Grade: B-
About the Author: Gina Ochsner is the author of two collections of short stories, The People I Wanted to Be and The Neccessary Grace to Fall. The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight is her first novel. Her short stories have been published in all the fancy literary reviews such as The New Yorker, Tin House, and The Kenyon Review.
The Russian Dreambook takes place in post-Soviet Perm, Russia. The story is centered around one dilapidated apartment building and the poverty-stricken people living inside of it. These characters’ interactions with each other is largely what the novel is about, with very long introspective passages from most of the characters about their dreams, burdens, and lives.
The Main Characters, broken down:
Tanya: A 24 year old slightly over weight girl with her head in the clouds- literally and figuratively. She spend hours writing descriptions of air, clouds, and colors in the notebook she carries with her everywhere and dreams of become a flight attendant for a small airline. She is shy and in love with Yuri.
Yuri: A young man whose mind has been bent from war. He wears his dead father’s flight helmet almost all of the time, it is a security blanket of sorts. He is extremely weak-willed and allows himself to be pushed around and even beaten by everyone around him. He lives with his mother, Olga, and his girlfriend Zoya.
Zoya: A greedy, useless pretty girl who does nothing but beg Yuri for babies. She is lazy and rude and nobody likes her. She is not given a perspective chapter, therefore she remains a flat character throughout the novel.
Olga: Yuri’s mother. She’s works a translator at the local newspaper The Red Star rewriting the news to make the Russian government look better. Once in love with languages, Olga now despises them, and hates herself for changing the truth into lies for a living. She misses her dead husband.
Azade: A woman who has been dislocated due to political upheavals. Instead of her proper social standing, she has been reduced to tending to the public latrine the apartment building’s inhabitants use. It provides a living for her but she feels intense shame about it. She feels dirty and the others refuse to socialize with her. Her husband, Mircha, was abusive to her.
She is the mother of Vitek.
Vitek: Son of Azade, a scoundrel, swindler, loser. He forces money out of everyone and beats people up. He is the leader of the pack of orphans that hang out at the building. He also does not get a perspective chapter.
Mircha: Abusive husband of Azade. He kills himself by jumping from the top of the building and then comes back as a ghost who wants to tell everyone how to better live their lives, while being his same drunken abusive self.
This novel plays with magical realism and does it in, I would say, a successful way. It’s interwoven with reality in such a tangible way that it is almost believable. A ghost comes back to drink vodka and mock those he mocked while he was living? Why not!
Her language is very flowery at some points, especially while describing the sky, the snow, the settings:
“It looked precisely like every other building in a twenty block radius: glum paperweights holding the pavements and old drifts of snow down.” p. 145
Or in the magical thoughts of her characters:
“Though Azade had smelled the upside-down dreams of bats and the warm and weedy dreams of eels, nothing
reeked as much as the dreams of humans.” p. 192
Although some of the language she used was very beautiful, she often described disgusting things in great, disgusting, detail. In her Azade chapters she is often talking about the various character’s bowel movements. describing their shit and farts repeatedly and without apology. While this does lend a palpable gritty quality to the narrative, it does turn the stomach to read about excrement repeatedly and in such detail.
At one point, towards the end, Ochsner breaks the fourth wall, a surprising choice due to the feel of the rest of the book. She writes, in the words of Mircha:
“You see, you can’t really make me go away because it’s not part of the story. You need me. I am the conflict, the
plot complication. I am utterly necessary.” p. 335
Well, Mircha was wrong on all points. Azade and Tanya destroy Mircha and his ghost disappears, leaving behind no great wisdom and having not changed himself even slightly. He is also not the conflict- each character’s own inner weaknesses are the major conflicts, regardless of any physical battering that occurs from Mircha or Vitek.
Each character has their own inner demons, weaknesses, and broken dreams. At the end of the story, none of that has changed. Their lives are mostly the same (except they ran off all the evil characters, Mircha, Vitek, and Zoya) and are more comfortable with themselves and each other.
I must admit that it took genuine effort to get through this novel. While it was interesting and the language beautifully and creatively written, it’s just a tough book to get through. Most of it is written in long, introspective chapters without much action. I also found the “bad” characters to be extremely flat and underdeveloped which caused them to play simple villian roles, which stood out in a book as complex as this one.
Not enough review for you? Here’s what some other people said:
Viv Groskop, of The Observer:
“This is a crazy adventure of the imagination, both hilarious and occasionally puzzling. With it, Ochsner joins a small but inspiring band of US-based (she lives in Oregon) writers exploring the post-Soviet landscape. This book has echoes of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Gary Shteyngart’s laugh-out-loud Absurdistan and Olga Grushin’s more romantic The Dream Life of Sukhanov.”
Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K.:
“The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight is a hilariously absurdist and deeply resonant debut novel. Gina Ochsner transforms ordinary lives into something magical and wise and glintingly beautiful.”
Bent Shelf Book Reviews 