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The Memory Artist
Winner of The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award 2016.
How can hope exist when the past is so easily forgotten?
Pasha Ivanov is a child of the Freeze, born in Moscow during Brezhnev's repressive rule over the Soviet Union. As a small child, Pasha sat at the kitchen table night after night as his parents and their friends gathered to preserve the memory of terrifying Stalinist violence, and to expose the continued harassment of dissidents.
When Gorbachev promises glasnost, openness, Pasha, an eager twenty-four year old, longs to create art and to carry on the work of those who came before him. He writes; falls in love. Yet that hope, too, fragments and by 1999 Pasha lives a solitary life in St Petersburg. Until a phone call in the middle of the night acts as a summons both to Moscow and to memory.
Through recollections and observation, Pasha walks through the landscapes of history, from concrete tower suburbs, to a summerhouse during Russia's white night summers, to haunting former prison camps in the Arctic north. Pasha's search to find meaning leads him to assemble a fractured story of Russia's traumatic past.
How can hope exist when the past is so easily forgotten?
Pasha Ivanov is a child of the Freeze, born in Moscow during Brezhnev's repressive rule over the Soviet Union. As a small child, Pasha sat at the kitchen table night after night as his parents and their friends gathered to preserve the memory of terrifying Stalinist violence, and to expose the continued harassment of dissidents.
When Gorbachev promises glasnost, openness, Pasha, an eager twenty-four year old, longs to create art and to carry on the work of those who came before him. He writes; falls in love. Yet that hope, too, fragments and by 1999 Pasha lives a solitary life in St Petersburg. Until a phone call in the middle of the night acts as a summons both to Moscow and to memory.
Through recollections and observation, Pasha walks through the landscapes of history, from concrete tower suburbs, to a summerhouse during Russia's white night summers, to haunting former prison camps in the Arctic north. Pasha's search to find meaning leads him to assemble a fractured story of Russia's traumatic past.
234 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 26, 2016
22 people are currently reading
425 people want to read
About the author
Katherine Brabon
6 books109 followersKatherine Brabon was born in Melbourne in 1987 and grew up in Woodend, Victoria. The Memory Artist is her first novel and won the 2016 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
July 10, 2016
I found this book to be flawed in its construction. I say this with much disappointment because some of the writing is very good. There are a few zingers such as the description of us as the bewildered authors of dreams (pge 28), the parallel between forgotten words and waves (pge 60) and the never ending promise of 'becoming communism' (pge 80), which in this passage shows how this promise operates almost as an opiate of the masses to keep them in compliant anticipation. But there weren't enough of them to overcome what I didn't like about the book.
Not much seemed to happen, either plot wise or emotionally; the terrain of the book appeared to be unvaried. So there wasn't much for my memory of previous passages to hook onto and recall at later points. As a result, I was reading the book trying constantly trying to recall where certain people and places fitted in, which I found a bit troubling for a book about memory and memories.
On reading chapter 33, I finally felt a sense of intrigue as to the book's theme of memory, memories & how this intersected for the character. However, it was a bit too late by then as I felt that up till that point the main character had not moved from his particular melancholic vantage point. If only the author had started with this chapter.
For me, the writing never changed pace or tone and remained stuck at a lethargic pace. I have no problems with characters remaining 'stuck', as this can be the tension within a story that keeps the reader reading. But when the writing seems stuck too, that can make reading feel like a chore rather than a joy.
Not much seemed to happen, either plot wise or emotionally; the terrain of the book appeared to be unvaried. So there wasn't much for my memory of previous passages to hook onto and recall at later points. As a result, I was reading the book trying constantly trying to recall where certain people and places fitted in, which I found a bit troubling for a book about memory and memories.
On reading chapter 33, I finally felt a sense of intrigue as to the book's theme of memory, memories & how this intersected for the character. However, it was a bit too late by then as I felt that up till that point the main character had not moved from his particular melancholic vantage point. If only the author had started with this chapter.
For me, the writing never changed pace or tone and remained stuck at a lethargic pace. I have no problems with characters remaining 'stuck', as this can be the tension within a story that keeps the reader reading. But when the writing seems stuck too, that can make reading feel like a chore rather than a joy.
May 6, 2016
Elegant prose and a clear voice define “The Memory Artist”, the debut novel from Katherine Brabon. The story, set in and around Moscow and St Petersburg/Leningrad, follows the narrator Pasha as he seemingly drifts through time and space attempting to make sense of his life after the fall of the old Soviet order. Like many others before and since, he discovers that freedom can be rather discomfiting and existence lacking in purpose, after a lifetime of defining yourself in opposition to a force that no longer exists.
A recurrent theme in the work is the exploration of memories and maps; both of these many-layered and subject to constant revision (additions, omissions, and concealments), and both unreliable aids to navigation. Brabon makes much of the anchoring of memory to time and place, although she also examines memory’s ability (paradoxically) to transcend both.
I found echoes of Foucault’s “History of Madness” in the premise that a person is insane when labelled so by psychiatric discourse; truth effects extended here to the State, whose discourse overpowers even that of psychiatry, and can thus consign those who disagree with it wholesale to the ‘other’ and have them committed to its care. Whole generations of Soviet citizens accepted the normalcy of such practices, or acquiesced through fear.
This is an intelligently written story which requires close reading on occasion, and close attention to nuanced ideas. Such attention is rewarding however, perhaps especially for those who can recall times when they seemed on the cusp of creating, writing, painting something significant only to find themselves reflecting later on these intentions, which had become by then the history of a future which will never be.
© 2016 M Wildenauer
A recurrent theme in the work is the exploration of memories and maps; both of these many-layered and subject to constant revision (additions, omissions, and concealments), and both unreliable aids to navigation. Brabon makes much of the anchoring of memory to time and place, although she also examines memory’s ability (paradoxically) to transcend both.
