What Is Told
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
What is Told is a masterful novel that sprints across generations, centuries and continents. In a spirited narrative that travels from old Ukraine to New Jersey, Askold Melnyczuk follows his character through the betrayals of war and the promises of marriage.
Zenon and Natalka Zabobon marry the day Archduke Ferdinand is shot in Sarajevo. When Natalka wins the battle of the bedroom, Zenon throws his energies into making sure his country doesn’t completely disappear from the map. His brother Stefan, meanwhile, renounces the abstractions of nationalism for the certain pleasures of Paris and his two mistresses, a mother and daughter.
Transplanted to the strange soil of the new world by the upheavals of World War II, the family finds itself unprepared for the subtle sabotages of peacetime suburbia. With the ghosts of their extraordinary past never far away, the voyagers resort to the strategies learned in the struggle again the Tartars, Nazis, and Communists. The results are as comic as they are unexpected.
In What is Told, Askold Melnyczuk reinvents with humor and compassion, the story of a people long hidden behind the Iron Curtain. His novel is a reminder that history is not something that happens only to others.
Seamus Heaney called it "A great novel of unresentful sorrow and unrequited loss."
"[Melnyczuk's] blend of myth and realism recalls Garcia Marquez," said Philip Patrick of The Boston Globe. And, Alida Becker wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "To fall in love with Melnyczuk's voice is no trouble at all..."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At once scathingly comic and tragic, this exceptional first novel is imbued with a deep sense of the importance of history as it follows three generations of a Ukrainian family from the outbreak of WW I to the U.S. of the '50s and '60s. Art history professor Zenon Zabobon weds a peasant girl, Natalka, on the day Archduke Ferdinand is shot in Sarajevo--an inauspicious omen for their mismatch. Zenon traces his lineage to 10th-century Toor Zabobon, king of the Rozdorizhans, whose battles against Tartars provide counterpoint to the Bolshevik invasion of the Ukraine. Having survived the upheavals of WW I and the Russian Revolution, Zenon tempts fate during WW II by hiding Jews in his apartment even while carrying on a reckless affair with a German captain's wife. The war's end finds Zenon, Natalka and their family in a displaced persons' camp in Berchtesgaden, near Hitler's ``Eagle's Nest'' hideaway. Moving to Manhattan in 1950, then to New Jersey, the clan copes with suburbia, uprootedness, menial jobs, suspicious neighbors and personal disintegration. Melnyczuk, who teaches at Boston University and edits the journal Agni , is a wonderful writer and a virtuoso stylist. The novel loses its fizz in the second half, dealing with America, but it should astonish readers nevertheless.
