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In Love with a Pencil, essays by Sasha Okun (NF)
Rights sold: Russia - SLOVO
The book was created as a textbook on pencil drawing techniques for beginners and professionals, but it is in fact something much more broad and interesting than just a manual on drawing. It is rather a manual on artistic perception of reality.
"All great masters of the past regardless of their main craft, be it sculpture or painting, were great draftsmen: Rubens, Rembrandt, Matisse, Picasso, Moore, Rodin... Drawing is the foundation, the cornerstone of any visual art. There's an endless amount of books and manuals about the art of drawing. Among them, there are bad, good, and very good ones. The question is, why write yet one more? The fact is that regardless of their quality, all of these books answer the question "how"? Some of them are even entitled "How to draw a portrait (landscape, model, still life, hands, etc.)." However, in my humble opinion, every "how" depends on"what" and "why". These "what" and "why" define the "how" on every stage of creative process, from initial choice of format to the techniques used to achieve the desired result.This book is an attempt to discuss a multitude of drawing-related issues from the point of view of artistic goals set by draftsmen, to take a look at artistic techniques and devices not as of something that exist abstractly and independently, but as of instruments, of means for achieving the goal, and of means that are an integral part of this goal, because in visual art "what" and "how" are inseparable.Still, any book regardless of its genre - be it a textbook, a memoir, a novel, or a tour guide - should fist and foremost make an interesting read. As Alexandre Dumas put it once, "all genres are good, except the boring." This commandment of the great novelist and culinary specialist is more important to me than purity of the genre. So, there a bit of everything in my book: analysis of the works by great masters of the past, practical advice, reflections, memories, anecdotes, and my thoughts about art accumulated over more than forty years I've been teaching people to draw." - writes Okun in a preface to In Love with a Pencil.
Surprisingly, the book conceived as a drawing manual turned out to be a tutorial on the vision of the world in all its diversity. Of course, this book will be extremely valuable and useful to artists, especially for beginners. But at the same time, it will be of use to everyone seeking to expand his general vision of life. Today's literary market is like a food store where dairy, meat, fruits, and booze each belong to its department. Same with books: there are a separate shelves for fiction, educational literature, philosophy, technical books etc. Everything is sorted out by its genre. Okun's book is rare product, a piece that does not fit into one single category, but to many. For publisher, such a non-standard books is a great challenge, but for readers it’s a rare joy. -- Ludmila Ulitskaya
Original languages: Hebrew, Russian. Around 55.000 words, color illustrations.
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Escape Hatch & The Long Road Ahead: Two Novellas by Vladimir Makanin (1979)
Rights sold: Finland - SN-kirjat, France - BELFOND, Germany - Neuer Malik, Italy - Edizioni e/o, World English - ARDIS, Spain - Siruela, Sweden - NORSTEDTS,
Shertlisted for the 1992 Russian Booker Prize
The book, which contains two dystopian novellas (written in 1991), indicates that, directly or indirectly, Makanin has been influenced by Evgeny Zamyatin, the author of We, a book that anticipated in great detail Brave New World and 1984. (Actually, Zamyatin's a better writer than Huxley or Orwell, who both appropriated details of We's plot.)
Zamyatin and Makanin (born 1937) also share a background in science and mathematics. Zamyatin worked for a while as a naval engineer, in fact. In the novella Escape Hatch (Лаз), the protagonist, a mathematician named Klyucharyov, travels through a tunnel from a deteriorating aboveground city, where public order hardly exists, to an underground community where residents live comfortably and safely but seem on the edge of some crisis. The Long Road Ahead (Долог наш путь), set in a future Utopia, finds a young engineer traveling from Moscow to an isolated food-manufacturing plant in the steppes to install a machine he's invented.
Both works display nightmarish, Kafkaesque qualities. Everyone in Escape Hatch seems terrified, waiting for the other shoe to drop. In The Long Road Ahead, the inventor is horrified to find that the plant he's visiting does not manufacture synthetic meat but actually slaughters cows, something considered barbaric in his society.
The inventor doesn't know what to do about the situation. He can't stay at the plant, but he's is afraid to leave, because, having been introduced to evil, he'd be a corrupting influence in Moscow. Eventually, he camps outside the plant on the steppe, keeping a bonfire going in hopes that a helicopter will see him and give him transportation to somewhere. Soon, he discovers that there are many people keeping similar bonfires going and calmly waiting--for what they do not know.
The Long Road Ahead has a story-within-a story construction. It turns out that the tale of the engineer has been made up by a narrator who appears in the middle of the novella and explains that he's composed it for his friend, Ilya Ivanovich, a schizophrenic who cannot bear to witness any living thing suffer. As the novella progresses, Makanin alternates between the two narratives, and the characters and events in each influence the other.
In these novellas, Makanin obviously draws on the experience of Soviet/Russian citizens now and in the recent past; the remote meat-producing plant, for example, could correspond to a prison in the Gulag archipelago. Makanin's works are allegorical, and it's difficult to discern where he stands on specific issues--possibly because he wants to provoke readers into asking questions rather than providing them with answers.
Makanin's protagonists are isolated and struggling with social, psychological, spiritual and political problems. Because he depicts their struggles so believably and poignantly, even in the context of fantastic plots, Makanin will appeal to a wide variety of readers. His stories can be dealt with on a number of levels. Even if you're not into speculating about the mysteries of the cosmos they may grab you, because Makanin, in addition to his erudition, is a top-notch storyteller.
(Harvey Pekar, a review for metroactove)
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