The Funeral Party
A Novel
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN?
This marvelous group of individuals inhabits the first novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya to be published in English, a book that was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and has been praised wherever translated editions have appeared. Simultaneously funny and sad, lyrical in its Russian sorrow and devastatingly keen in its observation of character, The Funeral Party introduces to our shores a wonderful writer who captures, wryly and tenderly, our complex thoughts and emotions confronting life and death, love and loss, homeland and exile.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The oddly matched protagonists in this award-winning Russian author's lively American debut are connected through their love for the artist Alik, a Russian migr keeling merrily toward death. Alik's loved ones gather at his cramped, stiflingly hot downtown Manhattan apartment, each trying to reconcile their memories with their moral obligations to the dying man. His neurotic wife, Nina, is desperate for Alik to be baptized; Maika, the 15-year-old daughter of his ex-lover, Irina, is upset that no one understands Alik's jokes now that the man is sick.Ulitskaya uses the loved ones' varying emigration experiences to underscore their attempts to respect one another's places in Alik's life and at his deathbed. One friend, for example, cannot get his impressive medical credentials certified in the U.S., while another not only passed his exams in record time but took advantage of advances in Western technology and found work in a cutting-edge field of medicine--still, both live in poverty. Irina, a former circus acrobat, performed at night for "rich idiots," using her earnings to graduate from law school, while Nina, a former model, now finds nothing for herself to do in the U.S. besides tend to Alik and drink. Ulitskaya is adept at capturing the subtle nuances of thought and experience, expressing both human spirit and flaws without false sentimentality. Her characters are fully realized, rendered in extraordinary detail.
