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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Editor's ChoiceWhen Andrei Kaplan's older brother Dima insists that Andrei return to Moscow to care for their ailing grandmother, Andrei must take stock of his life in New York. His girlfriend has stopped returning his text messages. His dissertation adviser is dubious about his job prospects. It's the summer of 2008, and his bank account is running dangerously low. Perhaps a few months in Moscow are just what he needs. A wise, sensitive novel about Russia, exile, family, love, history and fate, A Terrible County asks what you owe the place you were born, and what it owes you.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Gessen's exceptional and trenchant novel, floundering 30-something professor Andrei Kaplan flees from New York to Russia, the country of his birth, to reassess his future and take care of his ailing grandmother. Called abroad by his enterprising older brother, Dima, Andrei arrives in Moscow to find the city of his memory surreally changed, his 89-year-old grandmother's apartment one of the few spaces exempt from a partial Westernization. Andrei's early attempts to reorient himself to post-Soviet Russian society bring about considerable insight and humor-getting rebuffed by a men's adult hockey league, getting pistol-whipped outside a nightclub-leading him back to watching old Russian films with his grandmother. Eventually, though, Andrei carves out a place for himself among a group of leftists known as October, whose ranks include Yulia, a devout radical with whom Andrei embarks on a romantic relationship. Gessen (All the Sad Young Literary Men) meticulously forges these bonds before casting them in doubt, as Andrei's involvement in a protest complicates the new life he has built. While poised to critique Putin's Russia, this sharp, stellar novel becomes, by virtue of Andrei's ultimate self-interest, a subtle and incisive indictment of the American character. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
A decade after his debut, All the Sad Young Literary Men (2008), n+1 cofounder Gessen's new novel follows Andrei Kaplan, a Russian American struggling as an online adjunct professor in New York. When Andrei's brother asks him to temporarily move back to Moscow to look after their ailing grandmother, Andrei agrees. In Moscow, not much happens, though Gessen does offer an eerily timely portrait of Putin's Russia after the 2008 financial crisis. It is fascinating to see Andrei grapple with how Russia is simultaneously gentrifying and modernizing while it remains violent, corrupt, and indelibly scarred by the Soviet era. Caring for his grandma as she struggles with dementia and the traumas of her life, Andrei gradually builds his own life in Moscow; drinking overpriced coffee, finding a place to play ice hockey, and joining a Marxist activist group. With a realistic approach that nods to William Dean Howells and Tolstoy in equal measure, and like the fiction of his n+1 cohorts Chad Harbach and Benjamin Kunkel, Gessen presents a measured, socially engaged novel that is moving, often funny, and deeply thought-provoking.--Moran, Alexander Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE PRICE YOU PAY, by Aidán Truhen. (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, $16.95.) When his elderly neighbor is killed, things start to go south for Jack Price, the slick cocaine dealer at the heart of this thriller. The book is "brilliant, a latticework of barbed jokes and subtle observations and inventive misbehaviors, a high-end thriller, relentlessly knowing, relentlessly brutal," Charles Finch wrote in his review. "It reads like Martin Amis on mescaline." NO GOOD ALTERNATIVE: Volume 2 of Carbon Ideologies, by William T. Vollmann. (Penguin, $20.) The writer packs voice and passion into his examination of what we are doing to the earth, taking aim at coal, oil and natural gas and filling his book with interviews with people whose lives have been disrupted by those industries. Vollmann's intended readers, he says, are those in the devastated future. TELL THE MACHINE GOODNIGHT, by Katie Williams. (Riverhead, $16.) This novel imagines an invention called the Apricity, which offers individualized "contentment plans" that tell us how to be happy. The book centers on Pearl, who works for the company behind the invention, and her son, who's recovering from an eating disorder and refuses the technology. Williams's characters are complex and deeply human. GIVE PEOPLE MONEY: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World, by Annie Lowrey. (Broadway, $16.) Lowrey, who writes about economic policy for The Atlantic, marshals considerable research in her argument for a universal basic income. Even $1,000 given each month to every American would eliminate poverty by the government's current benchmark, she says, outlining a number of ways to redistribute the nation's money to make it possible. A TERRIBLE COUNTRY, by Keith Gessen. (Penguin, $16.) A jilted American returns to Russia, the place of his birth, and is enthralled and horrified by the magic and misery he finds there. Our reviewer, Boris Fishman, praised Gessen's novel of modern Russia, writing, "You won't read a more observant book about the country that has now been America's bedeviling foil for almost a century." THE VICTORIAN AND THE ROMANTIC: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time, by Nell Stevens. (Anchor, $17.) In this razor-sharp autobiography, the author tells of her obsession with Elizabeth Gaskell, the Victorian British novelist and the subject of Stevens's Ph.D. As she founders in academia, Stevens finds comfort in her kinship with Gaskell.
