Available:*
Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction | FIC GRUSHIN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Merced Main Library (Merced Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction | FIC GRU | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Selma Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction Area | GRUSHIN OL Line | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Grushin's stunning debut drew praise that placed her in the top rank of young literary voices. Now she returns with that rarity: a second novel even more dazzling than her first.
The line: the universal symbol of scarcity and bureaucracy that exists wherever petty officials are let loose to abuse their powers.
The line begins to form on the whispered rumor that a famous exiled composer is returning to Moscow to conduct his last symphony. Tickets will be limited. Nameless faces join the line, jostling for preferred position. But as time passes and the seasons change and the ticket kiosk remains shuttered, these anonymous souls take on individual shape. Unlikely friendships are forged, long-buried memories spring to life, and a year-long wait is rewarded with unexpected acts of kindness that ease the bleakness of harshly lived lives. A disparate gaggle of strangers evolves into a community of friends united in their desire to experience music they have never been allowed to hear.
The Line is a transformative novel that speaks to the endurance of the human spirit even as it explores the ways in which we love-and what we do for love.
Author Notes
Olga Grushin was born in Moscow, Russia in 1971. She moved to the United States as a teenager. Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Her other works include The Line and Forty Rooms.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At one point in Grushin's disappointing follow-up to The Dream Life of Sukhanov, it is observed that standing on a line is "a very efficient way of disposing of people's time." But however efficient, it's never entirely enjoyable. The story, inspired by Igor Stravinsky's 1962 return to Russia, begins in winter and follows Anna, a teacher, her musician husband, Sergei, and their son, Alexander, as the three take turns waiting on-and having their lives changed by-a line. While Anna theorizes that she is waiting for "something... to make her and her family happier," she eventually discovers the line is for tickets to see the grand return concert of conductor Igor Selinsky, who had escaped Russia before the "Change" 37 years earlier. During the wait for the ticket kiosk to open, each family member is greatly affected by what happens on the line-romance, job loss, and arson all pop up-though, despite Grushin's lovely writing and imagery, the narrative is hard to stick with. The twists are less than surprising, and despite the havoc that ensues, it turns out that people standing around in a queue isn't the most exciting material. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In 1962, Igor Stravinsky, long an expatriate, agreed to return to Russia for one concert. The line for tickets began a year before the event and evolved into a kind of microsociety, with those in the queue interacting almost like family. Grushin (The Dream Life of Sukhanov, 2006) focuses on one family in the line, a husband (a frustrated musician) and his mother, wife, and son. The novel moves at an excruciatingly slow pace How could a story about waiting in a line do otherwise? but, remarkably, it also generates considerable suspense: not suspense in the thriller sense, exactly, more like agonizing concern for these tortured souls who have come to invest so much of themselves in the idea of reaching the head of the line. A concert, yes, but it's far more than that. Whether they intend to keep their ticket, sell it, or give it away, that small piece of paper represents an escape from the quotidian grayness of Soviet Russia a rare exclamation point in a life of ellipses. Grushin works the metaphor brilliantly, but she never loses sight of the painful reality behind it.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN Olga Grushin's second novel, "The Line," hundreds of citizens spend several hours a day, every day for a year, waiting to buy tickets to a concert that may or may not take place. The premise is loosely based on Stravinsky's 1962 concert in Leningrad, which was likewise preceded by a yearlong ticket line. Where Grushin's first novel, "The Dream Life of Sukhanov," inserted an imaginary Surrealist artist into a real historical moment (the Soviet Union in 1985), "The Line" transplants a real historic event into an imaginary, atemporal, almost-Soviet city in which parades mark the 37th anniversary not of the Revolution, but of "the Change." The allegorical sci-fi vagueness is heightened by the fact that Grushin, as she explains in a note, "borrowed freely from three different periods of Soviet history": Stalin's '30s, Khrushchev's '50s and '60s, and Brezhnev's '70s. This mix-and-matching allows her to endow the line with a variety of historical meanings. Those who wait there are subject to Stalin-style persecutions, illustrating the would-be concertgoers' martyrdom to the arts. At the same time, their persistence is a measure of the metaphysical boredom associated with Brezhnev-style stagnation. Most interestingly, the line also becomes the locus of the superstitious optimism of "the Thaw" : the transformation of daily life into the search for signs that "times were changing." Oddly, the novel is particularly powerful, and particularly relevant to Grushin's 21st-century American readers, as a book about commodity fetishism. When the middle-aged schoolteacher Anna first steps into the line, she doesn't even know what is being sold. Cakes? Stockings? Who cares? Whatever it is, it's sure to "make her and her family happier, or lend some simple beauty to her everyday life, or perhaps even infuse her entire