Eleven Sooty Dreams
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Eleven Sooty Dreams could also have been called Meeting at Bolcho Pride, or Fire Deep Down Below, or Station in the Heart of the Flames, or Granny Holgolde’s Stories, or The Liars’ Bridge, or Eve of Battle After the Defeat, or Never Without My Embers, or Good-Bye to Death, or Fire Stories, or Terminal Childhoods, or Granny Holgolde’s Childish Sickness, or Even the Nursing Home Is in the Line of Fire.
In Manuela Draeger’s poetic ‘post-exotic’ novel, a group of young leftists trapped in a burning building after one year’s Bolcho Pride parade plunge back into their childhood memories, trading them with each other as their lives are engulfed in flames. They remember Granny Holgolde’s stories of the elephant Marta Ashkarot as she travels through the Bardo, to find her home and be reincarnated again and again. They remember the Soviet folk singer Lyudmila Zykina and her melancholic, simple songs of unspeakable beauty. They remember the half-human birds Granny Holgolde called strange cormorants, the ones who knew how to live in fire, secrecy, and death, and as the flames get higher they hope to become them.
Draeger, a heteronym for the acclaimed French writer Antoine Volodine, and a librarian in a dystopic prison camp, gives post-exoticism an element of tenderness, and a sense of nostalgia for children’s tales, that is far less visible in the other authors’ works. Eleven Sooty Dreams is her first book written for adults, a moving story of the constancy of brotherly, loving faithfulness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French writer Antoine Voldine (Bardo or Not Bardo), writing as Draeger, punctuates this bleak yarn of a leftist militia group's misadventures in an unspecified post-Soviet country with fantastical stories and black humor. The author's wry, uncanny writing reveals the central theme of the book: memory is the key to survival for those oppressed by state censorship and economic despair. The annual Bolshevik Pride festival is the only bright spot in the dreary setting a landscape marked by "the musk of war's bombs, barbed-wire fences, chemical dustings, still-smoking ruins" but this year the event goes awry when a group of young leftists breaks into an arsenal to steal weapons and becomes trapped by a fire. There, they remember the outlandish stories of Marta Ashkarot, a talking elephant, told by Granny Holgolde, a mid-level bureaucrat in charge of reintegrating assassins and mercenaries into society. Characters such as Holgolde's invention, Marta, who eats firecrackers and uses the Party's agenda as toilet paper, and Holgolde herself, the steely maternal figure whom the leftists remember visiting as children, are drawn with wonderful specificity, and Draeger writes brilliantly of the leftists' collective spirit. Stylistically inventive, heartfelt, and vivid, this shows a beguiling, talented author running on all cylinders.
