The Anonymous Novel. Sensing the Future Torments
by Alessandro Barbero
"This is an astonishing novel, both in its provenance and in its quality . ... [The plot is] an intricately designed maze; the route is as circuitous and often puzzling as any in a John Le Carre' novel. (And Le Carre' addicts will love this one too). Yet what is a plot for, as Scott remarked, 'but to bring in fine things', and there are fine things in spades.
First there is the picture of a society on the cusp of unnerving change, one in which it has become possible to say what previous could scarcely even be thought. Then there is the richness of the detail. ... Here rooms, journeys, weather, clothes, meals, landscape, tastes, smells, trains, the Moscow underground, the mustiness of archives are all vividly presented. The reader inhabits the world the author has conjured up. Finally, and best of all, there is the talk. Russians are great talkers and the novel floats on a sea of wonderfully varied, expressive and tremendous speech. The characters reveal themselves in their words, spoken or merely thought. (For in a good novel thought is a form of speech when presented dramatically, as it is here).
Reviews
"If you have any feeling for Russia or for the art of the novel, then read this one. You will find it an enriching experience." - The Scotsman
"It is a deeply rewarding pleasure to be lost in this novel." - The Sunday Herald
"Barbero is an absorbing and eloquent narrator who is very capable at continuously juggling an abundance of stories and a great number of characters, whose frenetic movements judiciously evolve with a complicit suspense even when they are entirely marginal and encountered only once duringthe animated events involving those who have the onerous taks of being the main protagonists." - La Stampa
"Barbero use the diabolic skills of an erudite and professional narrator to seek out massacres of the distant and recent past. The Anonymous Novel concerns the past-that-never-passes (whether Tsarist or Stalinist) and the future that in 1988 was impending and has now arrived" - Il Giornale
"As in a vast Russian river, thousands of rivulets and currents intersect with each other in Barbero's novel, which provides us with an amazing snapshot of the reality of yesterday and today with all the endless nuances, and holds our attention with the events of a police investigation." - L'Indice
"The Anonymous Novel: Sensing the Future Torments, from a new publisher, Vagabond Voices, situated on the Isle of Lewis, is a vivid novel about Russians coping with the transition from communism to capitalism and combines echoes of Bulgakov with elements of a thriller. Strangely it has been written by a successful medieval historian." - Eric Hobsbawm, The Observer
"This is a literary miracle - unique, witty and gripping. It reads like Bulgakov's prose somewhat modernised or even a careful and sensitive translation of the great Russian classics. It is stunningly authentic, and I cannot believe that the author and translator are not Russian... A book to savour and consume slowly..." - Vitali Vitaliev
