This is readable: new books about secret societies and the world behind the Iron Curtain

[ad_1]

Artist or science pop, Ukrainian authors or translations – what novelties have the publishers prepared for us? What iconic books appeared on the Ukrainian market? In order to keep up with book publishing, UP.Zhyttia recommends a new book review, which was made especially for us by colleagues from “Chitomo” – media about the publishing world. Among the review books are an adventurous trip to the edge of the world and several very different books about life in the 1960s. Read UP. Culture in Telegram Translated prose by Olga Tokarchuk. People’s Journey book translated by Viktor Dmytruk. – Kyiv: Tempora, 2023. – 224 p. Photo: Tempora “Journey of Book People” is the first novel by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarchuk, written in 1994. At the heart of this book is the eternal plot about the search for mystical artifacts like the Holy Grail. A nice (and, unlike the “Books of Yakov”, small) text about travel and old Europe, from which you can start getting to know Tokarchuk. The Age of Enlightenment is just beginning in Europe, but aristocrats are still dabbling in alchemy and secret societies. Some of them join the Book Brotherhood out of boredom or in search of poetic inspiration. The brothers believe in the existence of the Book with a capital letter, a divine artifact. What is written in this Book? But, actually, everyone fantasizes for himself. But it is definitely a great thing, into which God himself breathed his spirit and all his wisdom. True, of all the bored aristocrats, only one Marquis dares to travel through the Book, but a courtesan and a mute servant go with him. Needless to say, this journey will change their lives forever? Stories about the search for the Holy Grail are still of great interest to both writers and readers. It is also worth mentioning that “Journey of the People of the Book” was written at the time when Umberto Eco created his intellectual novels about heresies, secret societies, alchemy and other fascinating topics of old Europe. “Journey of the People of the Book” is a decent play on these themes and a gentle reminder that the path to the Book of Life or the Grail is important, not the artifact itself. Shin Gyeongsuk. Please protect my mother, translated by Hanna Kuzmenko. – Lviv: Anetta Antonenko Publishing House, 2023. – 224 p. Photo: Anetta Antonenko Publishing House In Western culture, there are many works about the problem of parents and children, told specifically from a child’s perspective. “Please, protect my mother” is a classic story about the generation gap, but the unseen side here is the mother. The author of the book is the Korean writer Shin Gyeongsuk, in 2011 she won the Man Asian Literary Prize, the so-called Asian Booker, for this novel. One day, Park So-nyeo comes to visit her children in Seoul and just disappears into the crowd of the platform. While searching for their mother, her grown children and husband suddenly realize that they really didn’t know much about this woman until now. For each of them, she was an unchanging character in her own story, a monolithic “mother of my children” or simply a mother. Now the family has to find out who has been hiding behind the familiar word “mother” all these years. Park Sonyo was an illiterate woman who secretly asked a stranger to read her own daughter’s novels to her. A woman who never complained about the hours spent in the kitchen, and who secretly suffered a stroke from her family. And this is only a small part of what her closest people will understand about her mother in the course of the book. At the same time as recalling the stories about Park Son-yo, the heroes keep getting news that somewhere in Seoul there is an old woman who looks like their mother’s photo. She appears in places related to their past. This ghost of their mother appears as a grieving old Madonna, lost in the alien world of her grown children. Shin Gyeongsuk’s book is a good poignant story that shows how fragile is the person on whom the microcosm of our childhood rests. Anthony Libera. Madame translated by Zhanna Slonivska. – Ternopil: Krok, 2023. – 496 p. Photo: Krok Ukrainian literature lacks light and exciting prose about the 1960s and 1980s. In our discourse, this is the time of dissidents and national resistance. Lightness appears only in Maryna Hrymych’s books (“Klavka”, “Yura”) and Andruhovych’s “The Secret”, which is not so much a novel as a memoir. But this lack can be covered by the fascinating Polish educational novel about the 1960s “Madame” by Antoni Lieber. “Madame” is an exciting and easy-to-read novel about the experience of totalitarian unfreedom, which is so familiar to Ukrainian readers. The hero of the novel is a Warsaw high school student with an artistic nature and a rebellious spirit. He lives in a world of history and aesthetics distorted by communism. This guy plays jazz and does experimental productions in the theater, trying to recreate the world of unfreedom. And he falls in love with his cold and unapproachable French teacher. Looking for a way to approach his thirty-year-old madam, the hero of the novel secretly follows her and conducts his own adventurous investigation. Whether this will open a way for him to the teacher’s heart, we cannot say. But it will provide a way to understand the society in which he lives. The hero of “Madame” is close in spirit to the Ukrainian underground of the 70s and 80s. He yearns for a real, free and interesting life. But it is closed in a world with a communist spirit and a strong Russian influence. We can see the same picture in the memories of the Ukrainian artistic underground of this period. After all, it was primarily a gathering of creative youth, where they knew how to satirize the regime and listened to the music of the free world through all possible cracks in the iron curtain. Ukrainian prose by Artem Pospelov. Amok Kharkiv: Vivat, 2023. – 288 p. Photo: Vivat Artem Pospelov knows how to intrigue readers with the very title of his books. His first novel was called “Tadush”, and now “Amok” is out. And one must give credit to the book, “Amok” is attractive not only by its name – the author knows how to construct the text in such a way that it is difficult to unravel it, to go through it like a game, to get to the bottom of things. This book tells about three characters who are difficult to call completely normal. This is a boy with developmental disabilities, a man on drugs and a suicidal woman from a family of religious fanatics. Three very different, but at the same time very similar people, experiencing parental dislike and loss