The Tsar of Love and Techno
Stories
(Sprache: Englisch)
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.
This stunning, exquisitely written...
This stunning, exquisitely written...
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From the New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts.
In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.
Lese-Probe zu „The Tsar of Love and Techno “
The LeopardLeningrad, 1937
I am an artist first, a censor second.
I had to remind myself of this two years ago, when I trudged to the third-floor flat of a communal apartment block, where my widowed sister-in-law and her four-year-old son lived. She answered the door with a thin frown of surprise. She wasn't expecting me. We had never met.
"My name is Roman Osipovich Markin," I said. "The brother of your husband."
She nodded and ran her hand along the worn pleat of a gray skirt as she stood aside to allow me in. If the mention of Vaska startled her, she hid it well. She wore a blond blouse with auburn buttons. The comb lines grooving her damp dark hair looked drawn on by charcoal pencil.
A boy was slumped into the divan's mid-cushion sag. My nephew, I supposed. For his sake, I hoped he took after his mother.
"I don't know what my brother has told you," I began, "but I work in the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation. Are you familiar with the job?"
"No," the boy said. The poor child had inherited his father's forehead. His future lay under a hat.
To his mother: "Your husband really didn't talk about me?"
"He did mention a brother who was something of the village idiot in Pavlovsk," she said, a bit more cheer to her tone. "He didn't mention you were balding."
"It's not as bad as it looks," I said.
"Perhaps you could get to the purpose of your visit?"
"Every day I see photographs of traitors, wreckers, saboteurs, counterrevolutionaries, enemies of the people. Over the last ten years, only so many per day. Over the last few months, the usual numbers have grown. I used to receive a slim file each month. Now I receive one every morning. Soon it will be a box. Then boxes."
"Surely you haven't come only to describe the state of your office?"
"I am here to do my brother a final service," I said.
"And that is?" she asked.
My vertebrae cinched together. My hands felt much too large for my pockets. It's a terrible
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thing, really, when said aloud. "To ensure that his misfortune doesn't become a family trait."
She gathered every photograph she had of Vaska, as I asked. Nine in total. A marriage portrait. A day in the country. One taken the day they moved to the city, their first act as Leningraders. One of Vaska as a boy. She sat down on the divan and showed each to her boy for a final time before bringing them to the bedroom.
She arrayed them on the desk. Her bedroom was mainly bare floor. The bed still wide enough for three, the blanket neatly pulled over a flabby mass of pillows. She must have only shared it with her son now.
I slid a one-ruble coin across the desk, hammer-and-sickle side up.
"What am I to do with this?"
I nodded at the photos. "You know what to do."
She shook her head, and with a sweep of her forearm that sent a small galaxy of dust motes into orbit, she winged the coin to the floor.
Could she have still loved my brother? Hard to believe. He'd been proven guilty of religious radicalism by an impartial and just tribunal. He'd received the only sentence suitable for a madman who poisoned others with the delusion that heaven awaits us. Paradise is possible only here on earth, possible only if we engineer it. One shouldn't envy this woman's blind devotion to a man who has proven himself unworthy of love. One mustn't.
She pressed her palms over the photographs, threw her elbows out to shield the images with her broad back, an instinct that suggested a starving creature protecting her last morsels, and this may be true: The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.
"Leave," she said, a ragged edge to her voice. She stared at the back of her hands. "Leave us be."
I could have turned, walked out of the room, closed the door on the whole affair. I'd done more than was required already. But something kept my heels pinned to the
She gathered every photograph she had of Vaska, as I asked. Nine in total. A marriage portrait. A day in the country. One taken the day they moved to the city, their first act as Leningraders. One of Vaska as a boy. She sat down on the divan and showed each to her boy for a final time before bringing them to the bedroom.
She arrayed them on the desk. Her bedroom was mainly bare floor. The bed still wide enough for three, the blanket neatly pulled over a flabby mass of pillows. She must have only shared it with her son now.
I slid a one-ruble coin across the desk, hammer-and-sickle side up.
"What am I to do with this?"
I nodded at the photos. "You know what to do."
She shook her head, and with a sweep of her forearm that sent a small galaxy of dust motes into orbit, she winged the coin to the floor.
Could she have still loved my brother? Hard to believe. He'd been proven guilty of religious radicalism by an impartial and just tribunal. He'd received the only sentence suitable for a madman who poisoned others with the delusion that heaven awaits us. Paradise is possible only here on earth, possible only if we engineer it. One shouldn't envy this woman's blind devotion to a man who has proven himself unworthy of love. One mustn't.
She pressed her palms over the photographs, threw her elbows out to shield the images with her broad back, an instinct that suggested a starving creature protecting her last morsels, and this may be true: The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.
