Madeline’s Reviews > In the Casa Azul: A Novel of Revolution and Betrayal > Status Update

“In Einstein’s physics, he knew, the future was out there waiting to be stepped into. The splash of a stone on water already ordained, the reflection of yourself in the water already contained in space-time. All times co-existed. His time with Frida was out there still. And memory could touch it.”

“The gravitational pull of the young woman bent time out of all known shape, and there were no longer days and weeks but only moments between one kiss and the next.”

“She knows what it is to slide up against the gravity of life, her hands full of promise, to slide back down again, with nothing. Her spine broken, her leg withered, in her hand a fistful of brushes. How all of life is contained in the sliding.”

“I was young, the young Lyova, and I loved the camaraderie and the acrid smell of vodka steaming out of tired pores.”

But I mastered
myself, stepping
on the throat
of my own song


- Mayakovsky

“Some people, you know, want all art to be curvaceous harmony. But the times demanded the toppling of symmetry. The dissonance of the multitude; the screech of brakes; the caterwauling of factory sirens; the pulsations of electricity.”

“We are well aware of the political limitations, instability, and unreliability of the Poputchiki (Russian poets). But if we discard Pilnyak... Mayakovsky... Esenin- then what will really be left, apart from as yet unpaid promissory notes for a future proletarian literature...?” - Trotsky, 1923

“The kulak does not exist, he says. The kulak is a figment of the imagination. A kulak is a man who once owned a cow, a man who once could never imagine eating his brother. The village is full of kulaks. The rich peasant, the middle peasant, the village proletariat- they do not exist. There is only one class in the countryside: the starving.”

Stalin/communist sponsored starvation

“It amazed him that outside that room history unfurled like a banner, while inside the room time was like a cat coiled in an endless slumber before a fire, too complacent even to stretch itself.” (pg. 100)