Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

The internationally acclaimed author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov now returns to gift us with Forty Rooms, which outshines even that prizewinning novel.

Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women’s identity, of women’s choices, that no modern novel has explored so deeply.

“Forty rooms” is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. (He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her.

Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Russia, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Contemporary, Womens

ebook

First published February 16, 2016

About the author

Olga Grushin is the author of four novels - The Charmed Wife, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, The Line, and Forty Rooms - as well as short stories, literary criticism, essays, and other works. She has been awarded the 2007 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and named one of the Best Young American Novelists by Granta magazine; her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Partisan Review, Vogue, and other publications.

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Dream Life of Mrs. Caldwell.

There’s an unreality to the world of Forty Rooms. Something lurking. The mood is tense, dreamy, unclear. Grushin’s Mrs. Caldwell is one of the countless unfulfilled souls that roam the earth carrying their regrets like a wound. Or is it more like a crutch? You could have been so much more. Or could you? Nothing is absolutely clear. This was so much more fantastical than a woman looking back on her life: We have a narrator that is never quite present...friends that may or may not be real...shadows and stars...the merging of memory and fantasy.

Parents die and childhoods are lost.

Was she a housewife with no talent, or a genius squandered? We don’t know and in the end neither did she. And neither do many of us.

Forty Rooms was a humbling and chilling warning that I likely will not heed because few of us ever do.

The final chapters were breathtakingly haunting and made me feel my mortality more than I have in awhile. A lifetime goes by. Decades. Generations. All these lives we should have lived but didn't and won't and never will and then it's over.

[Dolors · Rating 5 out of 5]

The forty rooms of Olga Grushin are not very different from Woolf’s room of her own, at least not in purpose. A succession of physical spaces that define the life, but mostly the confinement of an ordinary woman. As a child, her vivid imagination and her perception of time implode in swirls of smells and colors. The nameless girl becomes a young woman who is in love with words, who sees the world through the lens of poetry, and the rooms of her aspiring house are full of possibilities, a house that reminds the reader of Emily Dickinson’s fairer house than prose. At what exact time do her aspirations transform into abnegated conformism?

The woman becomes Mrs. Caldwell, and with this condition, a succession of births transform her into a middle-aged, middle-class matron, housewife and average citizen, erasing all trace of her youthful dreams, leaving her empty of the poetry that defined her reason to be.
Grushin’s novel is a subtle criticism to the unspoken and widely accepted sacrifices that millions of women have performed without complaint. Is it really the smaller things that should make us happy, or simply what women have to believe in order to carry on after renouncing to the endless possibilities that could have been?

A heart-breaking, quiet and incredibly original story that invites the reader to reflect on her own choices, on the road she has taken, which might not be the less travelled by. One can’t help identifying with this anonymous woman, and rather than feeling sympathetic for her mundane plights, numerous questions are silently presented to us. About the nature of our decisions. About the social context in which we evolve and develop our potential considering our gender and class. About women’s endurance to trade identity for imposed roles and general expectations of whatever it is we should become.

A devastating but beautifully told novel that shouldn’t go unnoticed, a tale of lost illusions and forgotten expectations, a story of a nameless woman who, at the end, comes to peace with the meaning of her life. Or does she? Or do you?

“An average woman – or at least an average married woman with children, which, for all she knew, no longer signified an average woman; to rephrase, then, a woman average for most human history – almost certainly devoted more of her time to the pursuit of laundering than to the pursuit of love; yet for all the thousands and thousands of poems written about love, only a handful had ever been written about laundry.”

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

The New Year is still two weeks away and already, I may have read my best book of 2016. Forty Rooms is luminous and magical and original.

The book revolves around this concept: a woman will occupy forty rooms in the course of her life. The number forty, according to our unnamed narrator’s mother, “is the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true. Noah’s forty days and nights of rain, Moses forty years in the desert, Jesus’ forty days of fasting and temptation. Forty of everything is long enough to be a trial.”

Our narrator is a poet – a GOOD poet (snippets of her poetry appear throughout the book and some of them dazzled me). As a young Russian child, she imagines herself on the dizzying edge of the unknown and dreams of being immortal. Her life – to her – seems limitless and she yearns to experience all its particular, gritty, wonderful details and to capture those experiences in unique words.

But, of course, our life is hobbled together while we are busy making other plans for it. And rather than travel the road less taken, our narrator finally dons a name – Mrs. Caldwell, American wife and mother, with a life filled with the material accouterments she was determined to shun.

All this may sound pedantic but it’s not. Ms. Grushin writes, “Don’t you have a sense sometimes that our life is essentially just the tip of the iceberg, and if you stop clinging to your puny bit of ice in fear or out of habit and just dive into the water, you will discover this luminous mass going down, deep down, and meet creatures you can’t even imagine, and have thoughts and feelings no one has ever had before…”

The questions become: who can you become when you let go of your fears? Must we surrender our dreams to embrace our life? If there were no self-imposed expectations, would you do something entirely different? Is a life without real pain, real joy, or real shame any life at all? What do our choices say about us?

With just a hint of Doris Lessing (Golden Notebook) and Virginia Woolf (To The Lighthouse), this book digs deeper than any I’ve read about what it means to be a woman artist. Each of the forty rooms represents a crossroads for our narrator. There is much beauty and truth in this exhilarating novel.

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, insightful, imaginative, philosophical and unique! This novel, written by Russian born Olga Grushin is an incredible read. It is a collection of short stories each taking place in a room that the narrator has lived in or spent time in during her lifetime. The stories initially are set in Russia and then move to America when the narrator travels there for college. There are so many life truths illustrated beautifully within this novel: the twists and turns life takes us on; it’s meaning; the perceptions of others as well as ourselves; the changing vision and perspective of life as we age; the rooms we choose to inhabit and their impact on us. This was so despite, or perhaps as a result of, the overwhelming use of fantasy/magical realism within the book.