"Leave," she said, a ragged edge to her voice. She stared at the back of her hands. "Leave us be."
I could have turned, walked out of the room, closed the door on the whole affair. I'd done more than was required already. But something kept my heels pinned to the
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Autoren-Porträt von Anthony Marra
ANTHONY MARRA is the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), which won the National Book Critics Circle s inaugural John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and appeared on over twenty year-end lists. Marra s novel was a National Book Award long list selection as well as a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and France s Prix Medicis. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he teaches as the Jones Lecturer in Fiction. He has lived and studied in Eastern Europe, and now resides in Oakland, California. Visit http://anthonymarra.net/
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Anthony Marra
- 2016, 384 Seiten, Masse: 13,1 x 20,3 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Hogarth
- ISBN-10: 0770436455
- ISBN-13: 9780770436452
- Erscheinungsdatum: 07.07.2016
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Prize for Fiction, 2015National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in Fiction
Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Books of 2015
Praise for The Tsar of Love and Techno:
[E]xtraordinary Each story is a gem in itself. But the book is greater than its parts, an almost unbearably moving exploration of the importance of love, the pull of family, the uses and misuses of history, and the need to reclaim the past by understanding who you really are and what really happened He starts this miracle of a book by showing us how a system can erase the past, the truth, even its citizens. He ends by demonstrating, through his courageous, flawed, deeply human characters, how individual people can restore the things that have been taken away. And if you ve been worrying that you ve lost your faith in the emotionally transformative power of fiction Mr. Marra will restore that, too.
-Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
Remarkable Marra is a gifted writer with the energy and the ambition to explore the lives of characters whose experiences and whose psyches might seem, until we read his work, so distant from our own. Reading his work is like watching the restoration the reappearance, on the page of those whom history has erased.
-Francine Prose, Washington Post
This book will burn itself into your heart. It s a collection of interlocking short stories that stand alone but also fit together, piece by delicate piece, to form an astonishing whole whose artfulness becomes increasingly clear as it goes on. The Tsar of Love and Techno swoops around in time and place, beginning in Stalinist Russia and ending somewhere in outer space in the near future. It s funny, moving and beautiful, the perfect thing to read.
-New York Times
Audacious [an] ambitious and fearless [book], one that offers so much to enjoy and admire...Marra
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s far-ranging, risky and explicitly political book marks him as a writer with an original, even singular sensibility.
-New York Times Book Review
Genius...what makes this (dare I say) masterpiece so stunning is Marra s clear love for his subject and insistence on infusing beauty into even the darkest places It s nothing short of extraordinary.
-San Francisco Chronicle
Powerful [an] ingenious book."
-Wall Street Journal
"Marra s nine stories, cunningly set out like strewn mosaic tiles that keep self-rearranging until they cohere into a complex, cathartic whole, demand to be read in order...Marra here emerges with an oxygenizing wisdom and an arsenal of wit as inexhaustible as it is unlikely.
-Boston Globe
Dazzling with its multiple narratives and recurring characters it certainly recalls both Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad" (a novel) and Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteridge"(short stories). By the time you reach Marra's astonishing final story about Kolya, "The End" set, a dateline tells us, in "Outer Space, Year Unknown" the book has achieved a heart-rending cumulative power.
-Tom Beer, Newsday
Like Nabokov, Marra is a writer for whom essential truths are found in detail The nine interlocking stories grip from the off with their dry tone and meticulously realised worlds of totalitarian life and its aftermath. Characters appear, disappear and reappear throughout the collection, graceful as a troupe of dancers in the author s assured hands. His stories have subtle nods to the Russian greats (Chekhov s gun, the lady with the lapdog) and more overt echoes of the writing of Kafka and Orwell in the tales of totalitarian living.
-The Irish Times
"Private acts of dissidence (a smuggled mix tape, say) become heroic in Anthony Marra's era-spanning portrait of the USSR."
-Megan O'Grady, Vogue
Cobbled together as a sort of mixtape itself (with four stories under Side A, four under Side B, and a single-story intermission), Marra s latest work is tender, touching, haunting at times and humorous at others in short, a feat.
-Thomas Harlander, Los Angeles Magazine
The Tsar of Love and Techno is inventively structured, emotionally resonant, superbly rendered.
-Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com
The Tsar of Love and Techno is an intricately structured and powerful collection[and] showcases Marra s wit and his gift for unforgettable details The Tsar of Love and Techno is the work of an elegant and generous writer.
-Bookpage
"Some books are love at first read, and this is one of them. Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, delivers his first collection of intimately tied stories (it kind of reads as a novel, actually), arranged into Side A and B and Intermission. With language as precise as a razor blade, Tsartakes us throughout Russia from 1937 to the present with a connected group of characters who, through their explosive escapades, demonstrate the peculiarities and nuances of life. It has everything: humor, action, suspense, drama I'm going to go ahead and call it brilliant."
