Vita Nostra

Some parts of the book; especially when the magic is being explained, didn't really make sense but in a good way. Like the magic felt legit and not half assed.

“They have driven you insane. Sasha, there was this one girl, a third year; she went mad . . . just like that.” “All girls are mad. Each in her own way.”

4.5 stars.

Vita Nostra is the most bizarre book I’ve ever read. It defies categorization, perhaps because it undergoes its own kind of metamorphosis: it begins as a dark fantasy or fairytale, grows more Kafkaesque, seems it might be heading in the direction of science fiction, takes a turn toward more traditional urban fantasy, and then ends on a decidedly metaphysical note. All I can say for sure is that it’s speculative.

It is also very, very dark—probably the darkest thing I’ve read. The content itself isn’t particularly heavy (some horrible things happen, to be sure, but nothing that would be beyond the pale for your standard YA novel); instead, it’s the tone. It feels nightmarish, oppressive, and unsettling. Sasha is in a near-constant state of desperation and panic. The tension and sense of anxiety never let up, and there’s no real sense of catharsis or relief at the end. I’m not sure this is something I really noticed while reading as I was so captivated by the story (so, who knows, maybe I’m overexaggerating), but looking back…it was heavy.

I really did love the writing style, though. (Julia Meitov Hersey has done a masterful job with the translation—it seems like it would be an unusually difficult text to translate, but it feels organic and natural.) It’s atmospheric to the extreme. The Dyachenkos have an incredibly evocative style that vividly captures the settings, often in slightly unusual ways. They use wonderfully unique metaphors and similes that imbibe the novel with texture and flavor—and, speaking of flavor, they incorporate food into their writing in a way that I don’t think I’ve seen in other books (though that may be because I’m unfamiliar with Ukrainian cuisine and so everything they mention feels exotic and interesting, even a cup of tea, or a mug of broth with crackers).

All that said, I really did enjoy this and think it absolutely deserves to be rounded up to a 5-star rating. However, it’s not making my list of favorites, nor is it something I can ever see myself rereading, for two reasons:

The first is that I didn’t like the headspace it put me in. The novel is incredibly fast-paced and I tore through the whole thing in four days (which is relatively quickly for me), and I’m glad I did—not only because I was enjoying it so much, but because I don’t think I would have wanted to spend much more time in this world.

The second is that I just don’t feel like there’s that much

there beneath the surface-level plot and the puzzle of trying to figure out what’s happening. Now I know what happens: I feel like I’ve gotten out of the book all it has to give. The ideas and worldbuilding were certainly engaging, but I’m not the type of reader who enjoys dissecting that sort of thing…and I think that’s the only thing a reread would provide me with. The characters were well-developed, but not so complex and intriguing that I think I could understand them deeper. There were certainly some themes there—I did think the

Biblical imagery was interesting, as Sasha appears to turn into a demon with her black talons and wings, there seems to be an intentional attempt to dismantle Christian values such as when Sasha is told to lose her virginity, and the “magic system” seems built around John 1

—but they’re not ones that resonate with me in particular.

All told, it was well-done and captivating, but I don’t imagine it will stay with me for long.

Some favorite passages:

At that time of the day, the sun was scorching, and the sea was boiling with the mass of swimming bodies, like matzo ball soup.

Sparse morning stars dissolved slowly, like sugar crystals in cold water.

The sea licked the beach, stole tiny rocks and brought them back, polished them, rubbing together their surfaces. The sea had time. And patience enough for two.

Autumn came in October, suddenly and irrevocably. Red maple leaves stuck to the wet asphalt like flat starfish.

Dried-up leaves rustled underfoot and smelled fresh and tangy, sad but not without hope.

Sasha thought of life as a collection of identical days. To her, existence consisted of days, and each day seemed to run like a circular ribbon—or, better yet, a bike chain, moving evenly over the cogs. Click—another change of speed, days became a little different, but they still flowed, still repeated, and that very monotony concealed the meaning of life . . .

“Elegance galore,” Kostya murmured. Stone and peeling plaster. Ivy and grapevines stretched over the gutters. Geraniums hung in pots. Sasha kept turning her head in all directions: here was a three-story brownstone stylized as a castle, with cozy-looking alabaster Chimeras. Over there was an uninspiring concrete building with old-style commercial air-conditioning units. And over there a tumbling-down wooden shack, a young birch tree growing on its roof.

“The world, as you see it, is not real. And the way you imagine it—it does not even come close. Certain things seem obvious to you, but they simply do not exist.”

