Day Equals Night

by Valeria Narbikova, Seth Graham (Translator)

This is the first translation of Narbikova's novel of a menage a trois set against the backdrop of Moscow's art world.
Narbikova focusses on the life of the female body and the misuses of logic. Her prose, dense with allusions to both mass and high culture, features a Sternean irony in regard to narrative, and what was seen by the critics as a dangerous tendency to insist on the primacy of the sexual and the natural. Her subversive style switches from the banal to the offensive, turning cliches against themselves in the process.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Valeria Spartakovna Narbikova was a Russian writer.
A member of PEN International from 1990 and of the Union of Writers of Russia from 1991, she wrote numerous works on number and prose.

Reviews

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Narbikova's writing style is unique. It feels like stream of consciousness, but it is far more consciously constructed than any other stream of consciousness book that I have read. Her prose is like a complex fractal web built of connections, contrasts and juxtapositions, simple building blocks that come together to make a complex pattern. It sits on top of the underlying narrative and simultaneously elucidates and obscures the story and characters. It is beautiful, but hard to read and fully absorb. It must have been a bear to translate. This is a book that you could spend months studying, teasing out the layers of meaning. But I did find that the complexity of the style made it less fun to read.

The characters and the story are a bit sketchy. The lovers who are the main characters don't do much, at least not much that is clearly explicated, and yet I found their love affair to be authentic and their personalities and relationship to be interesting. The style of the book keeps them a bit mysterious, which makes them more interesting and attractive than they would have been in a more straightforward narrative.

[Monica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Narbikova was one of the alternative female writers to emerge from the latter days of the Soviet Union. The prose is mostly stream of consciousness and one thought tumbles into another. Just as in white nights there is a lack of orientation, so as within “Day Equals Night” there is a lack of specificity to place or time.