in the world. Each of the heroes fights against the framework of this world, trying to free himself. Is it necessary to say that their attempts are destructive? “Amok” is an immersion in a broken consciousness. In which disease, pain and/or drugs have eaten their big holes. Because of this, the book will leave a lot of unclear moments that can annoy readers. A similar effect is produced by the novels of beatniks, whose narcotic trips are unrealistic to comprehend with the help of logic and analysis. One of the “Black Mirror” series could appear from Pospelov’s book. And “Amok” can be safely advised to lovers of psychological and social experiments. Maryna Ponomaryova. In the glass forest Kyiv: Creative Women Publishing, 2023. — 196 p. Photo: Creative Women Publishing “In the glass forest” is the debut collection of stories by Maryna Ponomaryova. Here a fantastic setting unfolds, fairy-tale heroines and heroes act and reveal the peculiarities of the female experience. This collection can be called feminist fairy tales, built around painful or annoying situations that women regularly face. The title reads like the classic feminist text “Under the Glass Cap” by Sylvia Plath. Glass here is a metaphor for invisibility, fragility, but also for what can hurt. At the same time, the forest is a familiar fairy-tale territory, and the characters in Ponomaryova’s stories are very fairy-tale. The departure from realism in the book also strongly resonates with the fact that women in society and culture still remain “fairy tale” creatures. These are mysterious creatures that do not say what they think, have their own incomprehensible logic (or substitute other stereotypes to your taste). Ponomaryova writes easily, vividly and accurately. Her images are firmly stuck in the mind. Be sure to take note of this author, it will be interesting to watch the development of her work. Volodymyr Dibrova. Creative people of Chernivtsi: Books – XXI, 2023. – 264 p. Photo: Books His new book “Creative People” is a collection of stories of literary failure and life defeats. A non-malicious, witty book that prompts you to empathize with outsiders and consider some people’s need for creativity. Dibrova’s heroes are the same weirdos who knock on the thresholds of publishing houses, pelt them with their masterpiece manuscripts, and even then stalk the editors. What is creativity for those who do not earn by writing, but until the end carry it like a written bag? By showing her tormented creativity of outsiders, Dibrova inspires sympathy for these people and understanding of their actions. Creativity is something that no one can take away from you. This is the territory of faith in one’s own capabilities and in another life, which must finally come when you finish the same brilliant novel. That is, it is like the coming of the Kingdom of God for believers through the power of art. In addition, most of the stories are in one way or another intertwined with the late Soviet context, in which creativity is in itself a territory of escape from a gray and hopeless reality. Belief in one’s own writing purpose is an amazing delusion that blinds the heroes of the book no worse than the famous opium for the people. And Dibrova’s collection contrasts well with the mass of modern stories about “successful success”. Nonfiction Oded Galore. The journey of humanity. Origins of wealth and inequality translated by Anna Markhovska. – Nash Format, 2023. – 272 p. Photo: Our Format What pushes humanity to develop and change? Why are some countries more successful than others? Oded Galor, an Israeli-American economist and the author of the unified theory of growth, tries to answer these questions. In the previous two hundred years, humanity has changed much more than in previous centuries. An inhabitant of the ancient world could find a place and a job in the 17th century, but he would no longer be able to adapt to the realities of the 19th and 20th centuries. Oded Galor explores the reason for this breakthrough in the first part of The Journey of Mankind, looking at the changes we have gone through since our inception as a species. In short, the cause of epochal changes lies in mass education. Instead of “investing” in more children, people began to invest more in their education. Economic development ceased to depend on the birth rate. Having clarified this, the author analyzes in subsequent chapters why, despite this, humanity has not achieved and cannot achieve equality. Galore provides many apt illustrations that make it possible to understand the economic history of mankind. How did Protestantism legitimize enrichment and what did it lead to? Why did the owners of agricultural territories prevent the education of its inhabitants? Why did Britain break out ahead in its development compared to Europe? An interesting work that explains the logic of many historical processes and brings ideological myths out of captivity. Read also: “The book that I would never want to write”: Oleksandr Mykhed published chronicles of pain and hope Oleksiy Zaretskyi. Alla Gorska. Mystkina in the space of totalitarianism Kyiv: Prometheus, 2023. – 432 p. Photo: Prometheus Alla Gorska is a Ukrainian sixties artist and one of the most important Ukrainian artists of the second half of the 20th century. Now we have a great opportunity to get acquainted with the most complete biography of Gorska, created by the cultural expert and her son Oleksiy Zaretsky. This book is a real event in our cultural life, especially given the wave of interest in all Ukrainian art and the rediscovery for the general public of figures of Gorska’s scale. As the child of two outstanding artists, Horska and Viktor Zaretskyi, Oleksiy worked a lot to tell about his parents, their era and to research their work. So “Alla Gorska. Mystkina in the space of totalitarianism” is not just the most comprehensive study of the life of an outstanding sixty-year-old woman, it is also a unique testimony of Oleksiy Zaretskyi. The era and its challenges are etched in the work of artists. And Gorska’s life, like her entire generation, is inextricably linked with resistance to totalitarianism. He, like a cancerous tumor, penetrated into the home, into the environment, into the cultural and everyday life of the sixties, poisoning it. Zaretskyi’s book shows how the KGB discredited dissidents, provoked the jealousy and suspicions of close people, and sowed gossip. After all, how Ukrainian artists were secretly killed, as it happened to Stus, Symonenko and Horska. Read also: This is readable: the first novel about Crimea, non-fiction about love and other novelties worth your libraries

[ad_2]

Original Source Link