Reading the barbaric combinations of half-familiar and alien words, she felt something brewing inside her: within her head, a wasp nest was waking up, and it droned and hummed in distress, searching in vain for an exit.

At that moment, a sharp gust of wind flew through the unmoving linden trees, leaves fell like raindrops, and the stars vanished for a second and then lit up again.

In a cloudy broth of insomnia she was beginning to feel that she was thinking somebody else’s thoughts. The thoughts felt so foreign to her that they didn’t even fit in her head.

Many hours of studying did something to her head. She felt like a crystal: transparent, fragile, and perfectly calm. Like a dangling icicle. Like an apathetic chunk of glass.

Several times during the last eighteen months Sasha had heard the crackling sound with which the threads that held together the familiar world ripped apart. She thought she was used to it.

She moved to the door. The door frames had a lousy habit of slithering out of her reach like a marinated mushroom escaping the fork. That’s why Sasha first felt for the door with her hands, found the obstacles on the right and left sides, and only then exited the room.

The CD contained silence. Deep, dense, devouring everything in its sight. Trying to devour Sasha as well; Sasha had panicked and struggled, like a fly on a strip of flypaper, using all her strength to stay on the edge, terrified to fall into this soft all-encompassing nothing, resisting this grave alien silence.

Both her arms resembled mechanical prosthetic devices made out of ivory and semitransparent, dazzling-white skin. She lifted her right palm to her face and squeezed it into a fist: gears turned, ripped through the skin, and stuck out in jagged shards. There was no pain.

And then out of the blackness came—seeped through, developed—a city surrounded by an enormous wall that reached up to the sky. Now Sasha saw the city in minute detail, all of it meticulous and very real. The city was the color of carbon. Bearing a slight resemblance to Torpa, it was truly perfect. Wearing slippers and standing on a linoleum floor, Sasha felt marble under her bare feet. She experienced wafts of air, both warm and cold, on her face. The smell of smoke rising from the burning pine in the fireplace. Cool stone and warm stone, smooth and rough, soaring walls, slender windows, spires rising into the sky . . . Sasha felt happy. She threw her head back and looked around; she wanted to possess this city. She wanted to absorb it into herself, make it a part of her. She threw herself open and began to grow, rise, expand, and inhale outlines, smells, and the texture of the stone . . . In those places where Sasha stretched enough to reach the city, it ceased being carbon black and became softly gray, like an antique photograph.

“All things are reflected in each other. Remember? Wind changes direction getting around a stone, the stone crumbles, reflecting the wind. The chameleon changes color, reflecting leaves. An ordinary hare turns white, reflecting winter. I am reflected in you when you listen to me. You are reflected in many people more or less deeply.

What is going on with your nails?” Sasha hid her hands under the table. When she was stressed, her nails darkened and grew with mind-boggling speed. Having grown by three millimeters during the exam, they were now lengthening again—hard, shiny, like the chitin backs of brown beetles.

There are concepts that cannot be imagined but can be named. Having received a name, they change, flow into a different entity, and cease to correspond to the name, and then they can be given another, different name, and this process—the spellbinding process of creation—is infinite: this is the word that names it, and this is the word that signifies. A concept as an organism, and text as the universe.

I broke out of our text and can view it from the outside. And I can see—it’s just letters. Every person is a word, simply a word. And others are punctuation marks.”

There are words that are simply trash, refuse, they turn into nothing immediately after they are spoken. Others throw shadows, hideous and pathetic, and sometimes gorgeous and powerful, capable of saving a dying soul. But only a few of these words become human beings and pronounce other words. And everyone in the world has a chance of encountering someone whom he himself spoke out loud . . .

Like an almost-empty can of dry peas, words that meant nothing rolled around—back and forth along the wires.

If she was sorry about anything, it was about words that lingered unspoken. And especially sorry about the others, the ones that had flown off her tongue.

“But there are other stimuli. Love. Ambition . . .” “There are none equal to fear,” he said, almost with regret. “It is the consequence of objective, unyielding laws. To live is to be vulnerable. To love is to fear. And the one who is not afraid—that person is calm like a boa constrictor and cannot love.”

To live is to be vulnerable. A thin membrane of a soap bubble separates one from impenetrable hell. Ice on the road. The unlucky division of an aging cell. A child picks up a pill from the floor. Words stick to each other, line up, obedient to the great harmony of Speech . . .

Darkness. “In the beginning was the Word.” Slow rotation. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” Luminous dust folds into a flat silver curve with two soft spiral arms. “Do not be afraid.”

kafkaesque