I found echoes of Foucault’s “History of Madness” in the premise that a person is insane when labelled so by psychiatric discourse; truth effects extended here to the State, whose discourse overpowers even that of psychiatry, and can thus consign those who disagree with it wholesale to the ‘other’ and have them committed to its care. Whole generations of Soviet citizens accepted the normalcy of such practices, or acquiesced through fear.
This is an intelligently written story which requires close reading on occasion, and close attention to nuanced ideas. Such attention is rewarding however, perhaps especially for those who can recall times when they seemed on the cusp of creating, writing, painting something significant only to find themselves reflecting later on these intentions, which had become by then the history of a future which will never be.
© 2016 M Wildenauer
July 22, 2018
This is a beautifully crafted and rewarding book to read.
At first, I did not understand Pasha’s apparent indifference to the death of his mother. However his matter of fact response became understandable when seen against the backdrop of the political oppression and state sanctioned disappearances that happened to the dissidents that his parents mixed with. I came to feel that Pasha’s attitude represents an emotional ignorance or deprivation that afflicts victims of trauma, many who are not allowed to grieve or even understand the acts that affect them. (Anya as a child sleeping furthest from the front door.) Pasha, and his contemporaries, are victims of the oppression of the past, having to deal with the memory, some if it reconstructed, or lack of it. It took me a while to understand that but I think that this was me, not the story.
I have always been a lazy reader, tending to skip over hard to pronounce names and unfamiliar words but with this book I decided “No”, I should make an effort and then I realized. Within the writing is the gentlest rhythm that is totally invisible otherwise. Upon trying to pronounce the Russian names: I perceived this rhythm, the book immediately became more Russian, I felt closer to the story, the writing jumped out at me further than it previously had. I immediately wondered, like the author’s reference to yellow houses, how many other Easter eggs (or babushkas) had she planted for the more insightful reader. For this reason I want to read it again as I became much closer to the novel as I read on.
Within the book I thought that there was a beauty to the writing: delightful turns of phrase showing that the writer has a vivid capacity to communicate. This beauty at times quite shocked me also. Reading about Pasha’s personal conflict with words and art, past violence and memory I was struck by the author’s capacity to write with beauty about acts of oppression and horror. There are better examples, but rather than spoil those … “Thinking of all those physicists mining coal, … the poets and teachers digging canals, the engineers, doctors, young parents buried in unknown, unmarked graves with a single, neat, horrific hole in their skulls, makes you wonder what might have been.”
That ‘single hole’ conveys the horror, the detail, the injustice of an event of mass killing under the Stalin era with such an economy of writing - it is a single sentence of structural beauty. It so deftly demonstrates the bluntness and matter of factness which many people forced to endure trauma must then live with. There are many more such sentences which rewarded me as the reader.
The issues dealt with in the book have no nice neat edges or bright happy endings. Indeed, the false light of the constant twilight of Russian summers haunts the characters in this book. I think that the author may leave a clue (or perhaps a babushka: open one and your find another, then another – I think I have worked this out) when she says “… you can’t give a system like that (Stalinism) the dignity of an explanation”, then going on to provide the reader with a clever revelation about question marks in her book. Pasha does find a type of resolution never the less.
This is a book of Literature.
The Memory Artist also took me on a wonderful tour of Russian history providing lots of snippets that will stay will me. (E.g. The Philosopher’s Ships)
In talking of the past of another country, does the author offer anything to contemporary Australians? If one thinks of Australia’s lack of protection for political or corporate whistle-blowers, the wasted lives of refugees held in off shore detention centres, the political and institutional indifference to victims of child abuse, the stolen generation and women who suffer domestic violence then, YES. We are not so far from Pasha’s conflicted state of dealing with a past that he only partly understands.
The Memory Artist can teach us to better understand the intergenerational damage and its effects upon memory and how individuals might deal with the effects of both.
At first, I did not understand Pasha’s apparent indifference to the death of his mother. However his matter of fact response became understandable when seen against the backdrop of the political oppression and state sanctioned disappearances that happened to the dissidents that his parents mixed with. I came to feel that Pasha’s attitude represents an emotional ignorance or deprivation that afflicts victims of trauma, many who are not allowed to grieve or even understand the acts that affect them. (Anya as a child sleeping furthest from the front door.) Pasha, and his contemporaries, are victims of the oppression of the past, having to deal with the memory, some if it reconstructed, or lack of it. It took me a while to understand that but I think that this was me, not the story.
I have always been a lazy reader, tending to skip over hard to pronounce names and unfamiliar words but with this book I decided “No”, I should make an effort and then I realized. Within the writing is the gentlest rhythm that is totally invisible otherwise. Upon trying to pronounce the Russian names: I perceived this rhythm, the book immediately became more Russian, I felt closer to the story, the writing jumped out at me further than it previously had. I immediately wondered, like the author’s reference to yellow houses, how many other Easter eggs (or babushkas) had she planted for the more insightful reader. For this reason I want to read it again as I became much closer to the novel as I read on.
Within the book I thought that there was a beauty to the writing: delightful turns of phrase showing that the writer has a vivid capacity to communicate. This beauty at times quite shocked me also. Reading about Pasha’s personal conflict with words and art, past violence and memory I was struck by the author’s capacity to write with beauty about acts of oppression and horror. There are better examples, but rather than spoil those … “Thinking of all those physicists mining coal, … the poets and teachers digging canals, the engineers, doctors, young parents buried in unknown, unmarked graves with a single, neat, horrific hole in their skulls, makes you wonder what might have been.”
That ‘single hole’ conveys the horror, the detail, the injustice of an event of mass killing under the Stalin era with such an economy of writing - it is a single sentence of structural beauty. It so deftly demonstrates the bluntness and matter of factness which many people forced to endure trauma must then live with. There are many more such sentences which rewarded me as the reader.
The issues dealt with in the book have no nice neat edges or bright happy endings. Indeed, the false light of the constant twilight of Russian summers haunts the characters in this book. I think that the author may leave a clue (or perhaps a babushka: open one and your find another, then another – I think I have worked this out) when she says “… you can’t give a system like that (Stalinism) the dignity of an explanation”, then going on to provide the reader with a clever revelation about question marks in her book. Pasha does find a type of resolution never the less.