This novel is so powerful and rich with language, metaphors, imagery, mirrors and reflections. There is so much depth to the novel added by the insertion thoughts that the various other characters are having; by repeating scenes with different scenarios, leaving it open to interpretation what might have actually transpired and what was fantasy; and of course by the magical or fantastical characters. The whole novel has a “dizzying,” dream-like quality to it. Many of the scenes occur, followed by Mrs. Caldwell waking up.

The novel is divided into parts which represent different time periods in Mrs. Caldwell’s life. Within each part are chapters representing the rooms within which each of the short stories occur. Forty rooms was very purposely chosen. As the narrator’s mother tells her: “Forty is God’s number for testing the human spirit. It’s the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true. Oh, you know what I mean- Noah’s forty days and nights of rain, Moses’ forty years in the desert, Jesus’ forty days of fasting and temptation. Forty of anything is long enough to be a trial, but it’s man-size too. In the Bible, forty years makes a span of one generation. Forty weeks makes a baby.”

In the beginning of the novel, the young Mrs. Caldwell hopes to achieve immortality. She wants only to write poetry and devote herself fully to that art. She is told by her Apollo that “the meaning of a single individual human life,.. consists of figuring out the one thing you are great at and then pushing mankind’s mastery of that one thing as far as you are able, be it an inch or a mile.” She really does work hard at her poetry and it seems all-consuming until she meets Paul and settles into married life, not even telling him her aspirations or love of writing poetry. She becomes a mother in a foreign country, with no friends and does not even learn to drive for quite some time. She seems to have lost herself and is trapped in her family life, and in so doing, her marriage starts to fail as well.

I loved that this novel encompassed an entire life. The reader is able to observe the changes occurring from childhood through adulthood to the very end. It leaves you wondering how her life might have been under different circumstances or had she made different choices. As a mother to young children who has made career concessions of my own, I felt swept up in this novel eager to hear the author’s final message or verdict on what might the right path be. I think this book is amazing! It is wonderfully written, incredibly insightful and sends a powerful message! I must say though, this book would appeal much more to women than men and would make a great book club read.

For discussion questions, visit http://www.book-chatter.com

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Nearly 4.5) Each of us is said to occupy 40 rooms in our lives. This novel in 40 vignettes, one per room, tells the life story of a Russian immigrant to America who dreams of becoming a poet. As a child she converses with the dead and with imaginary friends, a habit that continues into adulthood. It is as if she occasionally gets glimpses into the mystical reality behind everyday life, and the poems she writes in her head are her way of tapping into that something more. But she instead ends up a suburban housewife and mother of six with a huge house to maintain; this previously unnamed character becomes known as “Mrs. Caldwell” and gets stuck in a 1950s-like life that has seemingly just happened to her rather than been a product of incremental choices.

This is thus a powerful cautionary tale about the twin dangers of defining yourself in terms of your roles and relationships and squandering your creative gifts. It has a classic feminist tinge, like The Yellow Wallpaper or A Room of One’s Own (she says, having read neither!). I feel this book will resonate with women of every age, prompting them to question the path they’ve taken, the passions they’ve left unexplored, and whether it’s too late to change. I didn’t like the magic realism of the last few chapters as much – I guess I stubbornly, prosaically, like to know what actually happens in a novel – but in general it adds a Russian folktale flavor to the narrative. And Grushin’s writing is simply exquisite. I’ve marked out far too many passages to try to share them all here, and can only recommend that you experience it for yourself.

[Jessica J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy. Cow.

"Forty is the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true. Noah’s forty days and nights of rain, Moses forty years in the desert, Jesus’ forty days of fasting and temptation. Forty of everything is long enough to be a trial."

It took a while for me to get into this, but I am so glad I stuck with it because – wow. What an incredible experience reading this book was.

The central conceit of this book is that a woman will occupy forty rooms over the course of her life. Here, Olga Grushin uses forty rooms to examine the life of an almost nameless woman – a Russian who came to America with dreams of becoming a poet who travels the world, but who spent life as a housewife known simply by her husband’s surname, Mrs. Caldwell.

So I should say that I am an absolute sucker for any kind of story that captures an entire life within a finite space: The Namesake, the movie Boyhood, anything that shows the entirety of “growing up.” I find those kind of stories incredibly emotional and sentimental in the best kind of way. Because even though I have zero interest in ever having children of my own, I’m profoundly moved by seeing the experience of what it’s like to see children become functional human beings with lives of their own. It makes me miss my own childhood and it forces me to reflect on my own life, the unlikely path that led me my own adulthood. The passage of time is exciting and frightening, and it never stops looming.

Mrs. Caldwell dreamed of poetry, a life surrounded by beauty and art. In Soviet Russia, these dreams were dismissed as “bourgeois rot.” She followed these dreams to college in America, but more or less abandoned them upon graduation and ultimately spends much of her life waiting for a chance to live it. She counts the number of years until the youngest child graduates and consoles herself that she’ll still be "young enough." She remembers her original intention to return to Russia after college and worries that she didn’t make the most of the time she could have had with her aging parents. It's all about time: how much has passed, how much is left.

I’m also a huge sucker for literature that plumbs the experience of female identity as much as Grushin does here. You might immediately note that everyone in this novel has a name except for our protagonist. This had a huuuuge effect on me, personally, as a reader. I decided not to change my name when I got married last year. I was on the fence about it for a number of reasons, but I finally made my decision when I asked the advice of a friend who’d also decided to keep her name – “I didn’t want it to be like I was giving up my own identity just because I got married,” she told me. I very much felt the same way, and I have to work really hard to bite my tongue every time I receive mail addressed to Mrs. Husband’s Name. I know most people doing that think it’s cutesy or romantic or proper, but I find it insulting: I’m not just his wife, I’m me.

