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Featured titles
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Thief, Spy, and Murderer, a novel by Yuri Buida (2013)
2013 Big Book Award finalist
Rights sold: Russia - EKSMO, AST, France - GALLIMARD, Spain - AUTOMATICA
"Most of our town was laying in ruins – everywhere shards of houses, walls with gaping windows, basements without buildings – and everything covered by elderberry bushes. In the summer their dense foliage hid all this misery; you could go in the bushes since in the whole town there wasn't a single public toilet, and the men went there to drink, far from prying eyes."
Yuri Buida's new novel, the autobiographical fantasy "Thief, Spy and Murderer", tells a story of hero's childhood, youth, and maturing as a person and writer, his role in that time and place where he was born and lived, namely in the splinters of Teutonic civilization, in Western Prussia, annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II, in a small town outside Kaliningrad, in a time of half-built socialism during Khrushchev's "thaw" of the 60's. Comical and sad, monstrous and beautiful stories from the lives of those around him meld into a complete symphony of his era. Upset by the abyss between the high-minded problems of literary heroes and the vegetative lives of his contemporaries, he comes to a new level of understanding as he matures: to appreciate the harmony and the beauty of life, you need to lower your visor and start absorbing it directly through all your nerve endings. Then all of life's absurdity and horror will also enter you completely – but such is the price of feeling truly alive.
Buida's prose tastes at once bitter and sweet – such is the nature of this author's talent. As a literary critic once remarked, Buida is a little perilous to read, because he "winds his string very tight". But every time the string seems ready to break, it doesn't – it just screams at the limit of its abilities.
That's also how it is with his new novel. Its heroes live a life without a core, built on contrasts that sear the soul, as the sight of a snow-covered, sunlit mountaintop sears the eye. It's a wild life, untethered, newly primitive, knowing neither fear nor shame. Childlike innocence and feral cruelty, generosity of soul and poverty of mind, desire for divine flight and for desperate self-destruction go hand in hand. Here love and death are of equal value, both working toward annihilation.
The world reposes in evil, thinks Yuri Buida's hero, who has adored Kafka since his youth and dreamed of becoming a writer like him: to steal images from reality, to spy after the tiniest movements of the soul, and to kill moments – only to depict them forever.
Buida’s Thief, Spy, and Murderer feels like multiple books, in multiple ways. The description the literary journal Znamya gave the book - an autobiographical fantasy - sums up a lot: over all, Thief, Spy, and Murderer sure feels like an autobiography but some passages sure feel embellished. Thief, Spy, and Murderer read so much like a fiction-nonfiction hybrid to me that I can’t quite bring myself to refer to it as a novel, as Eksmo, its publisher, does. At least neither the journal nor the book publisher labelled it a “documentary novel,” a term I’ve always found annoyingly opaque.
At least the basics are fairly easy to list. Thief, Spy, and Murder is a first-person narrative told by a male who is identified (all of once) as Buida: he’s a boy when the book begins, an adult writer when it ends. ... Details may vary significantly but much of what happens to meta-Buida (as I’ll call the Buida in the book) echoes circumstances and events in the life of the writer named Iurii Buida, including being from the Kaliningrad area, practicing journalism, and becoming a writer.
Thief, Spy, and Murderer begins with meta-Buida’s family getting up in the morning and preparing to go out for a Revolution Day demonstration. The narrator first describes the order in which the family uses the slop pail, then shows us his mother in curlers and his father shaving and putting on his medals. We’re in the post-War years. As neighbors begin to appear, so do stories, like the woman whose daughters came “from the elder bushes” that grow in the ruins of buildings. And then banners and a smell (Red Moscow perfume makes yet another literary appearance) and toasts... There’s an earthiness, a bit of an edge, and a real sense of seaminess.
There are lots of other promising bits in the beginning of the book: railroad tracks that raised my expectations for a Don Domino-esque book, some sordid and lonely crime, and the narrator’s father preventing a group of men from hurting a gypsy child. I think my favorite passage involved a trip to the paper mill where meta-Buida’s father works: they look inside a train car loaded with books by Stalin, all waiting to be pulped. There are sixteen tons of Stalin in each car; hundreds of cars are lined up, if only in the distance. The father gives permission to begin work on the books, allowing them to be unloaded, pitchforked into the pulper, and then piped to a cardboard-making machine. Yikes. Vodka is consumed. Then a bit later: “After they’d cleared out the fourth car, my father took me by the hand and we went home.”