This is a book of Literature.
The Memory Artist also took me on a wonderful tour of Russian history providing lots of snippets that will stay will me. (E.g. The Philosopher’s Ships)
In talking of the past of another country, does the author offer anything to contemporary Australians? If one thinks of Australia’s lack of protection for political or corporate whistle-blowers, the wasted lives of refugees held in off shore detention centres, the political and institutional indifference to victims of child abuse, the stolen generation and women who suffer domestic violence then, YES. We are not so far from Pasha’s conflicted state of dealing with a past that he only partly understands.
The Memory Artist can teach us to better understand the intergenerational damage and its effects upon memory and how individuals might deal with the effects of both.
June 5, 2016
This year’s Vogel Award winner, The Memory Artist is a departure from the kind of Australian themed books that we have become used to with this prize. Recently the award has brought us some really impressive books, novels which have tackled important issues such as Aboriginal dispossession in Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party; Soviet interference in Australian affairs in Document Z by Andrew Croome; and the ethics of following orders in After Darkness by Christine Piper – but all these novels would have been eligible for the Miles Franklin Award too because they have presented Australian life in any of its phases. But The Memory Artist is set entirely in Russia, almost entirely in Moscow and St Petersburg, and the novel explores the process of recovering the memory of Stalinist repression. Brabon has tackled a large canvas for her award-winning novel.
Repression. I have used this entirely inadequate word to summarise decades of Stalin’s violence against his own citizens. Unknown millions died in the wake of collectivisation and the Great Purge which took place in the 1930s. As Stalin consolidated his power, not to be relinquished until his death in 1953, a climate of terror descended. Rivals, dissidents and intellectuals fell to an ever-expanding network of informers, and they disappeared without trace, either to the gulags or to ‘psychiatric’ institutions, or else were shot and buried in mass graves. After Stalin’s death there was a brief period of liberalisation known as The Thaw under Kruschev, but it didn’t last long and in 1964 Brezhnev took power and a repressive cultural policy was restored.
Brabon’s novel begins with the birth of its narrator Pasha in 1964, covers his childhood during the Brezhnev Freeze, and explores the flowering of hope and optimism as Gorbachev introduced economic reforms (perestroika) and new freedoms under ‘openness’ (glasnost). When it’s 1986, Pasha is twenty-four. He thrives in the new atmosphere in Moscow. He goes to street protests on the Arbat (a pedestrianised street in central Moscow); he listens to music that used to be forbidden; he gets to wear jeans; and with his girlfriend Anya he plans to research and write the history of repression. Both he and she have parents who were victims of the Freeze, and Pasha has childhood memories of covert dissident meetings in his mother’s apartment. Now he can tell the story, he thinks.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/06/05/t...
Repression. I have used this entirely inadequate word to summarise decades of Stalin’s violence against his own citizens. Unknown millions died in the wake of collectivisation and the Great Purge which took place in the 1930s. As Stalin consolidated his power, not to be relinquished until his death in 1953, a climate of terror descended. Rivals, dissidents and intellectuals fell to an ever-expanding network of informers, and they disappeared without trace, either to the gulags or to ‘psychiatric’ institutions, or else were shot and buried in mass graves. After Stalin’s death there was a brief period of liberalisation known as The Thaw under Kruschev, but it didn’t last long and in 1964 Brezhnev took power and a repressive cultural policy was restored.
Brabon’s novel begins with the birth of its narrator Pasha in 1964, covers his childhood during the Brezhnev Freeze, and explores the flowering of hope and optimism as Gorbachev introduced economic reforms (perestroika) and new freedoms under ‘openness’ (glasnost). When it’s 1986, Pasha is twenty-four. He thrives in the new atmosphere in Moscow. He goes to street protests on the Arbat (a pedestrianised street in central Moscow); he listens to music that used to be forbidden; he gets to wear jeans; and with his girlfriend Anya he plans to research and write the history of repression. Both he and she have parents who were victims of the Freeze, and Pasha has childhood memories of covert dissident meetings in his mother’s apartment. Now he can tell the story, he thinks.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/06/05/t...
August 23, 2017
I didn't initially engage with this novel and put it aside to read something with more energy. But I'm glad I went back to it. It is a melancholy, cerebral novel, a meditation on memory and the role of the artist in commemorating or trying to bring back past events.
I recently read The Wish Child which explored, in part, how ordinary Germans were swept up in support of Hitler, through propaganda and fear. The Memory Artist looks at the effects of another dictator, Stalin: how people experienced his reign of terror and also how they dealt with the revelations about the system once reforms were introduced. The narrator, Pasha, the son of dissidents, is attempting to reclaim the past, after his mother's death in 1999 makes him face memories of childhood, love and political activism.
The time in this novel shifts between the 60s (the Brezhnev era), the late 80s and early 90s (Glasnost and Perestroika under Gorbachov) and the late 90s when the Soviet Union had collapsed. It also moves between the cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. Brabon studied Russian history at university and began to write about these issues in a factual way before deciding her ideas needed the novel form. She was successful in winning Australia's Vogel Award in 2016 (for a first novel manuscript).
The novel tells us how people disappeared; how the dissidents spoke of them to insist on their existence when the state denied it; how poems and stories were recited and passed on but never written down; how layers of reality existed beneath the reality imposed by the state.
Another aspect of the Stalinist regime which the novel emphasises is the use of psychiatric institutions to incarcerate those opposed to the system - on the premise that one had to be mad to do so. Pasha interviews people who experienced these institutions and tries to write about it. However, he always feels he falls short.
