![]() ![]() ![]() Scornful of the ordinary life her parents imagine for her, she travels from Russia to the United States. ![]() She says, “Yes.” The exhilarating opening chapters of Grushin’s latest novel are narrated by an unnamed heroine who can see through mundane reality-beneath it, beyond it-into other worlds. The mermaid knows the story of every bauble: these earrings were a gift from the czar’s uncle to the girl’s great-grandmother, a ballerina that uncut emerald was prised from an icon during the revolution and purchased by the girl’s grandfather for a “length of smoked sausage and a box of German sweets.” In the cramped kitchen of her family’s Moscow apartment, this same girl is secretly reading forbidden verse when she meets an angel-or is he a god? “Do you want to be immortal?” he asks her. The award-winning author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006) and The Line (2010) contemplates the tension between art and domesticity.Ī little girl walks into a bedroom to find a mermaid sorting through her mother’s jewelry. ![]()
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