The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin

Unfortunately, after these first brilliant steps, he stopped striving and began to repeat himself – more clocks, more giraffes, more drawers, all those sleek juxtapositions of random objects that seem striking for a moment but are devoid of any real meaning, all those amusing tricks for the eye, like Raphael’s Madonna fitted into an ear, you know it? He managed to trivialize himself completely. His early visions are haunting, don’t you find – those pulpy, dripping clocks, those burning giraffes, Venus de Milo with drawers carved all along her body – great, dark metaphors for our nightmarish century. “True, the man once had undeniable talent.

I will definitely read more from this author.

I really enjoyed her references to art and Russian literature, and she shows us that the worlds within - our thoughts, memories, and dreams - are as big a part of our lives as our consciousness and the ‘real world’ which others see. In that way the novel feels Russian-American (which of course Grushin is) – Russian in having followed in the tradition of Gogol, Dostoevsky, and other great Russian masters in the absurd and cynical ways life plays out, and yet American in the sense of ultimate optimism. Sukhanov has struggled in life, made compromises, and let the dream go dormant, but ultimately he can still find himself, and live up to his father’s advice to “never let them clip your wings.” Tellingly, one of the lenses in his glasses break towards the end, distorting his impression of objects and people in surrealist ways. In sometimes absurd ways, life has conspired to break his comfortable life apart, to bring him low, so that he can pursue art once again. On top of it all, his memory is starting to get a little fuzzy on everyday details, but haunts him about things in the past.Īnd yet, it’s never too late to redeem oneself. He wants to reconnect and share personal things with his kids and wife, but finds the moments to have done so passed. Sukhanov’s choices were made much more difficult by the constraints Soviets placed on art, and now, in middle age, he finds his world crumbling – his wife disinterested, his children adults and no longer seeing him as someone they should look up to, his job threatened, and other people showing him what being true to himself would have been like. Spoiler alert in the next few paragraphs. Grushin’s writing is lush and brilliant, and she deftly weaves between reality and Sukhanov’s inner world of memories as the book progresses until the full story is known for what happened between him, another up and coming young artist, and the daughter of a wealthy artist who produced banal Soviet ‘socialist realism’ paintings. There’s so much to like in this book, which is the story of a middle aged art critic in the Soviet Union in 1985 who was himself once an avant-garde artist.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin