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A PERSON NOT TO BE TRUSTED, a novel by Vladislav Otroshenko (2010)
Rights sold: Italy – Voland, USA – The Literary Review (magazine rights), Russia – Limbus-press, Free Fly, CoLibri
Time and space, illusion and dream, world history and death are the main themes of Otroshenko's A Person Not to Be Trusted, where fantasy intertwines with reality, hoaxes and historical facts look just the same.
Literary critics sometime call Vladislav Otroshenko 'mystical realist' and 'postmodern writer', comparing his works to these of J.L.Borges, Italo Calvino, Gaite Gazdanova, and Milorad Pavić. At the same time, after Otrosheko's Person Not To Be Trusted was published in Italy (Voland, 1997), local journalists have dubbed the story 'philosophical mystery novel'.
Vladislav Otroshenko combined a rich, almost Gogolian prose style with Borgesian fantasy in his long-awaited volume of various genres of prose, entitled Persona vne dostovernosti (A Person Not to Be Trusted). (Thomas Epstein, The Literary Review)
Read moreBlue and Red, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1983)
Rights sold: Italy - Edizioni e/o,
Makanin’s view of man’s nature is a pessimistic one, and his depictions of love and harmonious interrelationships lack the power of his descriptions of man’s inhumanity to man (or to beast). He is most at ease describing love linked to violence, as in Blue and Red (Goluhoe i krasnoe) (1983), which describes how two grandmothers battle for the love of their young grandson Kliucharev, who is ‘unused to love’ — a phrase which perhaps could be used to describe many of Makanin’s heroes.The love which Makanin’s heroes advocate is a tough, universal and unselfish love, as typified by the healer Yakushkin with his philosophy of brotherly love in Makanin's previous novel Predlecha (1982). It is love for one’s family and kin, love for one’s people, birthplace, for Russia, love which has a basis in conscience, which interests Makanin, which means that his characters, are seekers...
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