As a wife, it’s incredibly important to me that I get to have my own identity, and it’s perhaps that theme more than anything else that made me love this book as much as I did. Over the course of her life, Mrs. Caldwell’s identity became about her husband’s needs and wants instead of her own, staying at home with the children instead of pursuing the things she’d thought she’d do. It’s telling that her husband of twenty-plus years never read one of her poems, when poetry was the primary reason she came to America in the first place. The central, thrusting question of the whole novel is Did she live the best life she could live? and I just love how ambiguous the answer to that question stays. I think your answer to that question is ultimately going to reveal more about you than it does about Mrs. Caldwell.

On the surface, this could so easily have become just another “bored housewife” novel. And to some extent, Forty Rooms checks off all the boxes in that genre: Mrs. Caldwell spends a lot of time reflecting on what she’s given up, what she’s missed out on, how far she is from where she thought she’d be. She worries that her husband will be disappointed, that he will be unfaithful because has given him cause to, or that she chose the wrong path, the wrong man. There’s regret and ennui and quite desperation, all the things we’ve seen before. But Grushin’s phenomenal prose and thoughtful construction really pushes it to a level all its own. The narration isn’t always the easiest to follow, especially given Mrs. Caldwell’s tendencies to have conversations with figures who aren’t actually there – as a child, it was imaginary mermaids; as an adult, it’s her dead grandmother or a former lover. But stick with it. If you’re a literary deconstructor with any kind of feminist or sentimental bent, I think you’re going to love this book.

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4+] Forty Rooms is about a poet who submerges her creativity for the needs of her husband and children -a familiar story - but it goes much deeper. As I followed her through the 40 rooms of her life, it prompted me to question and contemplate the many rooms of my life. Did she truly give up her dreams or were they even attainable? How do you compare the joy of motherhood to an idea of a distinguished self? Could she have found a compromise? Is it a failure to live ordinary life? An expansive and reflective journey.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
- from “Face,” in Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro

As I got deeper into the novel, and deeper into the rooms, I thought of the Munro quote above. The average American supposedly moves eleven times in his/her life, counting places like dorm rooms, so living in, say, forty rooms throughout. The unnamed main character, though born in Russia, turns into a so-called average American. But more than anything she turns into a so-called average woman.

The novel covers familiar territory, in the sense that you’ll identify with the main character if you’re a woman who’s compromised and/or delayed youthful dreams as life rolls on, as it accumulates people and possessions. You’ll be frustrated by a few choices she makes, but that’s because you‘re invested in her; besides, who among us hasn’t made ridiculous decisions for what seemed like a good reason at the time, and then consolingly lied to ourselves in order to make it through the days.

So a familiar life, but told uniquely. In the beginning I sensed a Mephistopheles-figure and a Faustian-pact; but even that, if that’s what it is, is told differently. Because it’s not just Munro’s “something” that happens in the room(s); it’s that each room also holds events that could’ve happened and didn’t. One room/chapter ‘tricks’ you into at first thinking one thing has happened over the other; unhappily, the main character and the reader know what’s most likely, even if she’s repressed it and fantasized something more congenial.

The prose is lush. The ending is beautiful. I think this is a book that will stay with me.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was a beautiful book, and I was sad to see it end. It is the story of a woman's life told through the rooms she has inhabited, some briefly, some repeatedly. It is also the story of poetry and creativity and how those gifts are cultivated or ignored - who creates beauty, and who decides the definition of beauty in the first place. The novel also asks about the value of a woman's life, in particular. There is a visitor throughout the novel that is pretty unique and at first I thought he was going to be a bit like the phantom of the opera.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher through Edelweiss. I only wish it were final copy so I could include some of the beautiful bits I have marked!

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Olga Grushin has previously published two excellent novels, The Dream Life of Sukhanov and The Line, both focused primarily on life in the Soviet Union.

Her third, Forty Rooms, examines the life of the emigre, and, primarily, that of a poet. The organising concept is to follow the life of the central character through the forty rooms, each taking one chapter, that constitute her life.

"Did you know that an average American moves eleven or twelve times in his life?"

"Really? How terrible for the average American! That's, what, something like sixty rooms the poor fellow has to furnish? The horrors of having to buy sixty rugs!"

"Probably more like forty - it includes dorm rooms and studios and poky little houses like ours."

Late in the novel, the biblical significance of forty (days Noah spent on the Ark, years Israel wandered before they could enter the promised land, days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness, one could have added the maximum number of lashes) is noted: "Forty is God’s number for testing the human spirit. It’s the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true."

Each room in her story also contains a choice - from fundamental (whether to emigrate to the US) to mundane (whether to visit someone). The most common is whether to speak up or not, and the narrative often contains two different versions, one a vision or dream, of what might have transpired had she spoken differently.

Her story reflects, in part, Grushin's own. Born in the Soviet Union she becomes, aged 18, one of the first ever students to study for a degree in the US, and ends up settling there.

The main character sees her true vocation as a poet, but the realities of everyday life, particularly as a mother, always seem to stifle this, and Grushin herself has acknowledged the same conflict in her life in interviews:

"I find it quite unnerving that, for me at least, it’s possible to be one or the other – an artist or a mother – but nearly impossible to be both at the same time."
http://latenightlibrary.org/olga-grus...

So far I have avoided mentioning the main characters name. That's because we don't know it - Grushin doesn't name her, other than later in her life by her married name Mrs Caldwell (a name that isn't truly hers since her mother-in-law is who most people mean by Mrs Caldwell).

Indeed, the different sections of the novel, narrating different parts of her life and different houses, have intriguing shifts of tense as well as subject.

The first section "Mythology" covering her childhood up until she leaves the Soviet Union, uses the first person and the present tense, and the second "Past perfect", detailing her student life and her first love (with a fellow artist), the first person past. "The Past", the early years of her marriage in a small house, is in the 3rd person past. And in "The Present", when her husband becomes successful, and they move to a very large house in the suburbs, the 3rd person past subject increasingly changes from "she" to "Mrs Caldwell".

These shifts effectively marks a key point of the novel, her journey away from the idealistic bohemian poet she aspired to be, to the very middle-aged domesticated mother she feared becoming. Indeed her motivation to leave Russia, where she has a comfortable life, with a marriage to a diplomat's son planned by their parents, is because she fears her future there:

"What I do not want, I think with a sudden ferocity, is a small life - a life of mundane concerns, of fulfilled expectations, of commonplaces and banalities, of children's sore throats, of grandmother's apple pies, of fussy nineteenth century porcelain.
[...]
In a moment of pure panic, i see my future flash before my eyes, just as one's past reputedly does in the moment of dying - and my future is a succession of increasingly suffocating rooms."

Poignantly, the narrative voice reverts to first person present right at the end of her story, and her life, as "I am somehow - finally! - free of this person who is not me"

The early chapters in "Mythology" beautifully capture the wonder of childhood when everything in the world seems mysterious, and the boundary between reality and imagination is blurred.

"He belonged to my Russian childhood. The otherworldly real of fairy tales, secrets and revelations that - even at my eighteen years of age - was so quickly receding into the distance of both time and space that I could already see myself believing someday that half of it had been real, or perhaps all of it had been real. Here [...] I no longer felt the need to be gentle with my persistent dreams."

But strikingly the dialogues with seemingly imaginary characters, and her visions of what might have been / might yet be, continue throughout her life. Indeed she sees her poetic gift as being able to glimpse the hidden side of everyday objects. Late in her life, she justifies these fantasies:

"What after all is the difference between a memory and a fantasy? Are not both a succession of imprecisely rendered images further obscured by imprecisely chosen words and animated only by the wistful effort of one's imagination."

Mirrors are a key motif through the novel, appearing in many of the rooms, as through them she sees both her real life reflected but also glimpses of what might have been. The power of words is also a major theme. At one point, early in her time in the US, she worries:

"Has life somehow, without my noticing, become its own paling reflection in a self-conscious mirror, its own stilted paraphrase on a dry page?"

But later (at the height of her poetic rhapsody, and before she marries her decidedly unpoetic husband) she counters:

"I see that my earlier fear of a secondhand reality muffled and diluted by words was misplaced - for it is through the power of words alone that the world can be truly captured, truly understood. Not just any words, to the sure: words can be alive or they can be dead, and dead words will dull the sharpest feeling, will turn the rarest vision into a vulgarity. I do not yet know what makes some words live and others die, but I believe I can already sense the difference between the two. And so I write, struggling to stretch the language until it bursts past the stale confinement of the rhymed "nights" and "lights" and becomes something else, weighty yet plain, stark yet beautiful."

Words are particularly meaningful to her as a non-native speaker of English (as Grushin is, writing her novels in English despite her mother tongue being Russian):

"When you are first learning a language, you are swimming in this glorious sea of possibilities - you feel that you are free to take all these little specks of meaning floating around you and combine them into the most fantastical, gorgeous, dreamlike structures that will be yours and no one else's, amazing castle, cathedrals, entire cities of words rising out of chaos. But then you start learning the rules, the grammar, what goes with what, and then, worst of all, all these common expressions and mass-issued turns of phrase start impressing themselves onto your brain, so that when you say 'time', you think 'valuable' and 'waste of' and 'waits for no man' and when you say 'love', you think 'star-crossed' and 'blind" and when you say 'death' you think 'kiss of' and 'bored to' and 'dead as a doornail' - and before you know it, your words have become these prayer beads strung together and worn-out through countless repetition."

Grushin herself certainly does not fall into this trap. The prose of the novel is sumptuous. It reminded me of Andrei Makine, another Soviet exile writing in not his native tongue but that of his adopted land (France) but writing novels with a very Russian literary underpin. This paragraph on the responsibility of home ownership resonated powerfully with me (if one replaces mother- with parent-hood):

"the notion of waking up one day the owner of a mind-boggingly complex conglomeration of pipes, wires, masonry and carpentry loomed over her in a vast shadow, almost as ambiguous, thrilling, inevitable and terrifying as motherhood itself."

The life she eventually has as Mrs Caldwell is, it must be said, rather exaggeratedly dull. She has six children, she can't drive (in suburban America!) and so seldom leaves her house, interacts only with the hired help, and seldom has time to speak to her career-obsessed husband, who is not even aware she writes poetry at all let alone that she regards it as her calling.

She often contrasts her life to that of her childhood friend, or perhaps (part of the novel's delight) imaginary alter-ego, Olga, who, from a similar starting point, makes very different choices. Olga was the first Russian student to be admitted to a US university, the main character is, albeit only shortly afterwards, merely the second, and so while Olga becomes a media star, she arrives in relative obscurity. Olga becomes a globe-trotting successful novelist, returning to live in Russia, while she becomes a suburban American housewife.

Olga Grushin's actual life lies rather between the two (see https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...). Like Olga she was subject to a media frenzy on arrival in the US and was to become a successful novelist (as this very book testifies) but she also settled and had a family in the US, again suggesting that Mrs Caldwell's situation may be rather exaggerated: even if Grushin (as per above) admits to the conflict between artistic and family life, is it on the day-to-day level, not a binary life choice.

To an extent this exaggeration slightly spoils the novel as a story (while one still revels in the prose). One can't 100% believe in the path Mrs Caldwell takes or become terribly interested in the detail of her often artificial choices. But to be fair to the author this was wholly deliberate. From the interview referenced above:

"I was not interested in half measures or nods to realism; I was hoping to tell an 'either-or' fable about choices."