existence, . . . knitting it into a tighter, brighter, fuller fabric." Grushin astutely nails the psychology of the consumer and the riddle of commodity capitalism: "If you don't know what it is," one onlooker asks, "how do you know you need it?" The machine is already at work, satisfying desires the consumers didn't know they had. The socialist "Change" appears to have left the desires intact while making the objects harder to get. Reading "The Line," I found myself recalling "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," in which the "golden ticket" offers the promise of a more meaningful life. Charlie confidently thinks a day in the factory will solve all his family's problems - a fairytale expectation that Grushin ingeniously subverts and dissects. Meanwhile, she replaces the capitalist-imperialist fantasy of the Oompa-Loompa-staffed factory with an intellectual commodity par excellence: a concert by "Igor Selinsky." The dubious status of art as commodity is the central question here. What changes when the object of desire is not delicious candy but a symphonic performance? How is art different from other objects of consumption? Why is it more noble or plausible to ascribe life-changing powers to a concert rather than to a new sofa? One of the pleasures of reading this book is its resonance with earlier literary works. Grushin's riffs on night skies recall Pasternak's lyrics; the social system of the line evokes the group dynamics in Andrei Platonov's novel "The Foundation Pit." Grushin, who left Russia as a teenager, has a fluent and inspired English style, marked by only very occasional infelicities ("One evening, as he was trudging along, giving cautious berth to dog feces"), with a marvelous talent for appearances and atmospheres: returning to his high school for the first time since graduation, a teenager is struck by "the cavernous, unclean hopelessness of it all." But Grushin's flair for external descriptions can become a liability. The visible surfaces of people and things are depicted so virtuosically and prolifically that they sometimes impede the actual storytelling. "The Line" is narrated primarily in the third person from the perspectives of Anna, her husband and their adolescent son. No matter whose point of view we follow, we get the same uniformly whimsical impressions of the scenery. Normally stationary objects appear to turn into birds and fly out the window (a hat), to fall overripe to the ground and be swallowed by darkness (windows), to rear up like horses (a sidewalk) or to drift up to the sky like balloons (streetlamps). I had particular trouble getting through the sporadic first-person stream-of-consciousness passages from the perspective of Anna's mother, a former dancer with the Ballets Russes, now an old woman lurking mutely around the apartment in an "ancient satin nightgown the color of moth wings, the color of fading memories." I'm not sure why this grandmother's internal monologues are sometimes audible to other characters in the form of a magical radio broadcast - or why Grushin specifies, at subtly spaced intervals, that Anna is tone-deaf, her husband has no sense of smell and their son is colorblind. These details heighten a pervasive, "Amélie"-like atmosphere of fanciful urban interconnectedness. Chance passers-by determine one another's fates; an older woman, walking to an assignation, imagines her shoes "tattooing a graceful rhythm across the velvet underside of late August, carrying echoes to expectant girls who sat dreaming about life by their cracked windows." I know that some readers enjoy this kind of thing, but I would have preferred fewer inventive visual connections and more human relationships and conversations. I was also distracted by several flashes of anti-philistinism in the style of the early Nabokov, where bad ethics conveniently convert to bad aesthetics, symphonies are replaced by patriotic jingles, and sensitive souls wishing to make life-saving calls to ambulances are inexorably shut out of telephone booths by enormous-stomached boors who are calling in an order for some kind of cheese. But, in fairness to Grushin, such moments aren't the only ones that remind the reader of Nabokov: maybe still the early, Russian Nabokov, not quite the one we love yet, but nonetheless a writer of tremendous talent and promise. The book's premise is loosely based on Stravinsky's 1962 concert in Leningrad. Elif Batuman is the author of "The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them."
Library Journal Review
Grushin's first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, blazed upon the literary firmament four years ago. It is now followed by a work of equal merit. The eponymous line is a conceit that showcases the hopes and dreams of a slice of Soviet society after "the Change," the repressive period following the Revolution of 1917. In Grushin's line, one of many thousands that stretched across the Soviet Union over the decades, citizens stand and wait for some initially unspecified goods to be put up for sale by the state. It finally turns out that the kiosk will be selling tickets for a concert to be conducted by a supposedly returning expatriate composer (in real life, a line like this actually formed for a concert by Igor Stravinsky). With only one ticket allowed per person, three members of a family of four take turns waiting for an entire year. Their motives are mixed and shifting, and in the end astonishing secrets are revealed. The miracle of this book is that its young author, who was born in Moscow but writes in English, has managed to transform the drab and dreary lives of beleaguered Soviet citizens into a tale of consummate beauty. Like a diamond with countless facets-utterly brilliant. Verdict Recommended ecstatically, especially for readers with an interest in cultures other than their own. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/09.]-Edward Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.