Guardian Review
Astute analysis and goofy prose combine in the story of a young man and his grandmother There seems to be an unwritten law of publishing that says books about Russia and the former Soviet Union must have the gloomiest possible titles: The Long Hangover, The Last Man in Russia, Lenins Tomb, The Harvest of Sorrow, A Peoples Tragedy. Russian writers started it, of course, back in the 19th century, with De mons, Dead Souls and The House of the Dead. From its title and the pedigree of its author, who translated Svetlana Alexievichs searing Voices from Chernobyl, youd think A Terrible Country might resemble the works of PG Wodehouses fictional writer Vladimir Brusiloff: grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. In fact, Keith Gessens second novel is a very funny, perceptive, exasperated, loving and timely portrait of a country that its author clearly knows well. It tells the story of Andrei Kaplan, like Gessen the US-raised son of Russian émigrés, who goes back to Moscow to take care of his octogenarian grandmother, Baba Seva. Its 2008 and Andrei is 33, a likable nebbish whos just split up with his girlfriend and is failing to get traction in his academic career. An expert on Russian literature and history, Andrei lacks the steely focus and aptitude for specialisation that impresses hiring committees. One of his less noble motives for going back to Moscow is to mine his grandmother for research material. Or, as his academic adviser puts it: Shell tell you stories about the USSR. You can weave them in and out of a tale of modernity. That shit is gold, my friend. People love that shit. This plan is immediately thwarted: Baba Seva has incipient dementia and can barely remember who Andrei is, never mind recall thesis-friendly episodes of 20th-century Soviet history. This is a terrible country, she tells Andrei on his arrival, which becomes her catchphrase. Why did you come back? Over a series of chapters with titles that play with the conventions of 18th- and 19th-century novels I get sick, Shipalkin foils my plans, My grandmother falls down the stairs Andrei relates the comic indignities of his new life with winning, informal candour. His fluent Russian and obligations to his grandmother draw him into corners of the vast city that outsiders never penetrate. He plays ice hockey matches in Moscows interminable suburbs, tries to get a date, is forced to rely on the fragmenting healthcare system, and meets young, broke Russians making their lives in a ruthless city that worships wealth and power. He surprises himself by disliking the well-off Russian liberals he meets at their informal headquarters, the cafe Jean-Jacques. It turned out they hated Russia. They sort of lived here. But they sort of lived somewhere else. They in turn look down on impoverished Andrei. I dont think youre cut out for this, one tells him. For Russia. Russia is a complicated subject, but Gessen combines astute analysis with a disarmingly goofy prose style: This place sucked. And it sucked in a completely different way from the one Id been led to expect. What happened to the scary dictatorship? What happened to the bloodthirsty regime? I thought I was going to be arrested, but no one was going to arrest me. No one gave a shit about me. I was too poor for that. In fact, Andreis experiences in Moscow will go on to overturn many of these perceptions not least that no one is going to arrest him. The refreshingly artless writing belies a deep understanding of Russia, its history and literature. Andrei digresses enlighteningly on Russian as a literary language, swearing, taxis, plumbing, ice hockey and the role played by global oil prices in the breakup of the Soviet Union. Whats more, the novel itself seems shaped by the countrys antecedents. Its mordant first-person prose owes something to the writer Sergei Dovlatov. And the relationship at its core between a young man and an old woman who incarnates the epic and ambiguous nature of Russia itself winks at a recurrent theme of the countrys fiction, from Alexander Pushkins The Queen of Spades through Crime and Punishment, to Daniil Kharmss bizarre short story The Old Lady. At the same time, Baba Seva feels like a person, not a symbol, and her descent into dementia after surviving the vicissitudes of an extraordinary life is evoked with great love and particularity. A Terrible Country captures a moment when high oil prices, economic confidence and a strong rouble made Moscow appear even more intimidating than usual to outsiders. Dmitry