The Light & The Dark

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Fate sends two star-crossed lovers, Sasha and Volodenka, on two separate journeys across space and time. Sasha finds herself as a young woman in a time not far from the present day. Volodenka finds himself as a young soldier in a horrific conflict at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet, despite their cosmic schism, their letters still reach one another; as he helps her to come to terms with life and she helps him to come to terms with death. Half male, half female; half exploration of the physical and the immediate, half meditation on the intangible and the infinite, The Light and the Dark is a literary feat as balanced and beautiful as it is prodigious and profound.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Probably, in order to become real, you have to exist, not in your own awareness, which is so uncertain and subject to the influence of sleep, for instance, when even you don't know if you're alive or not, but in the awareness of another person. And not just any person, but one for whom it is important to know that you exist. You know that I exist. And here, where everything is topsyturvy, that makes me real. When I was still a child I avoided death by a miracle--I got up at night to go to the toilet and the book shelves collapsed onto the bed. But I only started thinking seriously about my own death for the first time at school in a zoology lesson. We had an old teacher, an invalid, and he warned us to put a tablet from his pocket in his mouth if he ever fell unconscious. We put the tablet in, but it didn't help. He always used to wipe his glasses with his tie. At first he taught us botany and I took such a liking to him that I was always collecting herbariums, but later I decided to become an ornithologist, like him. It was very funny the way he used to lament the disappearance of various plants and birds. He stands there at the blackboard and shouts at us, as if we're to blame for something. "Where's the shady crocus? Where's the weak sedge? Where's the caldesia? And the summer snowflake? And Dubyansky's cornflower? Well, say something, will you? And the birds? Where are the birds? Where's Steller's sea eagle? Where's the bearded vulture-eagle? Where's the glossy ibis? I'm asking you! And the crested ibis! And the marbled teal! And the shikra! Where's the shikra?" And when he asked this, he himself looked like some sort of bird with ruffled feathers. All the teachers had nicknames, and he was called Shikra. Excerpted from The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

After being separated by war, a pair of lovers dream about their brief time together in Shishkin's striking but sometimes confusing novel. Vladimir and Alexandra, known to each other respectively as Vovka and Sashenka, fell in love during a summer spent together in the countryside as teenagers. Now they write to each other recounting their days and reminiscing about the past. Both work as medics: Sashenka at home, monitoring a troubled couple, and Vovka in the army, on a campaign to China to help quell the Boxer Rebellion. He attempts to remain human in the face of war, often looking back to the town where he and Sashenka met or the books they used to share. Vovka and Sashenka narrate their histories apart as vivid snippets of memories, even as Shishkin reveals that, somehow, the two lovers live in different eras, with Sashenka inhabiting a time closer to our own than to Vovka's. Despite this disorienting foray into mysticism, their tales cohere into a portrait of Russians growing up too soon, enlisted in causes not their own, exemplified by Sashenka's belief in a second, disobedient self who lives out the dreams she can't. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

This novel by acclaimed Russian author Shishkin is an experimental work about two young lovers kept forever apart. The voices of the lovers alternate throughout the novel; usually Vovka or Sashka will begin with an endearment, but these are monologues, not letters--neither responds to the other. Think of them as ships that pass in the night, again and again. Once, they spent some time together in a Russian dacha. That's the extent of our knowledge of them as a couple, for Shishkin conceals as much as he reveals. Nor do readers know when this is happening, until they reach the only historical marker: the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Vovka decides at the outset to "choose myself a war." He is assigned a position at staff headquarters, writing death notices to next of kin. As the army arrives in the Far East, there are some magic realist elements: an island that's a fish, people with dog heads. Indeed, the whole conflict in China has an otherworldly tinge, with seven Western nations allied against the anti-Christian Chinese peasantry. The high death toll, though, is uncomfortably real. Sashka's monologues concentrate on domestic matters: her marriage to a painter, her complicated relationship to his ex-wife and daughter, her attendance as a nurse on her mother, dying of cancer. In the constant tension between the life force and death, the scales are weighted toward death. Yet, in a significant moment, Sashka encounters a burning bush, an obvious Biblical allusion, and understands that she and Vovka "are already husband and wife." Outside of time, no doubt. It is also significant that the novel finds Vovka meeting Prester John, the Christian king of medieval legend whose territory the army had crossed en route to China and who will, maybe, effect the lovers' reunion. Shishkin expects his readers to do some serious decoding; whether it's worth the effort is an open question.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.