All That Is Solid Melts into Air
A Novel
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4.1 • 10 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Brilliantly imagined in its harrowing account of the Chernobyl disaster and exhilarating in its sweep, All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a debut to rattle all the windows and open up the ventricles of the heart. . . . The book is daring, exhilarating, generous and beautifully written.” — Colum McCann
A brilliant and gripping novel set against the tragedy of Chernobyl and the way in which the lives of its survivors were forever changed in its wake. Part historical epic, part love story, it recalls The English Patient in its mix of emotional intimacy and sweeping landscape.
Russia, 1986. On a run-down apartment block in Moscow, a nine-year-old prodigy plays his piano silently for fear of disturbing the neighbors. In a factory on the outskirts of the city, his aunt makes car parts, hiding her dissident past. In a nearby hospital, a surgeon immerses himself in his work, avoiding his failed marriage.
And in a village in Belarus, a teenage boy wakes to a sky of the deepest crimson. Outside, the ears of his neighbor's cattle are dripping blood. Ten miles away, at the Chernobyl Power Plant, something unimaginable has happened. Now their lives will change forever.
An end-of-empire novel charting the collapse of the Soviet Union, All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a riveting and epic love story by a major new talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1986 Moscow, as first-time novelist McKeon presents it, few expect the Soviet government to change: strikes fail, newspapers are corrupt, and many men and woman can only find work in factories. Even Grigory, a successful surgeon, mourns his relentless routine: "The life that had silently formed around him seemed such a solid thing now." McKeon conveys the U.S.S.R.'s rigidity through the miseries of his characters: Grigory's wife Maria, a savvy journalist, loses her career, reputation, and marriage in one fell swoop when her anti-Soviet sympathies are discovered. But while hope for personal betterment is relentlessly checked, the horrific nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl proves that massive-scale change is possible. McKeon offers four clear fictional perspectives on Soviet history, and not once do the private affairs of his characters (Grigory and Maria's love for one another; the tension between a nine-year-old piano prodigy and his mother, who has too much riding on her son's success; a boy's efforts to grapple with his father's sudden death) bump up awkwardly against the historical account. Instead, McKeon's fiction serves up, without clich , what so many futuristic dystopian novels aspire to: a reminder that human beings can bring about their own demise.
Customer Reviews
Good but..
The book is well written aside from continuously switching from 4 different characters point of views. Wish it explained more about Chernobyl rather than the life of people who lived during that time.