Letterbook aka The Light and the Dark

Author

Mikhail Shishkin

Full English, French, German translations available

Awarded Premio Strega Europeo 2022

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The internationally prize-awarded writer Mikhail Shishkin presents a beautifully sad and bewitchingly lucid epistolary novel. The stories of two lovers, told through their love letters across continents and epochs, intertwine in an elaborate text about the mysteries of life, the acceptance of death, and, ultimately, the grasp of eternity.

This latest novel by Mikhail Shishkin is deceivingly simple. A man. A woman. Their love letters. A summer house, the first love. Vladimir, Vovka–carrot–top, and Alexandra, Sashka; he goes to war, she stays at home, living an ordinary life. Two people writing to each other about just about everything: their childhood, families, trifles of life, joys and sorrows. What could be more normal? Until we realize things are not what they seem. The deeper readers delve into the writing, the more obvious it becomes that time has been disunited, dissected, and tossed together as in a children’s nonsense rhyme.

The time is indeed out of joint and only these letters bind it together restoring the world’s order. She lives in the 1960s, he goes to the Boxers uprising in China at the turn of the twentieth century. He dies in the very first battle of this half– forgotten war of his own choosing (“What war? Doesn’t matter. A war has always been. And will always be. And people get injuries and killed. And death is real”) — but his letters continue to arrive. She gets married, carries and loses a child — and keeps writing to him as if these letters exist in a parallel universe, as if time doesn’t matter — and neither does death.

This is a novel about the mysteries of life and the acceptance of death.

Shishkin is loyal to articulating his principle: the written word is the key, and so is love. “To exist you have to live not in your own mind, which is so unreliable... but in the mind of another person, and not just any person, but the one who cares if you exist”.

Shishkin’s sophisticated language and intricate style have won him major international literary awards and comparisons to the greatest authors of our time, and Letterbook firmly confirms this well–deserved reputation.

Shishkin is arguably Russia’s greatest living novelist... his writing is richly textured and innovative and his themes are universal: love and death, pain and happiness, war and peace... Shishkin’s writing is both philosophically ambitious and sensually specific, evoking the rain on a dacha roof, the smell of blossoming lime trees, or the stink of human corpses.

— The Guardian

Whatever the secret of the time scheme, and however magic–realist or metaphysical it might be, it contributes to the book’s powerful treatment of love and the vividness of being alive, underscored by the reality of ever–present morality — Shishkin is a writer with a compelling sense of the skull beneath the skin.

— The Sunday Times

There is a lyrical, poetic quality to much of Shishkin’s writing... This is certainly the most complicated, protean book I’ve ever reviewed and one jammed with cultural allusions and ideas.

— Standpoint Magazine

Shishkin’s prodigious erudition, lapidary phrasing and penchant for generic play are conspicuous components of his art... These charactersitics do indeed ally him with Nabokov, as he does have faith in the written word... And yet, unlike Nabokov, Joyce and many of their postmodern acolytes, Shishkin is unabashedly and unironically sentimental.

— Times Literary Supplement

Mikhail Shishkin is the Ian McEwan of Russia. A prize–winning writer who enjoys stunning commercial and critical success, he’s also a literary celebrity in a country that still knows how to celebrate its author– heroes. His latest novel, The Light and the Dark, in its brilliant translation, is striking proof that great Russian literature didn’t die with Dostoevsky. A wonderful book: it is filled with wonder.

— Monocle Magazine

It really does not matter if the lovers have ever met in person. The only witness who counts is the author — or, more precisely, his prose.

— The Independent

Striking... [Vladimir and Alexandra’s] tales cohere into a portrait of Russians growing up too soon, enlisted in causes not their own, exemplified by Sashenka’s belief in a second, disobedient self who lives out the dreams she can’t.

— Publishers Weekly