The Year of Miracle and Grief

I received my copy of The Year of Miracle and Grief by Leonid Borodin, translated into English by Jennifer Bradshaw, for review from the publishers, Quartet Books. It’s a new edition due to be published in November, a beautiful little book – just 192 pages, and a pleasure to read.

Synopsis adapted from Quartet Books website:

Nearly thirty years after its first publication in English, in November Quartet Books will publish a brand new English edition of a classic fairytale, The Year of Miracle and Grief by Leonid Borodin. A twelve-year-old boy, the son of teachers, finds magic, mystery, romance, and sadness at beautiful Lake Baikal in Siberia. Deep in Siberia lies the second largest and deepest lake on earth, Lake Baikal. When a small boy arrives on its banks, he is amazed by the beauty of the lake and surrounding mountains. As this astonishment yields to inquisitiveness, he begins to explore the fairytale of the area.

My view:

This book combines the elements of fantasy and reality, so much so that the narrator is convinced that he is not a spinner of yarns, but that he is relating what actually happened in his childhood. Writing 25 years later, he is now free to tell the tale. And it is a magical and grief stricken tale, a tale of love, forgiveness and suffering!

As he explores the area he is fascinated by Lake Baikal and Dead Man’s Crag, a high bare crag except for a pine tree on its peak, a pine tree with just four branches, two pointing up towards the sky and two larger ones pointing down along the trunk. Despite warnings not to climb the Crag he does just that and it is there that he meets a woman sitting on a throne of stone in a niche hollowed out of the rock. This is Sarma, a wrinkled old woman, so old it was impossible to imagine anyone older:

Her hermetically sealed lips were supported by a large jutting chin which came up to meet her nose, and her eyes were so deeply sunk into the network of wrinkles that the old woman seemed to be blind. She was wearing flowing sky-blue clothes, and this flowing blue enveloped her from head to foot; only her hands, encased in sky-blue gloves reaching to the elbow, contradicted the impression that the blue cocoon contained only a head. (pages 44-5)

She is a descendent of the Great Sibir (the origin of the name Siberia). She flooded Prince Baikolla’s valley, the Valley of the Young Moon, creating Lake Baikal, and guards the cave/underground castle where she holds the Prince and his daughter Ri captive, bewitched by a spell because the Prince had killed her son. But she allows the boy to enter the cave where he falls in love with Ri and begs Sarma to release her. What follows is a dramatic transformation in the boy’s life.

Borodin was a Christian and a Soviet dissident. He was born in 1938 in Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal and both his parents were teachers, like the boy in his book. He was imprisoned twice and wrote A Year of Miracle and Grief whilst in prison. It contains Christian elements focussing on the nature of forgiveness and suffering. He won the 2002 Solzhenitsyn Prize and died in 2011.

Other elements of this book are the landscape, the lake and the mountains and the miracle that takes place in experiencing the beauty of the world, the transformation of your thoughts, feelings and your entire being ‘into a sensation of total rapture in the presence of a miracle.’ (page 8).

I wrote about some of the books I have waiting to-be-read in May and I thought it was time to do another post about some more recent additions to my to-be-read piles.

This post is just to list some of the titles, quoting the publishers’ blurbs, with no recommendation to read them, as these are simply books that have been sent to me by the author/publisher to read and review, or books that I’ve recently bought. I may post my own thoughts on these books at a later date.

First two books that the publishers have sent to me:

Silver by Andrew Motion. I’m really looking forward to reading this book because I loved Treasure Island. I hope Andrew Motion has remained faithful to the spirit of the original.

‘Silver is the rip-roaring sequel to the greatest adventure ever told: Treasure Island. Almost forty years following the events of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic, Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver have seemingly put their maritime adventures to rest. Jim has settled on the English coast with his son Jim, and Silver has returned to rural England with his daughter Natty. While their escapades may have ended, for Jim and Natty the adventure is only just beginning. One night, Natty approaches young Jim with a proposition: return to Treasure Island and find the remaining treasure that their fathers left behind. As they set sail in their fathers’ footsteps, Jim and Natty cannot imagine what awaits them. Murderous pirates, long-held grudges, noxious greed, and wily deception lurk wickedly in the high seas, and disembarking onto Treasure Island only proves more perilous. Their search for buried treasure leaves every last wit tested and ounce of courage spent. And the adventure doesn’t end there, since they still have to make their way home…’ (Blurb from Broadway Paperbacks)

The Year of Miracle and Grief by Leonid Borodin. This was first published in English in 1984. This new edition is to be released later this year.

‘Deep in Siberia lies the oldest lake on earth, lake Baikal. When a small boy arrives on its banks, he is amazed by the beauty of the lake and surrounding mountains. As this astonishment yields to inquisitiveness, he begins to explore the fairytale of the area. We’ve published a beautiful new edition of this magnificent title, which the New York Times called €˜a work of art so seamless and so natural one can only imagine it took ages and ages of hard dreaming to construct’. (Blurb from Quartet Books)

And lastly two secondhand books that look brand new hardbacks:

The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam and Last Friends by Jane Gardam. These are companion books to Old Filth, which I read and loved a while back.

The Man in the Wooden Hat (blurb from the book jacket)

‘Written from the perspective of Filth’s wife, Betty, this is a story which will make the reader weep for the missed opportunities, while laughing aloud for the joy and the wit.

Filth (Failed In London Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the War. Reserved, immaculate and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions. But Elisabeth is different – a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese Internment Camps, which killed both her parents, but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth’s hated rival at the Bar – the brash, forceful Veneering. Veneering has a Chinese wife and an adored son – and no difficulty whatsoever in demonstrating his emotions ….

How Elisabeth turns into Betty, and whether she remains loyal to stolid Filth or swept up by caddish Veneering, make for a page-turning plot, in a lovely novel which is full of surprises and revelations, as well as the humour and eccentricities for which Jane Gardam’s writing is famous.’

Last Friends (blurb from the book jacket):

‘Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat told with bristling tenderness and black humour the stories of that Titan of the Hong Kong law courts, Old Filth QC, and his clever, misunderstood wife Betty. Last Friends, the final volume of this trilogy, picks up with Terence Veneering, Filth’s great rival in work and – though it was never spoken of – in love.

Veneering’s were not the usual beginnings of an establishment silk: the son of a Russian acrobat marooned in northeast England and a devoted local girl, he escapes the war to emerge in the Far East as a man of panache, success and fame. But, always, at the stuffy English Bar he is treated with suspicion: where did this blond, louche, brilliant Slav come from?

Veneering, Filth and their friends tell a tale of love, friendship, grace, the bittersweet experiences of a now-forgotten Empire and the disappointments and consolations of age.’

I just can’t wait to read all of them!!