The reclamation of the past - when it does come - comes not only through physical evidence such as mass graves but - seen as more important in this book - through words, through art, through monuments, through maps and through experiences of the landscapes of memory. A particularly moving section is when Pasha goes with an older man to visit a village where one of the many Gulags used to be. Another is Pasha's experience of the dacha outside St Petersburg that he feels as "a halfway point, balancing precariously between a past I was trying to recall and a present I was barely in. A place where memories came to gather and where present time, such as it was, didn't touch." Pasha and his friends are distressed at the way so many young Russians move blithely into a new Western-style culture, willing to bury the past in forgetfulness.
Once I adapted myself to the quiet mood of this novel and took time to absorb the ideas of memory and the role of the artist, I admired it very much. I found some of the time shifts confusing, some of the characters hard to remember and the pace rather too slow at times (so not quite 4 stars for me). It will be interesting to see what this new Australian talent will do next. If it is anything as complex and deeply researched as The Memory Artist, we may have to wait a while.
I recently read The Wish Child which explored, in part, how ordinary Germans were swept up in support of Hitler, through propaganda and fear. The Memory Artist looks at the effects of another dictator, Stalin: how people experienced his reign of terror and also how they dealt with the revelations about the system once reforms were introduced. The narrator, Pasha, the son of dissidents, is attempting to reclaim the past, after his mother's death in 1999 makes him face memories of childhood, love and political activism.
The time in this novel shifts between the 60s (the Brezhnev era), the late 80s and early 90s (Glasnost and Perestroika under Gorbachov) and the late 90s when the Soviet Union had collapsed. It also moves between the cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. Brabon studied Russian history at university and began to write about these issues in a factual way before deciding her ideas needed the novel form. She was successful in winning Australia's Vogel Award in 2016 (for a first novel manuscript).
The novel tells us how people disappeared; how the dissidents spoke of them to insist on their existence when the state denied it; how poems and stories were recited and passed on but never written down; how layers of reality existed beneath the reality imposed by the state.
Another aspect of the Stalinist regime which the novel emphasises is the use of psychiatric institutions to incarcerate those opposed to the system - on the premise that one had to be mad to do so. Pasha interviews people who experienced these institutions and tries to write about it. However, he always feels he falls short.
The reclamation of the past - when it does come - comes not only through physical evidence such as mass graves but - seen as more important in this book - through words, through art, through monuments, through maps and through experiences of the landscapes of memory. A particularly moving section is when Pasha goes with an older man to visit a village where one of the many Gulags used to be. Another is Pasha's experience of the dacha outside St Petersburg that he feels as "a halfway point, balancing precariously between a past I was trying to recall and a present I was barely in. A place where memories came to gather and where present time, such as it was, didn't touch." Pasha and his friends are distressed at the way so many young Russians move blithely into a new Western-style culture, willing to bury the past in forgetfulness.
Once I adapted myself to the quiet mood of this novel and took time to absorb the ideas of memory and the role of the artist, I admired it very much. I found some of the time shifts confusing, some of the characters hard to remember and the pace rather too slow at times (so not quite 4 stars for me). It will be interesting to see what this new Australian talent will do next. If it is anything as complex and deeply researched as The Memory Artist, we may have to wait a while.
July 25, 2016
This author writes beautifully but apart from that the novel appears to be nothing more than a vehicle for exposition on history and philosophical musings on the nature of memory. It is a missed opportunity for us to feel for the sufferings of the Russian people through connecting with her characters. Unfortunately the characters are too flat for this to happen including the main character who is unvaryingly chronically depressed and apathetic throughout. There is no strong narrative, the tone and pace of the novel are equally unvarying and the structure at times difficult to follow. By all means let the prose wash over you and gently rock you to sleep but don't expect to be engaged.
May 25, 2016
Thank you to Allen and Unwin for providing a free copy of this award-winning novel for me to read and review.
I feel I must give this novel 5 stars because it is simply so well-written. The author is the deserved winner of the Vogel Award (for unpublished manuscripts by an author under the age of 35) for this atmospheric and melancholy novel of a young man emerging from The Freeze in post-Glasnost Russia.
Pasha is the child of dissidents, and grew up listening to his parents and their friends discussing their cause and sharing their poetry and stories around his parents' kitchen table. He's a writer and feels compelled to record the memories of his parents and their peers, as well as his own memories of life before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. So much has been kept secret and with the emergence of Glasnost, and a new openness, he feels it's important to record what really happened before all the people who lived through it are gone. But he's having trouble getting anything finished. The thing that Pasha learns over time is that with the new freedoms comes a loss of purpose. They're no longer fighting for anything and life has become more about existence. He just can't seem to find the motivation to complete his task.
This is not the sort of book that doesn't require much attention. Brabon is an artist herself, painting pictures with words, but I found I could only take it all in if I was in a quiet space, with the time to let myself sink into the prose. I tried reading it on the train next to the man on his phone (for my entire 22-minute journey; and in the Quiet Carriage, no less) but I couldn't concentrate. They're rather bleak pictures, too, because these are Pasha's memories and Pasha is not a happy man. Even when he is remembering times when he and his friends were happy, he doesn't feel very happy. He seems to float from one place to another without ever really being present in it, more of an observer, looking at everyone else living their lives but remaining separate from everything.
Another feature of this novel I found challenging was the lack of quotation marks around the speech. Perhaps this device is employed by the author because this is Pasha's telling of speech which took place in his memories, or maybe I'm just a philistine and I missed something, but I found myself getting confused about who was "talking". The book is narrated by Pasha in the first person, so when someone would begin telling their memories and spoke about themselves, it would take me a line or two to realise I was reading speech and not just Pasha's voice.
As I've said before this novel is melancholy. The language is beautiful and I enjoyed the book, but I didn't come away feeling fulfilled. The ending is slightly ambiguous and nothing is resolved, so I don't have that sense of satisfaction a reader usually looks for when they close the back cover. But still, I learnt a lot about Russian history and was glad to have met Pasha. I'd be interested to hear what others felt about what happened at the end...
I feel I must give this novel 5 stars because it is simply so well-written. The author is the deserved winner of the Vogel Award (for unpublished manuscripts by an author under the age of 35) for this atmospheric and melancholy novel of a young man emerging from The Freeze in post-Glasnost Russia.