And fabulous the novel certainly is - in both senses of the world. Flawed, but intoxicating.

also worth a read:
https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_int...

[Antigone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Our narrator, a woman who will later on come to be known as Mrs. Caldwell, is recounting her life from the template of forty rooms. Here are forty slices of an existence begun in Russia and transported to the United States; decades of struggling with the demands of a poetic nature seeking voice and all the many distractions with which the devil is determined to thwart this. (It is no secret much of the time that the devil in question is Mrs. Caldwell herself.)

In her first decade of life, she had understood, albeit dimly and without reasoning, that a certain kind of inner fire was required if you were ever to see the things no one else saw. In her second decade, she had learned that work and daring were necessary also, and in her third, she had added experience - of pain and joy both - to the list. But was she discovering, on the cusp of her fourth decade, that selfishness too was an essential part of this celestial equation? In the end, when all accounts were totaled, did you become great only by disregarding the happiness of those around you - was the mark of a true genius his perfect solitude, his absolute inability to consider anything beyond his art?

And there you have it. I am rushing to the end of this because it's been too long, too long and hard for me to read a novel without an ounce of untrammeled compassion, or genuine affection, or the raw beauty of an instant of contentment appearing in its pages. And, you know, newsflash: Poets are poets because they see things everyone else sees, and labor to bring that familiarity into a fuller light. But we will argue about this so never mind. I am frustrated. If Mrs. Caldwell loved, and she might have, she certainly didn't share it here...despite her boyfriend, her husband, her parents and children.

A fine caliber of writing. Incomplete, though, to my mind.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Identity is a timeless theme in literature, and women’s identity is especially abiding, as women have just started to emerge as equal to men in the social sphere. The female protagonist of this story was born in Russia in the mid-twentieth century, raised by her academic parents, and was closest to her father, who inculcated her with culture, arts, and the poignancy of deep, philosophical thinking. Besides her father, her muse is a sort of Apollo’s Arrow, and she aspires to be immortal by becoming a celebrated poet. She moves to America for college, and begins a new life abroad.

As a child and teen, growing up on the myths and fairytales that inspired her, our protagonist is certain of her inevitability toward divine art and the renouncement of material possessions. I can relate to that, too, as I once aimed, in my youth, to be a famous poet, and still have spiral notebooks of my (bad and good) poetry tucked away. It is the shadow or ghost of my earlier identity. But who is this woman’s real identity? At the end of her life, will she attain her goals, or will the ghosts of thwarted ambition haunt her?

Forty rooms is the average number of rooms most adults will inhabit as they move from place to place as adults. In Russia, forty days has a significant symbolism for the soul, upon death; women are pregnant for 40 weeks; the rains (in Noah’s day) fell for forty days and forty nights. And the list goes on, biblically and otherwise. However, it is the forty rooms that this novel is structured around. Each part of the book symbolizes time passing in the protagonist’s life, and has a raw drawing of rooms in the abode where she lived. For example, in Part One, her Moscow apartment and dacha, the drawings depict “Mother’s bedroom or “Kitchen,” etcetera. She inhabits a room, leaves it, but the soul of the room remains, and the life lived there is ripe for reflection later.

I keep saying “the protagonist” because her name, or namelessness, is key to the central character’s identity. The book begins in the first person, and then, in adulthood, she is known by her last name. The meaning of the narrator’s designation is a prime connotation for the reader to examine. That’s all I will say. I won’t talk about her adult life, either, for I remember the anticipation I felt, waiting for her life to unfold before me. I will share that Grushin’s writing is visceral, intense, gifted. Every sentence poured out like a celestial body.

“There you go, Apollo, a nice little sacrifice for you--the sum of my entire existence to this day, all erased, so I can start anew, so I can create something real, something alive. There, there, can you smell the sweet rot of toy words, of dead words, rising like cloying incense to your heaven?”

This is the kind of book that inspired me to see beyond just the self that inhabits the rooms I am in, both literally and figuratively. A poet creates something material from imagination, and those thoughts turn into words. But thought itself is an enigma--we can't pin it down like we can the place where it comes from. We are more than this dimension, it would seem. I found myself checking the ether while reading! And thinking of parallel planes of existence.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dreamy, symbolic, ambiguous look at a woman's life - in the 40 rooms it inhabits. As the narrator’s mother tells her: “Forty is God’s number for testing the human spirit. It’s the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true." It felt at times episodic, or a collection of short stories that could stand alone, but all together make a complete picture.

She dreams of being "immortal" as a poet, and is determined as a young person not to let anything keep her from that. But, life and choices pull her along, and we get to witness what her life becomes, and then inevitably, judge if it was well-lived.

It brings up so many questions - one of which is: do women have to choose between family and domesticity OR following their dreams? Grushin is good at painting the enormous amount of space that family life takes up in a person, leaving very limited room for 'self'. Her life is definitely not perfect. It feels at times suffocating (HOW long did it take for her to learn to drive??) and stifling. But also privileged, and rich with her love of her children. So, the question is, did she live her life as she should have? Such a relatable situation and question for so many, and the answer, of course, is not clear.

I loved the magic in this book, the mythology, the moments of exquisite beauty and mystery. The chapter with her mother as a powerful, dangerously beautiful mermaid made me fall in love with the book and will stay with me a long time. I loved the idea of parallel universes underneath the mundaneness of everyday life. I was interested in the character of "Olga". Olga, who I believe represents the ideal of what our narrator wanted to be, but wasn't. And, I liked how our narrator is nameless (aside from her married name), which makes her an 'every-woman', a symbol of universal experience.