On the next page, meta-Buida says his first experience with the writings of Solzhenitsyn is through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which fails to make much of an impression because “Everything, everything, felt familiar to me when I read it: not the details, of course, but the very atmosphere, the air.” It’s the life and the worst aspects of everydayness that feel familiar to him - and scarier than the statistics of the Gulag - and it is all steeped in Stalin.
That mention of Solzhenitsyn is key to the book, I think because, for my taste, anyway, Buida is at his best in Thief, Spy, and Murderer when he addresses those everyday horrors: the book feels most elemental and smartest then, too, particularly because many of these scenes have the surreal or mythical touches I enjoyed so much in Don Domino and Blue Blood.
(From Lisa Hayden Espenshade's review. Full version is here: http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com.es/)
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Memoirs Of a Wartime Interpreter by Elena Rzhevskaya (NF)
Rights sold: Czech Republic - PASEKA, Estonia – TANAPAEV, France - CHRISTIAN BOURGOIS, Italy - VOLAND, Japan – HAKUSUISHA, The Netherlands – MOURIA, Poland - PWN, World English - Greenhill Books
On May 8, 1945, the soldiers of the Red Army broke into Hitler’s bunker. With them was Elena Rzhevskaya, a young military interpreter. She and other members of the Soviet military witnessed firsthand the charred remains of Hitler and Eva Braun. Important documents were uncovered in the search of the Berlin bunker: the notes of Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Hitler’s personal secretary and the diaries of propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, whose corpse lay nearby with those of his family.
Elena was entrusted with the irrefutable proof of the Hitler’s death. Tucked safely in her coat pocket, were the jawbones of Adolf Hitler, wrenched from his corpse just hours earlier. Much of the evidence uncovered from the bunker remained buried in the Soviet archives until 1994. Elena’s role as an interpreter allowed her to forge a link between the Soviet troops and the Germans. Confronted with the dramatic reality of war, she also witnessed the unfolding civilian tragedy in its messy aftermath of violence and rape perpetrated by the Soviets. Her diaries of those years became the source of her writings and this book is the capstone of a life dedicated to bearing witness to the truth.The book includes the latest Russian edition of “Berlin, May 1945”, specially adapted for translation and circulation abroad. It incorporates such later written and published parts of the whole story, as conversation with Zhukov, letters of Shkaravsky and a novel-memoirs The Distant Rumble in which Rzhevskaya returns again to the events of the last months of the war.
The famous “Berlin, May 1945” forms the central piece of the book, but the name of the whole work is changed so that this publication is not mixed with much shorter version published about 40 years ago. The name “MEMOIRS OF A WARTIME INTERPRETER” is important for Rzhevskaya, as it was her position in war, which, together with her being a woman and a most personal and even lyrical author, never fit to about battles, but to see the suffering, the “human face” of history, makes her recollections and her books so unique. She gives the readers not only bare facts, now included in encyclopedias, but precious details, which only her memory retains, the atmosphere of these times, very precise personal characteristics.
Rzhevskaya writes about the greatest historical events and everyday life in frontlines in her own inimitable style, mixing creative prose and documents, interspersing her work with letters and diary entries (from “other side”, as well as her own), with archival material and responses from readers. The book grows before our eyes and history becomes a part of today. Rzhevskaya talks in depth of human suffering, of the bitter-sweet taste of victory, of the responsibility of an author, of strange laws of memory, which lives by associations, by heartache, compassion and unresolved feeling of guilt.
Before bringing us to Berlin, Rzevskaya leads us by the Roads and Days of the battle for Rzhev (1942-1943) and makes us listen to Distant Rumble, that reaches her from Poland, 60 plus years ago – Poland, whose liberation from the nazist hell immediately turned into new political games and more human suffering. Here she elaborates the theme of woman’s position in war, first touched in two German documentaries, where Rzhevskaya played a major part: “Lucy, Wanda, Yelena. It was not their War” (by Raimond Koplin and Renate Stegmuller, 1995) and “Befreier and Befreite” (1992), where she says the keywords about the rapes committed on German territory: “Violence is the genocide of love”.
This memoir is shocking in its relevancy, the author’s first-hand participation in the making of this history brings one very close to the events all generations should remain mindful of, including our own, polarized by the ongoing political and military conflicts around the world. There is a lesson to be learned from Rzhevskaya’s writing, and there are episodes from her personal encounters with the war from both sides of the conflict, given her role as the translator, that stick with you long after finishing the book.
Her story is a telling reminder of the jealousy and rivalries that split the Allies even in their hour of victory, and foreshadowed the Cold War. Tom Parfitt, Guardian, May 8, 2005
Excerpts of Rzhevskaya's book were translated into about twenty languages and published in the periodical press of many countries. The face of the author appeared on the covers of magazines in Germany and Italy.
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