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Summary
Summary
"A Door Behind a Door is loose, dreamy, and symbol-packed... The resurfacing of characters from Olga's past in her new city speaks to the theme of immigration in the novel, of new homes and the passage from old to new--a passage that is perhaps not ever fully complete in the sense that the past cannot be shaken." --Marta Balcewicz, Ploughshares
In Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of '91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga's past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Moskovich (Virtuoso) mystifies with this vivid story of a pair of estranged siblings who immigrated to Milwaukee from the Soviet Union as children in 1991. The fragmented narrative begins with Olga Bokuchava, who strings together images and anecdotes from her childhood in a Soviet apartment building, where a neighbor, Nicky, stabbed a woman named Oksana to death and was sent to prison. Now in her 20s, Olga inexplicably gets a call from Nicky, who tells Olga that her younger brother, Moshe, with whom she lost contact after Moshe converted to Orthodox Judaism, is being held in some kind of extrajudicial custody after stabbing a young woman to death. Nicky gives her instructions on how to help Moshe, but before long, a pair of cops arrest Olga for the murder. From here, the perspective shifts to other characters, each wrapped up in an inscrutable conspiracy. Moskovich doesn't explain what's happened to Olga or Moshe, and focuses instead on the various characters' states of mind, including Oksana's, captivating the reader with the sense of waking from a dream and trying to fit each hazy piece together. The dynamic style and psychological depth make this an engaging mind bender. Agent: David Forrer, InkWell Management. (May)
Guardian Review
Yelena Moskovich's previous novel, Virtuoso, introduced us to a multinational cast of characters and focused on the trauma experienced by emigrants from the former Soviet bloc as they adjust to life in the west, often at the expense of their closest relationships. Virtuoso makes use of fractured timelines and episodic narrative techniques that are particularly effective in conveying the radical sense of disjuncture at the heart of both the migrant and the queer experience; Moskovich's skill in using form as an active part of the narrative makes for a memorable reading experience. Her new novel, A Door Behind a Door, is equally successful in evoking alienation. Here we meet Olga, a young woman transplanted from the former Soviet Union in the early 90s, now resident in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She has met and fallen in love with a nurse named Angelina, a relationship that is finally providing her with some stability, especially in the way she is accepted by her girlfriend's family. An unexpected late-night phone call throws this new security into doubt. The caller is Nikolai, a convicted murderer and former resident of the Soviet apartment block where Olga grew up. He insists on a meeting, saying only that the life of Olga's brother Moshe may depend on it. A Door Behind a Door makes use of a crime fiction framework though, as in Virtuoso, Moskovich is less interested in solving a mystery than in exploring a state of mind. The old lady Nikolai murdered was his upstairs neighbour, and as the novel's action becomes ever more fragmented, we must work to piece together how the fates of the various characters - a cafe waitress, a female prisoner, two teenage girls cruising a shopping mall, a young man blinded in one eye, a penniless vagrant - are interconnected. "To get to Hell," Nikolai tells Olga, "they take you through America. There is a door behind a door" - and it is beyond this hidden entrance that the answers to our mounting questions lie concealed. Are we truly in hell, or merely made party to the memories of those already dead? As we discover more about Nikolai's violent upbringing, Olga's divided family and the shattering grief that destroyed the life of the murdered woman, we learn also how the experience of being an immigrant is as much about mental isolation and social ostracism as practical difficulty. Nikolai's surname, Neschastlivyi, means "unhappy", and when Olga first catches sight of him in his "Soviet leather jacket", she notes how he is "somehow bulky and malnourished, strung up in his posture like a wartime puppet". The force of the past is annihilating, and it is a force Olga cannot ignore because she feels it too.The occasional use of Russian throughout the text is intrinsic to its power, hinting at an intimacy between lost souls, the impossibility of moving past the weight of earlier losses. The key literary reference is Mikhail Lermontov's 1832 poem Parus (The Sail), written shortly before he dropped out of Moscow University to enlist in the army. Lermontov was a difficult, egotistical character who hid his creative brilliance in order to survive in the ultra-masculine society in which he moved. "What is life," Olga says, paraphrasing his poem, "if you cannot go willingly into the heart of a storm?" We cannot help but draw comparison between the fate of her compatriot Nikolai and Lermontov's death in a duel at the age of 26. As with Virtuoso, this novel's primary interest is in language and form. The author has stressed the importance of theatre and novels-in-verse such as Pushkin's Eugene Onegin to her work, and it is in its performative, dramatic aspect that Olga and Nikolai's story comes fully to life. The text on the page resembles a play script, and Moskovich's plastic handling of language forces us to experience the novel's tension and unease almost as a physical sensation. We don't often see writing like this: genuinely subversive and innovative, an experiment in form that is actually discomfiting.
Kirkus Review
A stabbing sets off a mysterious chain of events. When Olga was a baby in the Soviet Union, a boy from her apartment building went up to the sixth floor and stabbed an older woman three times. Now Olga is all grown up and living in Milwaukee with her girlfriend, Angelina. Then, suddenly, Nikolai Neschastlivyi--the stabber--starts calling her phone in the middle of the night. Despite all these details, though, it's hard to say what Moskovich's latest novel is actually about. Nothing here is straightforward or linear. The prose appears in short bursts, each one topped by an all-caps header and most no more than a few sentences in length. One is titled "YEARS PASSED." The text that follows: "I forgot all about Nikolai from floor five." The next header reads: "AND THE OLD LADY WHO GOT STABBED?" followed by: "What was her life, lived with such precise values, against ours, unfolding into daylight like a corn being husked." The effect of all these flashes and bursts of prose is rather like that of a pane of glass that has shattered onto the floor. Individually, the shards are slick and sharp, but taken together, it's hard to know what to make of them. There's a diner in this book, and a waitress named Lisette, and then somehow Olga is in jail with someone named Tanya, and then, finally, the first-person narration is taken over by a dog. How these details connect to each other is anyone's guess. Olga's brother stabs Tanya, but does this actually happen, or is it a dream? And if it happened, when did it happen? And why? Moskovich doesn't give us anything to go on, and that makes it hard, in the end, to feel much of anything for these characters--including a sense of humor. Moskovich offers her readers little insight into either her characters or plot, and the result is frequently alienating. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Moskovich (The Natashas, 2018) offers up a tense puzzle box of a tale in her third outing. Olga's family fled Russia in 1991, leaving the ashes of the Soviet Union behind as they settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Olga is now in her twenties and estranged from her brother Misha, who has converted to Judaism and changed his name to Moshe. Olga lives with her girlfriend, Angelique, whom she adores, and works odd jobs until she gets a call from Nikolai, who lived in the same building as she did in Russia and was infamous for stabbing a neighbor. Olga is not thrilled to be back in touch with her dangerous former neighbor, but Nikolai has a lead on Moshe's whereabouts, which sends Olga down a dark path of criminality as she hopes to reunite with her brother. This impressionistic novel is relayed in short paragraphs of sparse, measured prose as Moskovich portrays a loosely connected group of Russian immigrants caught up in a heady mixture of desire and violence.