-Meredith Turits, Bustle.com
"Marra, in between bursts of acidic humor, summons the terror, polluted landscapes, and diminished hopes of generations of Russians in a tragic and haunting collection."
-Booklist (starred)
"With generosity of spirit and a surprising dash of humor, these artfully woven narratives coalesce into a majestic whole."
-Library Journal (starred)
Powerful strikingly reimagines a nearly a century of changes in Russia. [T]he book s brilliance and humor are laced with the somber feeling that the country is allergic to evolution."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred)
As in his acclaimed novel, Marra finds in Chechnya an inspiration for his uniquely funny, tragic, bizarre, and memorable fiction.
-Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Love and betrayal reverberate through these nine deftly linked stories... With this collection, Marra has created a stunning portrait of a place and its indelible inhabitants."
-Dawn Raffel, More
We know we are in the realm of fiction, but Marra makes it all feel viscerally real. He has mined modern Russian history for all it is worth to create a masterful novel.
-Russian Life Magazine
Treat yourself to these wise works of art set in Siberia, the USSR, and the heart.
-Refinery29
-New York Times Book Review
Genius...what makes this (dare I say) masterpiece so stunning is Marra s clear love for his subject and insistence on infusing beauty into even the darkest places It s nothing short of extraordinary.
-San Francisco Chronicle
Powerful [an] ingenious book."
-Wall Street Journal
"Marra s nine stories, cunningly set out like strewn mosaic tiles that keep self-rearranging until they cohere into a complex, cathartic whole, demand to be read in order...Marra here emerges with an oxygenizing wisdom and an arsenal of wit as inexhaustible as it is unlikely.
-Boston Globe
Dazzling with its multiple narratives and recurring characters it certainly recalls both Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad" (a novel) and Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteridge"(short stories). By the time you reach Marra's astonishing final story about Kolya, "The End" set, a dateline tells us, in "Outer Space, Year Unknown" the book has achieved a heart-rending cumulative power.
-Tom Beer, Newsday
Like Nabokov, Marra is a writer for whom essential truths are found in detail The nine interlocking stories grip from the off with their dry tone and meticulously realised worlds of totalitarian life and its aftermath. Characters appear, disappear and reappear throughout the collection, graceful as a troupe of dancers in the author s assured hands. His stories have subtle nods to the Russian greats (Chekhov s gun, the lady with the lapdog) and more overt echoes of the writing of Kafka and Orwell in the tales of totalitarian living.
-The Irish Times
"Private acts of dissidence (a smuggled mix tape, say) become heroic in Anthony Marra's era-spanning portrait of the USSR."
-Megan O'Grady, Vogue
Cobbled together as a sort of mixtape itself (with four stories under Side A, four under Side B, and a single-story intermission), Marra s latest work is tender, touching, haunting at times and humorous at others in short, a feat.
-Thomas Harlander, Los Angeles Magazine
The Tsar of Love and Techno is inventively structured, emotionally resonant, superbly rendered.
-Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com
The Tsar of Love and Techno is an intricately structured and powerful collection[and] showcases Marra s wit and his gift for unforgettable details The Tsar of Love and Techno is the work of an elegant and generous writer.
-Bookpage
"Some books are love at first read, and this is one of them. Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, delivers his first collection of intimately tied stories (it kind of reads as a novel, actually), arranged into Side A and B and Intermission. With language as precise as a razor blade, Tsartakes us throughout Russia from 1937 to the present with a connected group of characters who, through their explosive escapades, demonstrate the peculiarities and nuances of life. It has everything: humor, action, suspense, drama I'm going to go ahead and call it brilliant."
-Meredith Turits, Bustle.com
"Marra, in between bursts of acidic humor, summons the terror, polluted landscapes, and diminished hopes of generations of Russians in a tragic and haunting collection."
-Booklist (starred)
"With generosity of spirit and a surprising dash of humor, these artfully woven narratives coalesce into a majestic whole."
-Library Journal (starred)
Powerful strikingly reimagines a nearly a century of changes in Russia. [T]he book s brilliance and humor are laced with the somber feeling that the country is allergic to evolution."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred)
As in his acclaimed novel, Marra finds in Chechnya an inspiration for his uniquely funny, tragic, bizarre, and memorable fiction.
-Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Love and betrayal reverberate through these nine deftly linked stories... With this collection, Marra has created a stunning portrait of a place and its indelible inhabitants."
-Dawn Raffel, More
We know we are in the realm of fiction, but Marra makes it all feel viscerally real. He has mined modern Russian history for all it is worth to create a masterful novel.
-Russian Life Magazine
Treat yourself to these wise works of art set in Siberia, the USSR, and the heart.
-Refinery29
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