It is easy to judge her and point out where she failed, but hers is the same struggle so many of us face. The wonderful thing is, however lived, her life is immortal, through this telling.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

It will be hard to get into another book after reading this. Forty Rooms is a truly original exploration of a woman's journey through life from her earliest days born into a middle class family in Moscow until her death many years later. She remains unnamed throughout except when referred to as a "Mrs." At two pivotal moments, the narration switches from first person to third and then back again. Except for the fact that she is an extraordinary person, she might be called Everywoman. But she's much more than that and this book, told in the forty rooms of her life, incorporates magical realism at times, at others, dreams, at others, explorations into lives of sometimes very minor characters giving the novel a richness that is at times breathtaking. Late in the book reference is made to "...forty rooms, each a test for my soul, a pocket-size passion play, a small yet vital choice." That's it in a nutshell. I can't recommend this book enough.

[Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

ARC received courtesy of Goodreads.com First Reads Giveaway

I've been looking forward to reading this book but have also put it off a couple of times. It is a fascinating look at the lives we, as women, live. Do we make decisions or are decisions made for us; or, worse yet, do we make a decision by not making one? The book begins in Russia with a child that we will only ever know as Mrs. Caldwell. As she grows up, she knows that words have power and she wants to use that power by being a poet. All of her childhood and teenage years are spent in pursuit of this goal. The rest of the story tells the story of the rest of her life. Does she realize her dream? Why or why not?

I'm still struck by the title. Forty is a Biblical number; Noah spent 40 days and nights on the ark, Moses spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness, etc. Apparently, a woman lives most of her life in 40 rooms. If you can "know" these rooms, you can also know the woman.

[Angie Reisetter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regret is a poisonous thing. The nameless narrator of Forty Rooms walks us through the decision points of her early life, the forks in the road, the rooms in which her major decisions are made. Or turn-offs fly by almost unnoticed. And eventually we find ourselves settled in with her in marble mansion, watching life go by in its various rooms. The rooms, of course, are passive, as they are supposed to be. They are witnesses to the lives within them. The main character is startlingly passive as well, becoming more and more like the rooms she lives in. The language is beautiful, the writing powerful. But most of all, I wanted to grab this woman by the shoulders and shake her awake. I found I could not like her, despite initially finding her charming. I loved the book, though. It will make for fantastic discussions, both real and fantasy, both manifest and ghostly, passing through our imaginations. Much like her, I have had conversations with myself. Unlike her, I have had conversations with other people. I hope the balance of the two keeps me as I wish to be, or in close proximity to it, rather than in the rooms of regret inhabited by Mrs. Caldwell whose name is not Mrs. Caldwell.

What a beautiful but terrifying and frustrating book. Amazing.

I got this from the First to Read program.

[Ilya · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies — one might almost say, two personalities of the individual — are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life — in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man."

— Otto Rank (Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development)

[Marjorie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't have been more impressed by this book. The author has written an amazing piece of literature. The book's basic premise is that the average person inhabits 40 rooms in their lifetime. This is the story of one woman's life in her 40 "rooms". It's full of such profound insight into life, while still exhibiting wild flights of imagination. The last chapter of this book is pure perfection.

As a young woman, the main character (only ever known as Mrs. Caldwell) dreams of immortality as a poet. As she moves through each room of her life, she makes certain decisions that lead her to live one life or another. As she lives the life she has chosen, there is the ghost of the life she might have lived always just out of sight. At one point in her life, she is told that when she reached a fork in life, she should choose the harder path; otherwise, the path of least resistance would be chosen for her. This is a profound look at the many ways we allow our dreams to slip through our fingers.

I found the author's inclusion of the significance of the number forty to be quite interesting. Noah's 40 days of rain, Moses' 40 years in the dessert, Jesus' 40 days of fasting. In the Bible, the number 40 generally symbolizes a period of testing, trial or probation.

This is one of the first books I've read in 2016 and the books ahead will have a hard act to follow. Most highly recommended.

This book was given to me by First to Read in return for an honest review.

[Sterlingcindysu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The plot of this book follows the life of a woman but it could be anyone. At the beginning, you have an exotic atmosphere where mothers can be mermaids and fairy tales come to life in a foreign country, where parents throw parties where guests discuss philosophy and POETRY. Because aren't poets the most highly rated of all the artists? (rhetorical question, of course they are, they are Immortal (or so says the novelist)) And the girl says, yes I want to be a Poet and I will give it my all, the joy and pain, the blood, sweat, suffering and tears.

Then life comes and the excitement, possibilities and inspiration wanes as the girl goes to school, then college, then boyfriend, then temp jobs. Then babies...and let's face it, the poems aren't coming out fast and furious as the babies do. The girl grows up and starts making decisions herself instead of being swayed by others. But...did she squander her talent? Did she ever have any? (She sure did have an imagination in regards to her friend Olga.)

The framing of the novel sets scenes in room where important things happen. I wondered how Grushin would handle our American outlook of houses because hey, she's in Maryland and I'm in Northern Virginia. There's McMansions and tear-downs and wifi that doesn't cover an entire house and townhouses with elevators to get to all 4 floors with 4-5 rooms on each floor. And guess what, she not only handles it, that house is a character in its' own right in the book. A ballroom?? Genius! What a dressing room!

Ahh, there's a talking point. Stuff over substance, good or bad? Are artists by their very definition supposed to always be poor or at the most, middle class? Book clubs will love this...so much to talk about. An example, at the beginning there is no name for our girl, but later she is Mrs. Caldwell. Does that mean she 'grew' into the title and responsibility and became a real person vs. the girl who wanted to be a poet? Why does Olga, the friend have a name (the writer's name I might add) but Mrs. Caldwell doesn't have a first name?

Interesting that the last two books I've read (this and The Railwayman's Wife both featured poetry...maybe the trend for 2016?