Medvedev was president and a tentative liberalisation seemed possible. Ten years on, things are different, and yet strangely the same. Putinism has entered a more baroque phase. The likable protesters Andrei befriends have seen their moment come and go. Its unfortunate that this sharp-eyed novel is appearing just as the latest World Cup-driven spasm of interest in the region begins to subside. If the last two bizarre years have taught us anything, its that Russia is never irrelevant. I wonder how many more drugged spies, bent elections and political murders it will take for the rest of the world to realise that, for existential reasons, it would be smart for us to pay it a little more consistent and nuanced attention. A Terrible Country would be an excellent and entertaining place to begin. - Marcel Theroux.
Kirkus Review
A man returns to Moscow to care for his grandmother and learns much about Putin's Russia, its new prosperity and old problems.Gessen (All the Sad Young Literary Men, 2008) opens his second novel where his first ended, in 2008. The new work's central figure, Andrei Kaplan, recalls the feckless, at times unlikable young men of Gessen's debut. After eight years of grad school and a Ph.D. in Russian literature and "modernity," Andrei, at 33, is struggling to live in New York on a meager salary from online teaching. So when his older brother calls to say he must leave Moscowhis business schemes have brought legal woesand asks Andrei to come care for their grandmother, it seems like a promising alternative that might even bolster his resume. Grandma Seva is 89 and physically healthy but suffering "medium-stage dementia." As Andrei settles in to a daily routine, he comes to know her past and the new Moscow, a place he left at age 6 with his parents and brother. He's accepted by a group of socialists who show him the pricey city's cheaper side while they discuss Putin's form of capitalism, the "dictatorship of the market." They stage political demonstrations and share a strange sort of nostalgia for Soviet times. Small crises arise, but nothing like the chilling developments of the last 30 pages. Gessen's prose is generally unembellished and lends itself to deadpan humor, though it can be repetitious. The plain style does suit the muted action of Andrei's mostly mundane existence, and understatement helps to highlight the real hardship and peril that other lives confront.The themes are timely and engaging, and Moscow-born Gessen displays an affecting sympathy for the smaller players on history's stage. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In his debut novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, Gessen (journalism, Columbia Univ.) penned a passing nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald with an autobiographical tale of three -writers struggling to turn their literary ambitions into a lasting legacy. Similar themes from Gessen's life emerge here, as the author ruminates on the complexities of his homeland from the perspective of floundering academic and Russian expat Andrei Kaplan. With few job prospects and the high cost of living in New York City, Andrei returns to Moscow, his birthplace, to care for his grandmother, improve his hockey skills, and decide whether the academic life is worth the trouble. Navigating Russian culture as he moves between his grandmother's recollections of the USSR and his newfound revolutionary friends, he is caught between the ideologies of Putin's Russia and the Western liberalism that underpinned both his upbringing and his education. When the possibility of a romantic relationship presents itself, Andrei discovers his own narrative paralleling that of Mother Russia: cling to a past that is gone or strive for a future that may never materialize? VERDICT With wit and humor, -Gessen delivers a heartwarming novel about the multitudinous winding roads that lead us home. [See Prepub Alert, 1/22/18.]-Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1. i move to moscow In the late summer of 2008, I moved to Moscow to take care of my grandmother. She was about to turn ninety and I hadn't seen her for nearly a decade. My brother, Dima, and I were her only family; her lone daughter, our mother, had died years earlier. Baba Seva lived alone now in her old Moscow apartment. When I called to tell her I was coming, she sounded very happy to hear it, and also a little confused. My parents and my brother and I left the Soviet Union in 1981. I was six and Dima was sixteen, and that made all the difference. I became an American, whereas Dima remained essentially Russian. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, he returned to Moscow to make his fortune. Since then he had made and lost several fortunes; where things stood now I wasn't sure. But one day he Gchatted me to ask if I could come to Moscow and stay with Baba Seva while he went to London for an unspecified period of time. "Why do you need to go to London?" "I'll explain when I see you." "You want me to drop everything and travel halfway across the world and you can't even tell me why?" There was something petulant that came out of me when dealing with my older brother. I hated it, and couldn't help myself. Dima said, "If you don't want to come, say so. But I'm not discussing this on Gchat." "You know," I said, "there's a way to take it off the record. No one will be able to see it." "Don't be an idiot." He meant to say that he was involved with some very serious people, who would not so easily be deterred from reading his Gchats. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn't. With Dima the line between those concepts was always shifting. As for me, I wasn't really an idiot. But neither was I not an idiot. I had spent four long years of college and then eight much longer years of grad school studying Russian literature and history, drinking beer, and winning the Grad Student Cup hockey tournament (five times!); then I had gone out onto the job market for three straight years, with zero results. By the time Dima wrote me I had exhausted all the available post-graduate fellowships and had signed up to teach online sections in the university's new PMOOC initiative, short for "paid massive online open course," although the "paid" part mostly referred to the students, who really did need to pay, and less to the instructors, who were paid very little. It was definitely not enough to continue living, even very frugally, in New York. In short, on the question of whether I was an idiot, there was evidence on both sides. Dima writing me when he did was, on the one hand, providential. On the other hand, Dima had a way of getting people involved in undertakings that were not in their best interests. He had once convinced his now former best friend Tom to move to Moscow to open a bakery. Unfortunately, Tom opened his bakery too close to another bakery, and was lucky to leave Moscow with just a dislocated shoulder. Anyway, I proceeded cautiously. I said, "Can I stay at your place?" Back in 1999, after the Russian economic collapse, Dima bought the apartment directly across the landing from my grandmother's, so helping her out from there would be easy. "I'm subletting it," said Dima. "But you can stay in our bedroom in grandma's place. It's pretty clean." "I'm thirty-three years old," I said, meaning too old to live with my grandmother. "You want to rent your own place, be my guest. But it'll have to be pretty close to Grandma's." Our grandmother lived in the center of Moscow. The rents there were almost as high as Manhattan's. On my PMOOC salary I would be able to rent approximately an armchair. "Can I use your car?" "I sold it." "Dude. How long are you leaving for?" "I don't know," said Dima. "And I already left." "Oh," I said. He was already in London. He must have left in a hurry. But I in turn was desperate to leave New York. The last of my old classmates from the Slavic department had recently left for a new job, in California, and my girlfriend of six months, Sarah, had recently dumped me at a Starbucks. "I just don't see where this is going," she had said, meaning I suppose our relationship, but suggesting in fact my entire life. And she was right: even the thing that I had once most enjoyed doing-reading and writing about and teaching Russian literature and history-was no longer any fun. I was heading into a future of halfheartedly grading the half-written papers of half-interested students, with no end in sight. Whereas Moscow was a special place for me. It was the city where my parents had grown up, where they had met; it was the city where I was born. It was a big, ugly, dangerous city, but also the cradle of Russian civilization. Even when Peter the Great abandoned it for St. Petersburg in 1713, even when Napoleon sacked it in 1812, Moscow remained, as Alexander Herzen put it, the capital of the Russian people. "They recognized their ties of blood to Moscow by the pain they felt at losing it." Yes. And I hadn't been there in years. Over the course of a few grad-school summers I'd grown