Pasha is the child of dissidents, and grew up listening to his parents and their friends discussing their cause and sharing their poetry and stories around his parents' kitchen table. He's a writer and feels compelled to record the memories of his parents and their peers, as well as his own memories of life before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. So much has been kept secret and with the emergence of Glasnost, and a new openness, he feels it's important to record what really happened before all the people who lived through it are gone. But he's having trouble getting anything finished. The thing that Pasha learns over time is that with the new freedoms comes a loss of purpose. They're no longer fighting for anything and life has become more about existence. He just can't seem to find the motivation to complete his task.
This is not the sort of book that doesn't require much attention. Brabon is an artist herself, painting pictures with words, but I found I could only take it all in if I was in a quiet space, with the time to let myself sink into the prose. I tried reading it on the train next to the man on his phone (for my entire 22-minute journey; and in the Quiet Carriage, no less) but I couldn't concentrate. They're rather bleak pictures, too, because these are Pasha's memories and Pasha is not a happy man. Even when he is remembering times when he and his friends were happy, he doesn't feel very happy. He seems to float from one place to another without ever really being present in it, more of an observer, looking at everyone else living their lives but remaining separate from everything.
Another feature of this novel I found challenging was the lack of quotation marks around the speech. Perhaps this device is employed by the author because this is Pasha's telling of speech which took place in his memories, or maybe I'm just a philistine and I missed something, but I found myself getting confused about who was "talking". The book is narrated by Pasha in the first person, so when someone would begin telling their memories and spoke about themselves, it would take me a line or two to realise I was reading speech and not just Pasha's voice.
As I've said before this novel is melancholy. The language is beautiful and I enjoyed the book, but I didn't come away feeling fulfilled. The ending is slightly ambiguous and nothing is resolved, so I don't have that sense of satisfaction a reader usually looks for when they close the back cover. But still, I learnt a lot about Russian history and was glad to have met Pasha. I'd be interested to hear what others felt about what happened at the end...
October 8, 2017
A haunting read, portraying the subdued, silent nature of Stalin's terror, and how it manifested in a silent, shocked people.
For me, who knows very little about 90s Russia, I found it a great way to learn about the 'aftermath of Stalin', and counterculture's response. It demonstrates how long it can really take for a country to recover from such twisted horror. I especially love the idea of the absurd, violent and sometimes comic art that was created, a kind of underhand 'fuck you' to the people who were tying them down to psychiatric hospital beds.
It's certainly a historical novel - if you're looking for fast action and drama, this will not be for you. Also I had to read some passages really quickly because they made my insides squirm, but I hate all things violent so I'm not a good measure of this.
The overriding message (I think) surrounds our inability to forget, despite the silence, portrayed in the narrator's nagging inclination to write his book throughout his life. And the need to remember past horrors, even though the main aims of Stalin's (and following leaders') aims were to distort memories and change history. The narrator has the most passion and excitement when fighting for lost and forgotten lives to be brought back, and there were some really well-written descriptions of death not being the end of us.
I loved the tying together of maps in all the characters who the narrator interviews for his book: each one has it for their own purpose, and each use it to try and piece together fragments of their country's history in the wake of the horror, attempting to overcome the feelings of displacement and confusion created by a government that fed them a fake ideal rather than reality.
For me, who knows very little about 90s Russia, I found it a great way to learn about the 'aftermath of Stalin', and counterculture's response. It demonstrates how long it can really take for a country to recover from such twisted horror. I especially love the idea of the absurd, violent and sometimes comic art that was created, a kind of underhand 'fuck you' to the people who were tying them down to psychiatric hospital beds.
It's certainly a historical novel - if you're looking for fast action and drama, this will not be for you. Also I had to read some passages really quickly because they made my insides squirm, but I hate all things violent so I'm not a good measure of this.
The overriding message (I think) surrounds our inability to forget, despite the silence, portrayed in the narrator's nagging inclination to write his book throughout his life. And the need to remember past horrors, even though the main aims of Stalin's (and following leaders') aims were to distort memories and change history. The narrator has the most passion and excitement when fighting for lost and forgotten lives to be brought back, and there were some really well-written descriptions of death not being the end of us.
I loved the tying together of maps in all the characters who the narrator interviews for his book: each one has it for their own purpose, and each use it to try and piece together fragments of their country's history in the wake of the horror, attempting to overcome the feelings of displacement and confusion created by a government that fed them a fake ideal rather than reality.
June 30, 2016
A lovely read for a randomly picked book at the airport for my six hour flight to Bali. Of course the fact that it won the Vogel's award was a deciding factor and truly deserving.
I personally don't know much of the Russian history and have come to realize even fiction books as such do much research to represent history in its true essence. So this for me was an insight into some of its gory history. Pasha, I wish I could shake him up a bit and provoke him to do more with what he had. But he kept his sometimes lethargic attitude of a writer. How can you write a story of your life knowing you have covered all the important aspects yet not divulge into the "I" of the story.
It made me think of my own life - though not as dramatic - and wonder how would I write my story? who would read it? and why? The past, just a memory or is it? I think it is a selective memory. There are many things that one tends to forget about the past only realising it when someone else mentions it and so I could relate to his memory of his Father. And in so knowing his life I wanted him to be able to talk more to his mother, meet Anya again and write that book for Mikhail, for Oleg for every one of thoes aunties and uncles....I hoped!
Highly recommend you to pick this book and give it a chance, to play with your memories of life.
I personally don't know much of the Russian history and have come to realize even fiction books as such do much research to represent history in its true essence. So this for me was an insight into some of its gory history. Pasha, I wish I could shake him up a bit and provoke him to do more with what he had. But he kept his sometimes lethargic attitude of a writer. How can you write a story of your life knowing you have covered all the important aspects yet not divulge into the "I" of the story.
