The Line: A Novel [Paperback]

In "The Dream Live of Sukhanov", Olga Grushin displayed a gift for descriptive prose that easily evoked wonderful imagery, a talent especially amazing for a new novelist writing outside her native language. Ms. Grushin demonstrates that writing talent again in "The Line", which is also set in Russia at an indeterminate time in the Soviet era. So often she seems to find just the right word or phrase to capture a thought or a scene.

The central characters are Anna, her husband, teen-aged son, and mother, with nobody particularly happy as they cope with daily life. Anna joins a new line at a kiosk, which may offer something of use. "'So what are they selling here?' she asked. The old man smiled, and as his wrinkles multiplied, a deeper darkness suffused them. 'What would you like?' he said softly. 'I'm sorry?' 'They are selling,' he said, 'whatever you'd most like to have.'"

They soon conclude that the line is for concert tickets to a return performance by a great exiled composer. Anna's husband is a musician, and Anna's mother has some vague connection to the composer, making the rumor particularly desirable for them. The days of maintaining the line grow into months, with the kiosk occasionally staffed by someone who never sells anything. For some, the line becomes the dominant presence in their lives, with significant consequences for Anna's family and others. The author develops some characters from anonymity in the line to more complex individuals with their own reasons for being there.

Despite the author's graceful writing, "The Line" moved a bit slowly through much of the first half. As one might expect for a story oriented about a line going nowhere, not much happens as the group forms and settles into equilibrium, and we learn more about Anna's family and its dynamics. The story lacked some narrative drive during the transition. Perhaps the assessment includes my own disbelief that people would voluntarily stay in such a line for so long, and we'll need some perceptive Russians to comment.

Eventually some relationships form and the characters deepen, such as Anna's son Alexander's interactions with an old man and a fellow young criminal. The line itself becomes secondary at the same time that it dominates. At a key moment for Alexander, he bemoans a theme of the novel, "Alexander wept, and couldn't stop weeping, like the child he had been once - weeping for this life in which nothing ever happened, weeping for his mother, and his father, and Viktor Pyetrovich who had wasted so much time waiting for something to happen, waiting in vain, for nothing ever happened in anyone's life".

The abstract line does, in fact, transform the lives of the family and those in its sphere. Anna's long-silent mother comes more to the front as the novel winds toward a modest climax, and Grushin leaves the mother's historical thread tantalizingly incomplete, as part of an ending that is satisfying and without a need for a complete, tight wrap.

Psalm 39, V.2

I was nervous about Olga Grushin's second book, The Line, for two reasons. First, I thought her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, was a beautifully constructed look at the lives of a small group of Soviet artists from the 1950s through the 1980s. But second novels are challenging, both for the author and for the reader. The author is challenged to live up to the promise of his/her first work. The reader is challenged by virtue of his/her own heightened expectation and anticipation that the second work will outstrip the qualities of the first novel. Second, I've read another book, The Queue (New York Review Books Classics), in which a line served as a metaphor for life in the USSR and was moderately disappointed in the result. I'm happy to say that Grushin's latest book lived up to my heightened expectations and one that engaged me far more than Sorokin's work.

As noted in her author's comment, "The Line" is loosely based upon Igor Stravinsky's famous 1962 return to the USSR to perform in Leningrad after a long period of exile. The announcement of the concert set off a year-long wait for tickets and the evolution of the line, the development of an informal but rigidly enforced set of rules for those waiting in line that became a model of sorts for all the lines that followed.

The Line focuses on one family's collective experience with the one-year wait for tickets to the performance by the composer "Selinksy". Sergei is a frustrated musician whose dreams of playing the violin were crushed when he was forced to take up the tuba instead. He now plays in a local `band' run by the sort of apparatchiks that could crush anyone's spirit. He lives in a crowded, run-down apartment with his wife Anna, a school teacher, Anna's mother, an elderly woman who has remained mostly silent for years, and a 17 year old son Alexander (Sasha). They are each disaffected and alone despite their close living conditions. They are each in their way dumb with silence. But for each of them the chance to secure tickets to this concert is a way out of their sorrow. The return of Selinsky takes on something of the return of the Messiah as each of them sees hope for some redemption in their lives if only they can get their hands on a ticket.

Grushin has a marvelous way with words, all the more remarkable given the fact that English is her second language. Her ability to portray and reveal the inner lives of one family and the people they meet at work and on the line is remarkably good. Secrets are revealed to the reader and new secrets arise during the year-long wait but the profound lack of communication amongst the family left me acutely aware of how tenuous are the links that bind us even while the story reveals links among the parties that they could not even begin to imagine.

Grushin's portrayal of her characters felt brutally honest to me. There is pettiness, despair, self-interest and the possibility of betrayal. Anna, Sergei and Sasha all fumble their way through their lives. These are flawed `small' people living lives of quiet, unexpressed despair. But in Grushin's hands they are treated with an underlying compassion, a sense that it is the world (in this case the USSR) that is too much with them, it is the world that has made them small.

Grushin's The Line is well-worth reading. It is a worthy successor to "The Dream Life of Sukhanov". Highly recommended. L. Fleisig

Olga Grushin's, "The Line" is an amazing work. Demonstrating a mastery of English reminiscent of Joseph Conrad, also not a native English speaker, the novel combines compelling prose with an interesting plot line and convincing character development.

Author Grushin captures the feel of life in the Cold War era Soviet block with an uncanny accuracy that gets to the very heart of how things were and how people lived. I spent a short while in East Germany back in those days, and even as a visitor it was clear: the grinding poverty, the shabby housing, poor food, lack of goods, and above all the despair and hopelessness was so obvious. Ms. Grushin puts us intimately in touch with all of this at the same time she tells a fascinating story.

It's about waiting in line for concert tickets. This line lasts a very long time. It's based, at least loosely, on something that actually happened in the former Soviet Union.

I too experienced such a thing: a line in East Berlin. For some reason I joined in, just like many others, not knowing what was on sale, but knowing that if something was available, you bought it--- whatever it was--- because you didn't know when or if you could get it again. In this case, it was a small teapot, one per customer, pay and move along. Ms. Grushin's book brought back every facet of that experience, and you will "live" the same experience, even if you've never done it in real life.

The story is full of ironies, unexpected connections, and surprises. The writing is poetic, the imagery vivid, the sense of time and place crisp and alive. But above all, the story is about the people in it, and the dreams they build to cope with the lack of hope of life in those days, in those places. We watch them dream and we watch the dreams shatter against the hard walls of reality, and yet we watch the characters somehow survive and build something precious in the midst of the unrelenting grayness of Soviet bloc living. At the conclusion of the story, we feel uplifted by the triumph of the human soul. It shows us a glimpse of the spirit that eventually brought down Communism.

Read this book. Although at times it may seem just a little tedious, there's a reason the author wrote it that way. You'll understand it all when you get to the end, and you'll be glad you persevered. It's sort of like getting to the front of the line and receiving your teapot.

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