Medea and Her Children
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- USD 5.99
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- USD 5.99
Descripción editorial
Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez is an iconic figure in her Crimean village, the last remaining pure-blooded Greek in a family that has lived on that coast for centuries. Childless Medea is the touchstone of a large family, which gathers each spring and summer at her home. There are her nieces (sexy Nike and shy Masha), her nephew Georgii (who shares Medea’s devotion to the Crimea), and their friends. In this single summer, the languor of love will permeate the Crimean air, hearts will be broken, and old memories will float to consciousness, allowing us to experience not only the shifting currents of erotic attraction and competition, but also the dramatic saga of this family amid the forces of dislocation, war, and upheaval of twentieth-century Russian life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The members of a raucous extended Russian family trade witticisms, fall in and out of love with the wrong people and try with mixed success to make important decisions in this wry second novel by the author of The Funeral Party. At the center is the elderly Medea Mendez, the matriarch and "last remaining pure-blooded Greek" of a Crimean family now scattered across the former Soviet Union. While childless herself, in the summer months Medea plays host to her many nieces and nephews, each of them inevitably in the midst of a crisis. Medea's niece Masha discovers the pleasure of adulterous love (permissible because she has an open marriage), but neither sex nor her gifts as a poet can save her from despair. Of course, it doesn't help that she's competing with her own sister for the affections of her summer fling, a circus acrobat turned yoga instructor. Masha's husband, Alik, a talented biochemist, must decide whether to leave his motherland for a lucrative job in America. Ulitskaya also tells the story of Medea's own marriage to a Jewish ex-revolutionary who began his proposal with "you really aren't my type at all." There are plenty of vignettes of Soviet and post-Soviet life, from fixed gymnastics competitions to gossip about who's got what connection and who's father-in-law is a "top bastard in the Party." Ulitskaya's observations are quite funny, though her relentlessly sardonic tone tends to stifle the characters. Still, this colorful, noisy panorama of Russian life is entertaining, and Ulitskaya ties the book's loose ends together slyly.
