginative and beautifully wrought, overflowing in Machkasov's translation with rich sensory details that combine with an offbeat sense of humor to form a fully realized world. This dense, heady tale should be enjoyed by seasoned readers of literary fiction and magical realism. Although it is being marketed in the U.S. for teens, it will perhaps find its most natural audience among adult readers. An impressive—and impressively massive—feat of imagination and translation. - Kirkus Reviews
The titular house in Armenian writer Petrosyan’s massively absorbing and sometimes frustrating novel is a boarding school for physically disabled students on the outskirts of an unnamed town. The distinctly supernatural house is a three story “gigantic beehive” made up of dormitories, classrooms, and other less formal spaces, each with their own set of rules and secrets. The students—known only by nicknames bestowed upon them by their peers—divide themselves into tribes based on their assigned dormitories, and these close-knit groups work to uncover the mysteries of the house and its history while also trying to avoid war between the factions. Rich with startling details and vivid world building, the novel unfolds in alternating points of view as characters learn about how the house operates differently from the largely unknown world outsides and collectively wonder about what will happen after graduation, when they must reenter a world that they no longer know. Much of the novel consists of the students telling fairy tales to each other about the “Outsides” and what they know of the house’s past and their own place within it, building a personal mythology as a way of explaining the strange world in which they have found themselves. The witty dialogue, sharply drawn characters, and endlessly unfolding riddle of the house’s true nature buoy a narrative that sometimes seems as meandering as the hallways of the house itself, a series of entertaining anecdotes rather than a cohesive whole. But the intellectually and emotionally rewarding conclusion confirms this fantasy novel’s undeniable power. - The Publishers Weekly
The House That is a remarkable work. It’s a door leading to that new literature we all have been waiting for. – Dmitry Bykov, writer and literary critic.
The book is a brilliant and fanciful parable telling about other kids. – Yevgenia Ritz, literary critic.
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