It made me think of my own life - though not as dramatic - and wonder how would I write my story? who would read it? and why? The past, just a memory or is it? I think it is a selective memory. There are many things that one tends to forget about the past only realising it when someone else mentions it and so I could relate to his memory of his Father. And in so knowing his life I wanted him to be able to talk more to his mother, meet Anya again and write that book for Mikhail, for Oleg for every one of thoes aunties and uncles....I hoped!
Highly recommend you to pick this book and give it a chance, to play with your memories of life.
May 21, 2016
There is a lot of books about Russia, Stalin and the fall of the USSR. But here is a fairly unique book which is narrated by a son of dissidents and covers the period from the 60s to the late 90s. A lot of questions are asked on how quick people can forget the past, how people did behave during the darkest hours, whether all the effort to seek an end to the Communist Party control of the USSR was worth it, and is the grasser greener in another country.
The narrator is a writer trying to write down his thoughts and of the stories he has accumulated. There is a lot of reference to Russian intellects, writers, poets and scientists and a little bit of knowledge on post WWII history helps to understand this melancholic story.
The narrator is a writer trying to write down his thoughts and of the stories he has accumulated. There is a lot of reference to Russian intellects, writers, poets and scientists and a little bit of knowledge on post WWII history helps to understand this melancholic story.
May 30, 2016
Winner of the Australian/Vogel's Literary Award 2016, The Memory Artist by Katherine Brabon, is a story of a man, coming to terms with his past, when presented with a crisis point. Set in Russia, we follow him during 1999 when he recalls his youth in the mid 80s, during glasnost and later, perestroika.
It seems as though the author wanted to share what she has learnt about Russian history, art and culture with the world, and has chosen the novel media to convey it. It works beautifully. I feel like I have just learnt so much more about Russia and its history than I knew before. She treats the issues sensitively and respectfully, letting the reader make comparisons between different times and places.
It seems as though the author wanted to share what she has learnt about Russian history, art and culture with the world, and has chosen the novel media to convey it. It works beautifully. I feel like I have just learnt so much more about Russia and its history than I knew before. She treats the issues sensitively and respectfully, letting the reader make comparisons between different times and places.
June 4, 2016
The Memory Artist is a beautifully crafted work of fiction, allowing readers to wander the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg with Pasha, the protagonist, who is swept up in waves of events beyond his control. Don't expect a traditional plot structure - the frustration and tension of being a generation deeply affected by, by not directly affected by, the 'Freeze' suffuses the narrative, leaving the reader in much the same state of being in-between. With a sensory experience that echoes Camus' The Outsider, this novel lets you climb into Pasha's skin, questioning everything and everyone as he does. A bright new voice in Australian literature, Katherine Brabon is one to watch.
July 23, 2016
Set in Russia the story follows Pasha, born in Moscow during Brezhnev's repressive rule .. the story gave me an insight into Russia' history through following Pasha's search in coming to terms with his past.
March 13, 2018
The blurb on this book made it sound so good and it won the Vogel literary prize, so I was excited when I started reading it. However, there was no plot and I quickly became quite bored with it. After the sixth chapter, I gave up. Very disappointing
May 9, 2016
Thoroughly enjoying every word. This is a fantastic debut novel - highly recommended!
November 28, 2020
It was a challenge for me to finish this book. There was no flow in the narration and the story was all over the place after the first chapter.
October 14, 2016
I was so excited for the release of this book, and bought it when it first became available. Sadly, it is disappointing. A meandering, narrative-less collection of descriptions which aren't particularly good or accurate and the exposition is so obvious it could be irritatingly distracting if there was a story to be distracted from.
The author made the 'quirky' decision to omit the use of punctuation to indicate speech which I have seen used successfully elsewhere, but in a novel with little action and which is already confusing and quite uninteresting (a feat when covering the era of the fall of the Soviet Union in Moscow) it does nothing to engage the reader. I can't remember the last time I re-read so many pages because it was difficult to recall whether I'd read them before.
The character development is non-existent. The mood of the protagonist is flat, uninspiring and 'closed' and this potentially could have been because he was an unreliable narrator or some other tool but it isn't. It is a choice and one that then bleeds into the rest of the book. The whole piece could have been a short story and would perhaps then have been sustainable. It screams of an indulgent piece of writing by an author who wants to let every person possible know that they've learned a couple of words of Russian and the names of some well-known places in Moscow and therefore can write a book about the Russian experience. It didn't work. It's not a successful exploration of memory, or of Soviet history, it's not a successful novel and not well written.
I do not think literature needs a 'twist', or action scenes or the like, and good fiction can certainly be quiet and thoughtful and still be effective. I am assuming this was the aim, sadly unachieved.
I made myself finish it in hope that there would be a redeeming feature but didn't discover one.
It's clearly well-received by some people but didn't at all work for me.
The author made the 'quirky' decision to omit the use of punctuation to indicate speech which I have seen used successfully elsewhere, but in a novel with little action and which is already confusing and quite uninteresting (a feat when covering the era of the fall of the Soviet Union in Moscow) it does nothing to engage the reader. I can't remember the last time I re-read so many pages because it was difficult to recall whether I'd read them before.
The character development is non-existent. The mood of the protagonist is flat, uninspiring and 'closed' and this potentially could have been because he was an unreliable narrator or some other tool but it isn't. It is a choice and one that then bleeds into the rest of the book. The whole piece could have been a short story and would perhaps then have been sustainable. It screams of an indulgent piece of writing by an author who wants to let every person possible know that they've learned a couple of words of Russian and the names of some well-known places in Moscow and therefore can write a book about the Russian experience. It didn't work. It's not a successful exploration of memory, or of Soviet history, it's not a successful novel and not well written.
I do not think literature needs a 'twist', or action scenes or the like, and good fiction can certainly be quiet and thoughtful and still be effective. I am assuming this was the aim, sadly unachieved.
I made myself finish it in hope that there would be a redeeming feature but didn't discover one.
It's clearly well-received by some people but didn't at all work for me.
