It will be a matter of due respect to so many masters of world literature born by Mother Russia. The thing is that after Tolstoy, Dostoievski o Chekhov, considering reading current Russian literature is risky. Until you meet someone like Anna starobinets and you see that this strange iciness undone in slabs of fiery prose is a contradiction that is inherited among Russian storytellers. A dichotomy of the Russian in its historical and existential scenography ultimately. Conditions that expose the soul to the unsuspected rigors of polarized emotional climates, loaded with wonderful contrasts ...
Anna Starobinets covers the story, the fantasy genre, dystopian science fiction, the youth narrative and the tragedies of the everyday. And it always emerges as that voice capable of whispering in a haunting way. Or as the omniscient narrator who moves with the most appropriate words. Images transformed into the symbol that every narrator would like to find to fulfill the most exalted of descriptions.
Top 3 Recommended Books by Anna Starobinets
You have to look
In the majority of occasions, chance opts for the pernicious side, of fatality. Waiting for children has that noséqué of justification, of reencounter with the meaning of life. Until the sense twists ominously. Healthy writing in these cases. I remember the case of «The violet hour»By Sergio del Molino and I discover in this book that impossible recourse against the intangible court of destiny. Justice is never done but in the worst conviction the necessary relief is born to continue risking life to new hazards.
In 2012, Anna Starobinets discovered, in a routine visit to the doctor, that the child she was expecting had a birth defect incompatible with life. What begins as the chronicle of a failed pregnancy, ends up becoming a true horror story.
Starobinets narrates with extreme harshness and heartbreaking humanity the pilgrimage through the health institutions of his country, his subsequent trip to Germany and the mourning for his lost son. You have to watch it triggered a storm in Russia when it was published, as it dared to address the taboo of power that women have over their own bodies. A story of pain and resistance as bold as it is clarifying, as intense as it is real, about a silenced trauma.
The Live
The heart never beat, it was only a matter of the brain. That echo is the one that commands like the drumbeat from the temples to consciousness. A consciousness as lipid and attached to the top of the brains, between fats, thank you very much and the damn neurons that goad us ...
After The Great Reduction, the population of the Earth remains fixed at three billion inhabitants. Nobody dies: at the end of their lives people are reborn in some other part of the globe; an incarnation code holds information about your previous lives. There are no longer individuals, each human being is nothing more than an element in a greater consciousness, The Living One.
This central brain decides everything: where people will live, what their work will be like, how long they will be allowed to survive in their current incarnation ... Until a human being without a code is born, and the entire planetary system is threatened. This novel, among the finalists of the prestigious Russian Natsionalny Bestseller and Strannik awards, once again demonstrates the talent and literary qualities of Anna Starobinets, one of the leading figures of the new Russian literary generation.
Shelter 3/9
Experimentation in literature can be merely formal or in-depth. In the case of this Refuge, Anna manages to make the forms syncopate and stridently accompany a world that is disrupted at the same time. The result is that fascinating estrangement that either loses us or offers us lucidity. A disturbing play of lights and shadows.
At once a realistic novel about the disintegration of a family, a fantasy world created from myth and folklore, and a contemporary parable about the end of the world, Vault 3/9 manages to keep the reader one foot in the disturbing terror of Starobinets, and another in a gripping plot, demonstrating how fantasy and reality interact.
Perfect mix of a real world and an imaginary one, Shelter 3/9 is a fascinating novel by one of the renowned masters of contemporary fantasy. A story built from fairy tales and internet conspiracies, the fundamental foundations of Western culture, and the limits of contemporary science, this is a novel that manages to draw a clear and worrying portrait of the world in which we live.
