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All Over Again, a foodie travelogue by Sergei Parkhomenko (NF)
Rights sold: Russia - CORPUS
It took me as many as thirteen years to write the fifty-six sketches that make up this book. I first wrote something in this peculiar genre in 2004 and the latest of these texts came along in 2017.
I have always felt that gastronomy was a very important and in a sense fundamental branch of human knowledge. And not just because the gastronomic experiences, as someone aptly phrased it, are a unique conglomerate of sensations supplied by all five human senses – taste, smell, sight, hearing, and touch – and in this regard only sex can fully compete with them. Another source of its importance is that gastronomy quite naturally turns out to be a literally undrainable source of incredibly fascinating snippets from people’s lives.
The workings of all five senses leave five distinct imprints in your memory. Coming together and superimposing, they are the only thing capable of creating a truly vivid, three-dimensional picture of a minute that flew by once upon a time and maybe even of a full day that was once lived.
It turns out that I am not writing gastronomical sketches; rather I am infinitely adapting and readapting the story about the evanescence of all that exists, the story that unfolds again and again, in different circumstances and various shapes.
Oddly enough, every such experience turned out to be firmly tied not only to a specific year, a point on the time axis, but also to another point – on the geographical map.
I know it may sound absurd, flippant, even grotesque, but hear me out: a thing meant to be put on a plate and eventually end up in a stomach, turns out to be a universal fabric tying together time and space.
Original language: Russian. Around 350.000 words.
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Yermo, a novel by Yuri Buida (1997, 2011)
Rights are handled on behalf of Editions Gallimard
Rights sold: France – Gallimard, Russia - Vagrius
With Yermo, Yuri Buida signs a breathtaking novel in which he develops his reflection about literary creation mingling biography, aesthetic essay and thoughts about the novelistic style.
Life of the American writer George Yermo forms an extraordinary romantic material. Georgi Nikolaev-Yermo was born in 1914 in St. Petersburg into a family of the Russian nobles. He was raised in New Salem, MA, under the sign of Melville, Emily Dickinson and Henry James (all three New Englanders) and Puritan values of the US Founding Fathers. After graduating from University, he’s experienced an unhappy love affair, and went to the Spanish Civil War as a reporter. His battlefield articles made him famous.
In the early fifties, an accidental visit to the palace Sanseverino in Venice changes a course of Yermo’s life, as he suddenly recognizes a materialization of the house from his childhood dreams. The palace, its past and its secrets, and its beautiful owner Lisa, will from now on be the center of his life.
Buida’s Yermo is a broad reflection about literary fiction, and a beautiful homage to Vladimir Nabokov. The book is written in rich, abundant language, and contains protagonist’s (and author’s) views of art in general, of painting, theater and film, of philosophy and aesthetics, and of Russian and American literature. But it is the fascinating originality of its main character that makes Buida’s novel a real reading delicatessen.
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