July 6, 2016
The Memory artist is described as 'a fractured story of Russia's traumatic past.' For me the word fractured is the flaw in this book as I found the narrative structure confusing which distracted from the beautiful writing. The descriptions of places are evocative reflecting my own memories of travelling in Russia and some of the scenes are very moving: the moment when flowers and ribbons are place at the site of a former Gulag stays in my mind. The challenges faced by the children of those who suffered in these awful places is movingly drawn and this book will ensure that the awful treatment of dissidents in the Soviet Union is not forgotten.
March 13, 2018
Katherine has shown very deep knowledge of Russian culture-fears, hopes, feelings of people from all walks of life. It's hard to imagine the amount of work that has gone into this book to make it authentic-to select and carefully craft small bits and pieces that could be immediately recognized. Don't be repelled by cliche'd matreshkas (nesting dolls) on the cover of the book-you won't find a trace of them inside.
October 12, 2016
'The Memory Artist' is a beautifully written book about pain, fear and repression interwoven with an interplay of memory, activism and history. The interlinking of art and geography was beautifully done, and would have worked much better had the storyline and plot been a little more substantial, rather than musings about life in the Soviet Union, and post-Communist Russia.
July 14, 2016
Strongly recommend also reading The Hunger Artist by Kafka (as referenced in the book) - as they both find personal meaning and purpose for their lives through their 'art'.
September 5, 2016
Profound, beautiful and haunting this novel creates an impact far above its weight. I cannot encourage you to read this more.
July 1, 2017
‘With our words we linked our creative futures to the pasts of our parents.’
‘The Memory Artist’ opens in 1999, when Pasha Ivanov (the narrator) learns of the death of his mother. Pasha is a Russian writer, a child of dissidents who grew up in the 1960s in a small Moscow apartment where his parents and their friends gathered. Members of this group were determined to find out and circulate information about the ruthless repressions which had continued under successive governments long after Stalin’s death. Millions of people had been murdered, placed in mental institutions, exiled to remote gulags or had simply disappeared. Pasha’s mother and her friends campaigned for the release of political prisoners. And Pasha remembers the ‘shiny mint-green Latvian radio that was moved to the table for those gatherings’.
‘The emergence of memory seemed to me like a warped wound, with a welt or bruise that had arrived inexplicably late. ‘
Pasha is in his early twenties when Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the 1980s. With glasnost providing the promise of increased openness about the activities of government institutions, Pasha wants to write a book about the stories of killings and oppression he had heard while growing up. He particularly wants to write of those who were forced to undergo treatment in the mental institutions. While many Russians want to forget this period, Pasha believes that the past needs to be acknowledged.
In the 1990s, when the USSR has disintegrated and become the Russian Federation, Pasha is living in St Petersburg. He is teaching Russian to foreigners, but has made no progress with his book. He is seemingly overwhelmed by the past: unable to forget it or leave it behind, unable to treat it the way he thinks he should. In the meantime, his own life is stalled.
‘I thought of my father and all the silent spaces in our apartment where he still lived, despite his death, where every day he still breathed.’
When his mother dies, Pasha goes to a dacha and writes. It is summer, and the endless days provide the perfect setting for Pasha to try to move beyond the past and into the promise (perhaps) of a better present. What does the future hold?
‘I hated to think of how words dissolve like smoke.’
I’ve read this book twice. I kept willing Pasha to succeed, to be able to write the book. As the story shifted between time periods, I could see why he wanted to write, but sometimes had trouble appreciating the various barriers Pasha saw. This is a richly detailed story, one that invites the reader to read carefully, to appreciate the language used as much as the story told. It is also a novel that I might, rarely for me, read a third time.
‘The Memory Artist’ won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2016.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
‘The Memory Artist’ opens in 1999, when Pasha Ivanov (the narrator) learns of the death of his mother. Pasha is a Russian writer, a child of dissidents who grew up in the 1960s in a small Moscow apartment where his parents and their friends gathered. Members of this group were determined to find out and circulate information about the ruthless repressions which had continued under successive governments long after Stalin’s death. Millions of people had been murdered, placed in mental institutions, exiled to remote gulags or had simply disappeared. Pasha’s mother and her friends campaigned for the release of political prisoners. And Pasha remembers the ‘shiny mint-green Latvian radio that was moved to the table for those gatherings’.
‘The emergence of memory seemed to me like a warped wound, with a welt or bruise that had arrived inexplicably late. ‘
Pasha is in his early twenties when Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the 1980s. With glasnost providing the promise of increased openness about the activities of government institutions, Pasha wants to write a book about the stories of killings and oppression he had heard while growing up. He particularly wants to write of those who were forced to undergo treatment in the mental institutions. While many Russians want to forget this period, Pasha believes that the past needs to be acknowledged.
In the 1990s, when the USSR has disintegrated and become the Russian Federation, Pasha is living in St Petersburg. He is teaching Russian to foreigners, but has made no progress with his book. He is seemingly overwhelmed by the past: unable to forget it or leave it behind, unable to treat it the way he thinks he should. In the meantime, his own life is stalled.
‘I thought of my father and all the silent spaces in our apartment where he still lived, despite his death, where every day he still breathed.’
When his mother dies, Pasha goes to a dacha and writes. It is summer, and the endless days provide the perfect setting for Pasha to try to move beyond the past and into the promise (perhaps) of a better present. What does the future hold?
‘I hated to think of how words dissolve like smoke.’
I’ve read this book twice. I kept willing Pasha to succeed, to be able to write the book. As the story shifted between time periods, I could see why he wanted to write, but sometimes had trouble appreciating the various barriers Pasha saw. This is a richly detailed story, one that invites the reader to read carefully, to appreciate the language used as much as the story told. It is also a novel that I might, rarely for me, read a third time.
‘The Memory Artist’ won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 2016.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
December 22, 2018
It is unusual for a young female Australian writer to set her debut novel in Russia in the second half of the 20th century, but Katherine Brabon, with her 2016 Australian/Vogel's award winning novel has done just that.
