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The Dream Life Of Sukhanov
by Olga Grushin
Grushin's--dare we say it--dreamlike novel centers on a 56-year-old artist during the waning days of the Soviet Union.
Putnam, 368 pages
01/05/2006
$24.95
ISBN: 0399152989
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
The Independent Lesley Chamberlain
Olga Grushin reminds us of what makes the best of Russian culture soar to fantastic heights, and the subject of her novel is in some ways just that: the seriousness of talent.
Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
Olga Grushin's extraordinary first novel is so wise and mature that it is tempting to suspect the author's biography is a joke. The Dream Life of Sukhanov is sophisticated, ironic and witty, multilayered, intricately constructed, deeply informed, elegantly written -- the work, one would think, of someone who has been writing and publishing fiction for years, not someone who is doing it for the first time, and doing it in what is not her native language.
Booklist Michele Leber
In well-honed prose with vivid imagery, Grushin provides a portrait of a culture, interplaying art with politics in twentieth-century Russia, and dealing throughout with the universal subjects of love and truth. [15 Nov 2005, p.22]
Kirkus Reviews
Brilliant work from a newcomer who's already an estimable American writer. [15 oct 2005, p.1101]
Library Journal Edward Cone
Though an absorbing chronicle of life at the end of the Soviet era, this is really much more -- a meditation on society, art, truth, and life. This time the publisher has it right: "that rare debut that requires no hype." Simply stunning. [15 Oct 2005, p.45]
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Rachel Polonsky
Only occasionally losing linguistic balance, [Grushin] guides a daring plot artfully past the hazards of schematic moralism, melodrama and excessive symbolism. Her association of art with madness would be jejune were it not so historically knowing, so laced with festive Gogolian irony. [17 Feb 2006, p.24]
Publishers Weekly
Grushin offers a powerful and richly detailed examination of late Soviet society's harsh confinements - even for those who have all the right connections. [17 Oct 2005, p.41]
Daily Telegraph Lucy Beresford
This novel is no masterpiece. It is overly long (adjectives have been daubed on with a trowel), and several chapters (including the crucial first) slide away like Dalí watches into disarming anticlimaxes. It is, however, richly creative, especially when depicting the surrealist qualities of dreams, with their daytime residue and tortured logic.
Daily Telegraph Ruth Scurr
Grushin tracks Sukhanov's crumbling sense of self through sinuous prose that shifts seamlessly from third to first person, between present and past, in and out of dreams and hallucinations.
Boston Globe Barbara Fisher
Olga Grushin's engaged yet dreamy novel makes one nostalgic for a world where a man can lose his soul for writing an article with the title ''Surrealism and Other Western 'Isms' as Manifestations of Capitalist Insolvency" and save it by praising the flying beasts of Chagall.
The New York Times Richard Eder
The writer, who has done very well with irony and whose excursions into memory are powerful though sometimes lush, doesn't handle her phenomena as well.
The New York Times Book Review Liesl Schillinger
Grushin writes with a polyglot's overprecision in language that calls attention to itself for its studied effort at beauty - like a woman who manages, just barely, to walk smoothly on high heels. But sometimes a simple sentence glides eloquently through the artifice.
Sydney Morning Herald Michael McGirr
Earnest and sometimes long-winded, but humanly rich.
The Guardian Lucy Ellmann
Grushin's idea of art, based on the pursuit of "beauty", is too simplistic, and she tends to exaggerate every metaphor to breaking-point.
Los Angeles Times Susan Salter Reynolds
The Dream Life of Sukhanov is full of dread. It is a novel of an insecure generation that has lost more than it has gained. [12 Feb 2006, p.R11]
 The average user rating for this book is 8.8 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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