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

*2.75 stars.
*I’m finding this book problematic. After a beginning filled with promising rooms and chapters, the story loses luster. The problem, I think, is that I do not find the main character interesting after her childhood. She is someone I’d rather know less, not more, about. I do realize that her mundanity may go with part of the author’s purpose--to focus on the ordinary, but it still doesn’t work for this reader.
The following are passages I liked:
“...the tray of portly perfume bottles...” (14).
“...my father’s mechanical typewriter, which, even when given a rare hour of rest, seems to radiate the heat of its passionate staccatos…” (17).
“On nights when I cannot sleep I stare at it for what seems like hours, populating it with the geometry of imaginary constellations, with meandering trajectories of grotesque creatures born in the deeper pockets of darkness and fleshed out by dribbles of streetlamp illumination” (24).
“...and the cuckoo stumbles out to take two stiff bows…” (27).
-long quote about the role of poetry (30).
“...but this morning my mother packed her best porcelain into starched nests of napkins…” (33).
“...a bat cuts across the light of the closest streetlamp in the jagged movement of a knife slitting a throat” (44).
“...words can be alive or they can be dead, and dead words will dull the sharpest feeling, will turn the rarest vision into a vulgarity. I do not yet know what makes some words live and others die, but I believe I can already sense the difference between the two” (45).
“Picking up the heavy brush, she tried to read the initials but could decipher only the first, M, the other two letters choked past the point of recognition by the virulent proliferation of Victorian scrolls” (122).
“...something she could not make out caused the men to gargle with laughter…” (195).
“The boss said, ‘A perfectly cooked steak is so rare,’ and laughed uproariously at his own pun” (196-197). *Witzelsucht!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't even know where to start. Forty Rooms is the most powerful, emotionally resonant novel I've read in years. Forty "is God's number of testing the human spirit," and much like "Noah's forty days and nights of rain, Moses' forty years in the desert, [and] Jesus' forty days of fasting and temptation," this novel follows our narrator through the forty rooms in which she lives throughout her life.

But even that description doesn't do it justice; all its power lies in Grushin's execution. This is a story of aftershocks - the reflection and small emotional responses that occur after the dust from life's biggest events have settled. Our narrator is unnamed, known only by her married name (Mrs. Caldwell), and that is both significant to her story and the experience of reading it. In becoming an every(wo)man of sorts, her internal monologue becomes our own: How did I get here? Is this the life I was meant to live? Is there a way to take it all back? Was it all worth it in the end? Heavy questions for sure, but the way Grushin arrives at a conclusion (if not a definitive answer) to them at the novel's end is a beautiful thing.

I could go into story specifics and dissect all of its complex layers, but with a novel like this, it would ruin the experience. Forty Rooms manages to be subtly haunting, consistently heartbreaking, sophisticated without ever feeling pretentious, and simply one of the best reading experiences I've ever had.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This knocked me out. What is a life well-lived, especially through the lens of domesticity and caregiving vs. artistic pursuits and travels (you can have both...but can you have both?). The title being the conceit that a woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime, each section takes place in a different room in the narrator's life, and Grushin displays this concept in a way that doesn't feel constrained at all. Will be thinking about this one for a while.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Portrait of the Artist as a Married Woman

This is one of the best written novels I have read in a long time. But before I had even got into her prose, Grushin had disarmed me with a cute drawing, a sketched ground-plan of a Moscow apartment with each of the rooms (Bathroom, Mother's bedroom, Father's study, and so on) becoming the header of one of the chapters that follow. Her concept is that a woman will inhabit on average forty rooms over the course of her life, rooms, as it says on the cover, "that will nurture her—and contain her—as her dreams and ambitions flourish or die." This novel is the account of sixty years of one woman's life, keyed to the rooms in the various places where she has lived, each with its little ground-plan serving as index. Actually, there are rather few of these: her family's Moscow apartment, her college campus when the nameless heroine moves to America, her first studio apartment, the penthouse apartment of the man she will marry, their first home, and the much larger house they move into as their family grows.

Hers is an attractive spirit, the bright only child of a professor of philosophy and a loving mother. A poet in the making (the novel is scattered with her verse), a visionary who receives magical visits from a critic/muse somewhat like Apollo, a girl bursting with purpose: "My soul feels swollen with my private certainty, immense with my private joy. For this, I know at last, is why I am here: to experience deeply, my senses a heartbeat away from exploding, then take everything I am feeling—the insignificance of being human, the enormity of being human, the intoxication of being young, the ache of being alone, the dizzy thrill of witnessing the steady rotation of the universe, the cozy warmth of a small wooden house teetering on the edge of a vast Russian forest, of an untamed Russian night […] —and use the best words I can to pin it all down, to snatch one single moment from the oblivious flow of impersonal time and make it bright, make it personal, make it forever." Oh yes, Olga Grushin can write!

Just as Grushin's sentences are brilliant, so is her feel for the short form. Some of the chapters are short, others longer; all involve decisions or epiphanies. From the chapter where she eavesdrops upon her father and his friends drunkenly reciting banned poetry to the one decades later when, as a wealthy married woman, she receives a visit from a former lover, and all the discoveries, joys, scares, and heartbreaks before and after, almost every chapter reminds you of why you keep reading, even if you feel you may not want to.

And why might you not want to? Because for all its limitless promise at the beginning, this novel is still the story of a rather ordinary life. Happy enough in material terms, perhaps—successful husband, house, children—even though the marriage goes wrong in the ways marriages tend to do in literature (though fortunately not always in life). But in terms of what happens to that budding artist, no. I found it almost unbearable to watch her creative spirit come to so little (and that, unfortunately, IS often true in life). I looked back at those poems, now wondering: was she such an artist after all? Maybe not, but like the character herself, I had such high hopes. I guess I should have paid more attention to those words in the blurb: that rooms can confine as well as nurture, that ambitions may flourish but also die. I should have taken more note of the epigraph from John Donne: "Be thine own palace, or the world thy jail."