I really wanted to love this novel about memory and coping with social change. Much of the prose was lyrical, elegant, intelligent and evocative, and the author's grasp of the subject matter was sublime. There was a lot to like in this debut offering, and it will be fascinating to observe the future development of this talented writer.
But, I found the novel confusing at times due to its unusual structure and shifts between time and location. It seemed to drift and lose narrative focus and direction, and I found my mind wandering and losing connection several times.
Brabon has written mainly about the post-glasnost period in Russia, from the late 1980s into the 90s and touching on the end of the century. It is a time of major social and political change in Russia, with new freedoms, new consumerism and even McDonalds in Moscow.
But, through the principal character, Pasha, a writer, Brabon maintains a connection with a dark past, a time of disappearances, shootings, the gulags and the restrictions of dogmatic communism.
Through memories of his parents subversive activities, and interviews with the father of his girlfriend, Anya, the past is recalled with a mixture of grief and, strangely, yearning.
The narrative moves mostly between Moscow and Leningrad/St Petersburg, although there is one significant trip to the frozen north, the site of the old gulags.
It covers the arrival of glasnost, the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Russian Federation, all of which was a time of massive upheaval, not always positive, and often confusing for Russian citizens.
I couldn't quite give this novel 4 stars, but it wasn't far short.
I really wanted to love this novel about memory and coping with social change. Much of the prose was lyrical, elegant, intelligent and evocative, and the author's grasp of the subject matter was sublime. There was a lot to like in this debut offering, and it will be fascinating to observe the future development of this talented writer.
But, I found the novel confusing at times due to its unusual structure and shifts between time and location. It seemed to drift and lose narrative focus and direction, and I found my mind wandering and losing connection several times.
Brabon has written mainly about the post-glasnost period in Russia, from the late 1980s into the 90s and touching on the end of the century. It is a time of major social and political change in Russia, with new freedoms, new consumerism and even McDonalds in Moscow.
But, through the principal character, Pasha, a writer, Brabon maintains a connection with a dark past, a time of disappearances, shootings, the gulags and the restrictions of dogmatic communism.
Through memories of his parents subversive activities, and interviews with the father of his girlfriend, Anya, the past is recalled with a mixture of grief and, strangely, yearning.
The narrative moves mostly between Moscow and Leningrad/St Petersburg, although there is one significant trip to the frozen north, the site of the old gulags.
It covers the arrival of glasnost, the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Russian Federation, all of which was a time of massive upheaval, not always positive, and often confusing for Russian citizens.
I couldn't quite give this novel 4 stars, but it wasn't far short.
September 6, 2018
This book is a hard one to review. It tells the story through the point of view of Pasha. He is an author who has this massive project to record the history of the Gulags but never gets around to finishing it.
The author has researched thoroughly and it shows in her writing. I enjoy this book for the portrayal of the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation. If I ever go there, I'll want to visit the places mentioned in this book as I'm engaged with the history of the place through this book.
My issue with this book is the writing style. It follows a non-linear narrative, where the reader goes back and forth along Pasha's timeline, from when he was a young child, to when he was a young man and when he is an adult. Normally, I can follow sick transitions easily but I left it for a week and once I picked it up again, I lost track of what happened when. This put me off the book a little.
This is a great book for those wanting to know how like was in Russia (and the Soviet Union).
The author has researched thoroughly and it shows in her writing. I enjoy this book for the portrayal of the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation. If I ever go there, I'll want to visit the places mentioned in this book as I'm engaged with the history of the place through this book.
My issue with this book is the writing style. It follows a non-linear narrative, where the reader goes back and forth along Pasha's timeline, from when he was a young child, to when he was a young man and when he is an adult. Normally, I can follow sick transitions easily but I left it for a week and once I picked it up again, I lost track of what happened when. This put me off the book a little.
This is a great book for those wanting to know how like was in Russia (and the Soviet Union).
July 30, 2017
This exploration of the value & worthlessness of memory, of past trauma within late C20th Russian society is interesting. It is a fascinating historical era & culturally rich country but being written by an Australian academic who'd only visited Russia once made me a little uneasy. It was almost like a novel written by a robot who has digested a lot of original source material but you do wonder if it quite hangs together. Much of the backing & forthing of the protagonist between 1989 and 1999, between St Petersburg and Moscow, between two dreary relationships, not sure what to do with himself was difficult to engage with and his deliberations rather ponderous and pretentious. However it made me curious to know more & while already lauded with a Vogel, it'd be good to see this writing mature & sharpen.
May 14, 2017
Initially I was hypnotised by the slow pace and simple cadence of this novel about the meanderings of a young writer in post Iron Curtain Russia. The voice is very simple, direct and conveys that dream like state of searching for old memories in a country that had so much erased. But nothing really much happens and in the final third of the novel I stopped wanting to follow him on his journey to old mass graves of dissidents, to his girlfiends' houses or at some Dacha where he was writing. It is imbued in the Russian spirit alright; the poetry, the death, the hopelessness and the prose is beautiful but the character just doesn't seem to grow out of this bubble of memory into action.
July 9, 2017
Probably more a 2.5 than 2, but ultimately this was just too slow for me. The writing itself was of a good quality, but Brabon spends so much time meandering through the narrator's malaise that it just completely lost me and I was waiting for the novel to be over.
A shame, as I was really looking forward to this one, and the topic is one that interests me greatly.
A shame, as I was really looking forward to this one, and the topic is one that interests me greatly.
August 22, 2019
The author takes you on a graphic and emotional journey through a Russia many of us do not know. There is no great dramatic element but rather a slow ride through someone’s reasonably satisfying memories. Not a sit down, read in one session narrative, but a nicely cooked meal to savour over a week or two with google close by for intertexts and graphics. Well done.
August 27, 2019
A complex and melancholy exploration of the invasive influence of generational violence in Russia. Fascinating insights into a young writer's attempts to reconcile past, present and future possibilities. The constant movement between multiple past story arcs and the present required concentration but added to my enjoyment of this book.
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