|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Story writer Holland's impressive debut novel tracks the plight of disgraced literature teacher and reluctant archivist Pavel Dubrov, whose job, mainly, in 1939 Moscow, is to destroy books at Lubyanka prison, a dank, morbid depository for political prisoners where the boilers rarely work. When an unsigned story is discovered in a prison file, Pavel is ordered to authenticate its author, believed to be Isaac Babel, who is locked up at the prison. Haunted by his conversations with Babel and his love of Babel's work, Pavel steals the manuscript and hides it behind the crumbling bricks of his apartment's basement. (Later, he smuggles out a second manuscript.) He has little to lose: his young wife was killed in a train accident, his mentor is waiting to be carted off to prison for his unwillingness to walk the Party line, and his mother is succumbing to a brain tumor. All around him, literature is being destroyed, from the boxes of manuscripts he prepares for destruction to the page scraps his neighbor and lover Natalya uses to roll her cigarettes. Nearly everything and everyone in the novel is sad and broken, but Holland finds a kernel of hope in Pavel's mission. It's a melancholic and moving tribute to the written word. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Holland's new novel is a disturbing story of governmental censorship set in 1939 Moscow. Pavel Dubrov, a former literature professor, is for all purposes a broken man, having lost his wife in a train accident the year before. As an archivist in the Lubyanka prison, his job is to "weed" the collected manuscripts of writers who are not approved by the government. In the course of his archives work, he is often taken with the beauty of the stories^B he examines, many of which he had taught in his classroom; his gentle touch on the pages just before being forced to incinerate them is hard to read. Pavel is especially taken by the file for the writer Isaac Babel, whom he actually meets in the prison, to ascertain whether a specific manuscript is his. This meeting drives Pavel to the breaking point, and he brings it home to hide in his basement. The unraveling of the plot is depressing and uncomfortable, but there are novels whose value is in the discomfort they evoke. Debi Lewis
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. |
