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Featured titles
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ADDENDUM TO OLD PHOTO ALBUM, a novel by Vladislav Otroshenko (2007)
Rights sold: Italy – Voland, Fanucci (magazine rights), France - Verdie, Macedonia - Makedonika Litera, World English - Dalkey Archive Press
A magical realism masterpiece, this family saga is populated by surrealist characters, and narrated with a spicy and clownish language. A mysterious race of a greedy tribe leaded by a bizarre patriarch with a heroic past, all inhabiting the unexplored depths of a house as big as the world. Otroshenko's quirky and cute characters move, peck, amuse one another as if they were puppets of papier mâché, engaged in phantasmagoric adventures, enchanting and exhilarating. Otroshenko makes the entire history of mankind and of Russia to repeat itself endlessly, in concentric circles out of time and space.
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The Portrait and Around, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1978)
Rights sold: Czech - Svoboda, Germany - Aufbau
In his 1978 The Portrait and Around (Portret i vokrug) Makanin pinpoints a major problem for the Russian intelligent; namely, his inability to recognize his guilt. The Portrait and Around revolves around a ‘man of the sixties’, Starokhatov, a man who abuses his position as a well-known scriptwriter and producer to sign his name to scripts written by novice authors. Starokhatov is no monster (he is capable of generous, even noble acts), but his ability to create a false, successful self-image through his plagiarism points not only to his lack of ethics, but to his lack of identity. Identity is a major problem for the main character in this novel, Igor Petrovich, who becomes involved in the Starokhatov case when a friend asks him to help create a ‘portrait’ of the man. Igor uncovers evidence of Starokhatov’s theft of scripts but finds himself unable to take any action against the man. This is not only due to an intelligent's ineffectuality; Starokhatov tells Igor that he ‘sees himself’ in Starokhatov, whose criminality he has exposed. Starokhatov suggests one possible motivation for lgor's inability to act; for Igor, laying charges against this man would be like indicting himself; and he cannot accept his own criminality.
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