tired of its poverty and hopelessness. The aggressive drunks on the subway; the thugs in tracksuits and leather jackets walking around eyeing everyone; the guy eating from the dumpster next to my grandmother's place every night during the summer I spent there in 2000, periodically yelling "Fuckers! Bloodsuckers!" then going back to eating. I hadn't been back since. Still, I kept my hands off the keyboard. I needed some kind of concession from Dima, if only for my pride. I said, "Is there someplace for me to play hockey?" As my academic career had declined, my hockey playing had ramped up. Even during the summer, I was on the ice three days a week. "Are you kidding?" said Dima. "Moscow is a hockey mecca. They're building new rinks all the time. I'll get you into a game as soon as you get here." I took that in. "Oh, and the wireless signal from my place reaches across the landing," Dima said. "Free wi-fi." "OK!" I wrote. "OK?" "Yeah," I said. "Why not." A few days later I went to the Russian consulate on the Upper East Side, stood in line for an hour with my application, and got a one-year visa. Then I wrapped things up in New York: I sublet my room to a rock drummer from Minnesota, returned my books to the library, and fetched my hockey stuff from a locker at the rink. It was all a big hassle, and not cheap, but I spent the whole time imagining the different life I would soon be living and the different person I'd become. I pictured myself carrying groceries for my grandmother; taking her on excursions around the city, including to the movies (she'd always loved the movies); walking with her arm in arm around the old neighborhood and listening to her tales of life under socialism. There was so much about her life that I didn't know, about which I'd never asked. I had been incurious and oblivious; I had believed more in books than I had in people. I pictured myself protesting the Putin regime in the morning, playing hockey in the afternoon, and keeping my grandmother company in the evening. Perhaps there was even some way I might use my grandmother's life as the basis for a journal article. I pictured myself sitting monastically in my room and with my grandmother's stories in hand adding a whole new dimension to my work. Maybe I could put her testimony in italics and intersperse it throughout my article, like in In Our Time. On my last night in town my roommates threw me a small party. "To Moscow," they said, raising their cans of beer. "To Moscow!" I repeated. "And don't get killed," one of them added. "I won't get killed," I promised. I was excited. And drunk. It occurred to me that there was a certain glamor that might attend spending time in an increasingly violent and dictatorial Russia-at that very moment bombing the small country of Georgia into submission. At three in the morning I sent a text message to Sarah. "I'm leaving tomorrow," it said, as if I were heading for a very dangerous place. Sarah did not respond. Three hours later I woke up, still drunk, threw the last of my stuff into my huge red suitcase, grabbed my hockey stick, and headed for JFK. I got on my flight and promptly fell asleep. Next thing I knew I was standing in the passport control line in the grim basement of Sheremetevo-2 International Airport. It never seemed to change. As long as I'd been flying in here, they made you come down to this basement and wait in line before you got your bags. It was like a purgatory from which you suspected you might be entering someplace other than heaven. But the Russians looked different than I remembered them. They were well dressed, with good haircuts, and talking on sleek new cell phones. Even the guards in their light-blue short-sleeve uniforms looked cheerful. Though the line was long, several stood off together to the side, laughing. Oil was selling at $114 a barrel, and their army had just won a short little war with Georgia-is that what they were laughing about? Modernization theory said the following: Wealth and technology are more powerful than culture. Give people nice cars, color televisions, and the ability to travel to Europe, and they'll stop being so aggressive. No two countries with McDonald's franchises will ever go to war with each other. People with cell phones are nicer than people without cell phones. I wasn't so sure. The Georgians had McDonald's, and the Russians bombed them anyway. As I neared the passport booth, a tall, bespectacled, nicely dressed European, Dutch or German, asked in English if he could cut the line: he had to catch a