Wound
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
A breathtaking novel of grief, love, creativity and a young woman's queer and artistic awakening.
In the days after her mother's death from breast cancer, Oksana, a young queer poet, decides to return her mother's ashes to their working-class hometown in Siberia. It is a journey home that will take her through the raw, almost dreamlike emotions of early grief through to an acceptance of the wound that death leaves behind.
As she navigates the rituals of parting, Oksana feels her way through memory and heartache with a wry humour, reflecting on her complex relationship with her mother and on her own experiences of love, loss, sexuality and the search for home.
Powerful, lyrical and precise, this extraordinary debut is a novel which blurs the line between reality and creation. Wound is both an exploration of grief and a journey towards love, happiness and creative fulfilment.
Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter
"This is not just an amazing novel, extremely frank, extremely accurate and extremely addictive, but, perhaps, a book about finding happiness" The Blueprint
"Wound is a poet's novel . . . a primer on feminist thought for readers with Pushkin in their veins" European Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Vasyakina explores grief and sexuality in her stirring English-language debut about a 30-year-old lesbian poet named Oksana Vasyakina who makes a lengthy and circuitous trip to bury her mother in late 2010s Russia. After her mother, Angella, loses a yearslong battle with cancer, Oksana travels from her home in Moscow to Volzhsky, where her mother is cremated. She then returns to Moscow with Angella's ashes and contends with a dead-end gallery job and a loveless relationship. Two months pass before her scheduled departure to Siberia, where she was raised and where she plans to bury Angella's ashes. Over this time, Oksana recounts with unflinching clarity her fear of her mother's decaying breath in the weeks before she died, the emptiness in Angella's indifferent gaze while she was sick, and the frustration of having to wait around for someone to die—and contemplates how Angella's emotional neglect over the course of her life impacted her ability to experience carnal pleasure, an effect that ended after her mother's death. The narrative is distinguished by its dry wit and philosophical import, which Alter, a PW contributor, renders in razor-sharp prose (as Oksana feels the urn digging into her back while carrying it in a backpack, she embraces the pain and considers how she's embodying a cliché: "I was on an important ritual journey, which is always marked by suffering"). Vasyakina stuns with this bold and emotionally raw chronicle.