Although I was depressed by the large arc of the novel, Grushin again handles it beautifully. Her heroine, for instance, is nameless throughout. But when she refers to herself with an exuberant "I" you feel so close to her that names do not matter. Then somewhere in the middle of the book, you notice that she has changed to the third person, observing a figure that is no longer herself, a woman she refers to increasingly as "Mrs. Caldwell" as though that name both contained and confined her. At the very end, though, the "I" returns, with shattering effect. My immediate reaction to the book, in terms of personal enjoyment, was somewhere between three and four stars. However, that change of pronouns, together with several other details in the final chapter, have led me to rethink the end of the novel and discuss it some more, with the slowly dawning realization that Grushin has been doing something altogether more subtle—and miraculous—than I had given her credit for. So four stars now, even pushing towards five.

[Kaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What I do not want," she sniffs, "is a small life — a life of mundane concerns, of fulfilled expectations, of commonplaces and banalities."

What is a life well lived? That is the question at the heart of this exquisitely crafted novel.

Over several decades, we follow the Russian-born narrator — an aspiring poet turned American housewife — into the 40 rooms that represent the topography of a privileged, middle-class woman’s life. These 40 rooms house moments in which the character’s life changes direction, spurred by a choice or chance event. Forty Rooms succeeds movingly in its exploration of identity, contentment and marriage. Full of original and quoted poems, this heartbreaking novel is an invitation to contemplate whether the richness and ambition of one's life has to correspond to the proportions of one's landscape.

“My dream house . . . Each room a different texture, a different mood, a different poem, and at its heart, a creaking ladder sliding along floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in a timeless oak-paneled room that smells of leather and eternity.”

[Ann · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe I read too many books where people have real problems. I just could not relate to this character. She is a woman who had a good life. Her life was never dangerous or difficult. Her greatest difficulty was boredom, although raising 6 children should be a challenge. Possibly I missed something because people seem to love this book. She spent 50 years bemoaning the fact she never became a famous poet. I like Robert Frost's poem, "The Road not Taken" better. He said the same thing in a few paragraphs instead of 300 pages.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read most of this book at the library last week, but then I decided to bring it home to see if I could digest or even discern the message. The writing is somewhat fanciful, posing complex puzzles following the life of Russian girl who comes to America for her college education and then stays, getting married and having children.
Her imagination as child and desire to write great poetry was the portion I liked best.

The choices she made as adult were depressing overall. Fortunately the book can be read quickly. Maybe someone more interested in feminism would be a better audience.

[Kelsi H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful, nostalgic, beautiful. Reminds me of Virginia Woolf.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was at first concerned about the structure: would a book about the forty rooms a person lives in during their entire live feel episodic? (The author states that Americans move an average of 12 times and have forty rooms in which to live. I've moved fifteen times- so far - and had 79 rooms, but I digress.) The author does slightly rise above this issue by inserting revelations about the past, or speculating about the future, at different points. Then again, in some rooms, nothing happens to advance the story. I did like the fantasy elements (a mermaid? a ghost of her mother? an angel who appears to her early in life and then later?). I did like the end very much, especially the segment entitled "Future". But I didn't understand the angst of the narrator. She is born in Russia and moves to America to go to college, and that's a huge leap for anyone, that takes strength and courage. Yet, the narrator is so full of angst, complaining that she wants to do much more. She marries well, gets her dream house with which she has a love/hate relationship, has five children, spends most of her life thinking about getting a driver's license and a car (America is a culture of driving!) but for whatever reason she just can't. The constant inability to do things doesn't ring true, as this is a smart/strong woman who, like I said, moves away early in life from everything she knew to start fresh in a new country. And nothing bad happens to stand in her way of doing the things she wants. There are some beautifully written thoughts/scenes, particularly a love scene in a ballroom beside a roaring fireplace. I did like this book, hence my three-star rating.

[Magdelanye · Rating 5 out of 5]

The world becomes obscure and remote when you look at it
through a mesh of words, you know. p301

Olga Grushin has given us a gorgeously spun mesh of words in this complex, moody, multilayered volume set in a deceptively simple form, rich with metaphor and concise in its meanderings. Forty Rooms is not so much about a sense of place but the peculiar intersection of choice on time in place.

Moses and Jesus each had their 40 days in the wilderness, with temptations;and it is claimed that 40 days and nights are what it takes to establish or break a habit. OG has postulated that each one of us, over a lifetime, inhabits 40 rooms. Surely conflated, perhaps apocryphal, mostly transcendent, each pivotal moment is separated by a little block illustration of the room on its own.

I didnt love this book the whole way through. Parts were maddening. That the protagonist was also named Olga made it confusing. I'm keen to read it again.

Maybe it's true, maybe everyone is special-maybe its just
very few who manage to do something with it. p287

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a solid 3 up until the ending, when it dramatically crossed the line to a 4.

Superficially, it's the story of a woman whose passion is writing, but she gives it up for a man and a comfortable life of domesticity.

Beneath the surface, it's an exploration of the many parallel lives we each live at any given time and the excuses we make for either willfully or passively ignoring the spark we have inside that we believe makes us special or unique or talented. Please read some of my other reviews if you'd like to know what I think about the ridiculous notion that most of us are in fact special, unique, or talented.

First we let others whittle away at our idea of what we want in life, then we say we'll follow our passion "when I have time," then we decide that we were happy with how our lives turned out, and finally we admit that we probably weren't very good at X anyway. Think of all the potential we are wasting!

Anyway, this is a very sad, at times mystical, thought-provoking book.