connecting flight. I nodded yes-we'd have to wait for our luggage anyway-but the man behind me, about the same height as the Dutch guy but much sturdier, in a boxy but not to my eyes inexpensive suit, piped up in Russian-accented English. "Go back to end of line." "I'm about to miss my flight," said the Dutchman. "Go back to end of line." I said to him in Russian, "What's the difference?" "There's a big difference," he answered. "Please?" the Dutchman asked again, in English. "I said go back. Now." The Russian turned slightly so that he was square with the Dutchman. The latter man kicked his bag in frustration. Then he picked it up and walked to the back of the line. "He made the correct decision," said the Russian guy to me, in Russian, indicating that as a man of principle he was ready to pummel the Dutch guy for cutting the line. I didn't answer. A few minutes later, I approached the passport control booth. The young, blond, unsmiling border guard took my battered blue American passport-the passport of a person who lived in a country where you didn't have to carry your passport everywhere you went, where in fact you might not even know where your passport was for months and years at a time-with mild disgust. If he had a passport like mine he'd take better care of it. He checked my name against the terrorist database and buzzed me through the gate to the other side. [AU/ED: with an American passport, would Andrei be on the same passport line as Russians? In many airports they separate them, yes?] I was in Russia again. My grandmother Seva lived in the very center of the city, in an apartment sheÕd been awarded, in the late 1940s, by Joseph Stalin. My brother, Dima, brought this up sometimes, when he was trying to make a point, and so did my grandmother, when she was in a self-deprecating mood. ÒMy Stalin apartment,Ó she called it, as if to remind everyone, and herself, of the moral compromise she had made. Still, in general in our family it was understood that if someone was offering you an apartment, and you lived at the time in a drafty room in a communal apartment with your small daughter, your two brothers, and your mom, then you should take the apartment, no matter who it was from. And itÕs not like Stalin himself was handing her the keys or asking for anything in return. She was at the time a young professor of history at Moscow State University, and had consulted on a film about Ivan the Great, the fifteenth-century Ògatherer of the lands of RusÓ and grandfather to Ivan the Terrible, which Stalin so enjoyed that he declared everyone involved should get an apartment. So in addition to Òmy Stalin apartment,Ó my grandmother also called it Òmy Ivan the Great apartment,Ó and then, if she was speaking honestly, Òmy Yolka apartment,Ó after her daughter, my mother, for whom she had been willing to do anything at all. To get to this apartment I exchanged some dollars at the booth outside baggage claim-it was about twenty-four rubles per dollar at the time-and took the brand-new express train to Savelovsky Railway Station, passing miles of crumbling Soviet apartment blocks, and the old (also crumbling) turn-of-the-century industrial belt just outside the center. Along the way the massive guy sitting next to me-about my age, in jeans and a short-sleeve button-down-struck up a conversation. "What model is that?" he asked, about my phone. I had bought a SIM card at the airport and was now putting it in the phone and seeing if it worked. Here we go, I thought. My phone was a regular T-Mobile flip phone.But I figured this was just a prelude to the guy trying to rob me. I grew tense. My hockey stick was in the luggage rack above us, and anyway it would have been hard to swing it at this guy on this train. "Just a regular phone," I said. "Samsung." I grew up speaking Russian and still speak it with my father and my brother but I have a slight, difficult-to-place accent. I occasionally make small grammatical mistakes or put the stress on the wrong syllable. And I was rusty. The guy picked up on this, as well as the fact that my olive skin set me apart from most of the Slavs on this fancy train. "Where you from?" he said. He used the familiar ty rather than vy-which could mean he was being friendly, because we were the same age and on the same train, or it could mean he was asserting his right to call me anything he wanted. I couldn't tell. He began to guess where I might be from. "Spain?" he said. "Or Turkey?" Excerpted from A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
