"Pravda" by Edward Docx *****

• Book Club selection June 2012
• English author
• Originally published in 2007
• Author's online bio:  Edward Docx was born in the north of England. He grew up in Manchester and London. After school, he went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature and was Junior Common Room President. He began his professional writing career working on the national newspapers. In 2003, his first novel, The Calligrapher, was published to widespread acclaim. It was selected by the San Francisco Chronicle as a Best Book of the Year and was a finalist of The William Saroyan prize at Stanford University. It is now translated into eight languages.
  In 2007, his second novel, Pravda (entitled Self Help in the UK), was published; it was long-listed for the Man Booker and went on to win The Geoffrey Faber Prize.
  In 2003 and then again in 2007, Docx travelled in South America as part of the research for his third novel, The Devil's Garden, which is published in paperback this year.
  Edward Docx has written for The Times, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Observer, Vogue and The Independent. His most recent journalism appears in The Guardian and Prospect Magazine. He lives in London very close to MI6 and the river Thames.
• Characters: Maria (Russian, wife to Nicholas, mother of Gabriel and Isabella, defected to England, loved St. Petersburg, gave birth to Arkady, illegitimate and put in orphanage), Nicholas (Maria's husband, abusive father, gay, living in Paris, miser),  Gabriel (married to Lina, has lover, Connie, brother to Isabella, found mother dead in her apartment in St. Petersburg), Isabella (Maria's daughter, Gabriel's twin sister), Arkady (pianist, illegimtimate son of Maria), Henry (heroin addict, roomate of Arkady, trying to get enough money together for Arkady to complete study at music institute), Alessandro (Nicholas' young Italian lover who only wants money)
• Epigraph:  "The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure, to live it you have to explode."  Bob Dylan
•  Part II Epigraph:  "Pardon me if I lie, all you who understand love."..Susanna, Mozart, Le Nozze di Figaro
• Part III Epigraph:  "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind."...Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
• Opening line:  "He was relieved to be again among the Russians.  Nothing to do with his head, or even his heart, but in his soul; some kind of internal alignment or tessellation."
  
• Quotes I Like:
• p.19..."Abruptly, and with a sickening feeling, she realized that her heart had a false floor and had been concealing its contraband throughout:..." 
• p.49..."Half the world is screaming for water and freedom when the other half is ordering cocktails and complaining about the service."...Nicholas
• p.50..."Honesty--Masha, is it not the most monstrous piece of excrement that mankind has ever come up with?"...Nicholas
• p.50..."At the end of each of the culs-de-sac down which his mind careered, there was, he knew, a gaudy theater wherein savage satires were ever being staged."...Nicholas
• p.51.."Nicholas still could not make up his mind which was more annoying, the guile of straight women or the wiles of gay men."
• p.52..."The naked body of this other human being entranced him, engrossed him, bewitched him like a river god rising in vapors of jasmine and myrrh with a different violin sonata for each of his senses."
• p.55..."In so many brief years we become strangers to our own blood."
• p.59..."In art we are in conversation with ourselves across the generations, Gabriel, this is the lodestar of our humanity.  The rest is chasing food and money....".  Maria to Gabriel
• p.71..."And what was conscience but mood wearing a uniform?"
• p.79...description of Arkady's relationship to his piano.....
• p.89..."Somehow he had become a fugitive from his own decisions--a boy in an adventure story, locked in the basement, stock still, ear to the door, listening to the baddies decide what they were going to do with him
• p.100..."So here--we bequesth yout his desperate, flailing, lopsided world, in a worse and better state than we ourselves received it.  We ask only that you look after it as best you can.  And make sure that when your time is over, there's something to pass on.  For truly, Izzy, this unlikely blue ball is it.  This blue ball is all there is."....Maria to Isabella
• p.148..."One day they may just about persuade you to believe that business is the engine and money the fuel, but whaever they say, you can be absolutely certain that neither is the journey and neither is the view."...Maria to Isabella
• p.153..."The artist's vision without the accompanying artistry:  the cruelest curse of the gods.:...Nicholas about his own work
• p.189..."He watched her a moment, thirsty as a hermit for her beauty and her being."...Gabriel watching Connie
• p.338..."The truths within the lies, the lies within truths, thoughts within feelings within thoughts--they were all so many beguiling matryoshka dolls to him
• Interesting Ideas:
• p.5..."The difference between the Russian character and the Western is that we Russians have learned to live our days in the full knowledge that whatever transpires in the interim, the sun will eventually expand and humanity will be incinerated. It's a way of life precisely opposite to the American Dream.  Call it Russian fatalism if you like.  But it gives us a sense of perspective, a sense of humor, and perhaps a certain dignity."
• p.8..."Democracy is difficult for us.....In Russia we are required to live within the pathologies of the strongest man--whatever he titles himself.  That way we all know where we are and what we are doing.  However bad it gets."
• p.9..."Duplicity, hypocrisy, and cant, the primary colors he once would have scorned, he now saw in softer shades.  Perhaps this was the aging process; bit by bit truth grows faint until she vanishes completely, leaving you stranded on the path, required to choose a replacement guide from those few stragglers left among your party--Surly Prejudice, Grinning Bewilderment, Purblind Grievance."
• p.10..."We have--all of us, the whole world--we have all lost our belief in our bewtter selves.  And the great told-you-so of capitalism will roll out across the earth until there is no dining place.  And every day that passes, Marx will be proved more emphatically right.  And all the men and women waking in the winter to the slavery of their wages will know it in their heart." 
• p.149..."When a parent passes away, the family demons do not retreat but rise from their sarcophagi and move out across the borders of the mind, swearing in their puppet regimes as they pass."
• three levels of internal war.....conscious (cigarettes, food), war against the father.....the war against despair
• p.166..."...sex and love are like two principle dancers of the ballet:  sometimes they aremagnificently, beautifully indissolubly together,,,,,,but sometimes the one will dance while the other watches in the wings; or sometimes they will dance in parallel, on opposite sides of the stage, together yet apart, a curtsey for a bow, an arabesque for a tendu...................."
• the first time one sees oneself thinking or behaving like one of one's parents...."like a whetted knife slicing out of the fog......p.186....Gabriel
• p.188..."...there are infinite infinities in just one infinity.  This is the great paradox in the laws of our universe, and this is also the great paradox of the human heart.".....Gabriel's love of both Lina and Connie
• p.237..."Very few people have their inner and their outer selves aligned in any kind of meaningful way."...Grandpa Max
• p.238..."That's the secret, and that's what all great leaders do.  They somehow let their people know that they understand the inner as well as the outer human life and that it's all right by them."....interesting
• 326..."Life is about ignoring the fact that life isn't about anything.  That's it.  Get used to it.  And stop looking for excuses."...Gabriel to Isabella.....very existential
• Vocabulary:
• tessellation:   form of small squares or blocks, as floors or pavements; form or arrange in a checkered or mosaic pattern.
• quiddity:   the quality that makes a thing what it is; the essential nature of a thing.
• purblind:   nearly or partially blind; dim-sighted.
• steatopygous:   extreme accumulation of fat on and about the buttocks, especially of women.
• contrapposto:   a representation of the human body in which the forms are organized on a varying or curving axis to provide an asymmetrical balance to the figure.
• kraken:   legendary sea monster causing large whirlpools off the coast of Norway.
• viscid:  having a glutinous consistency; sticky; adhesive; viscous.
   
• Reference to "Pravda": p.103
• 
  
• p.235....Wonderful description of Grandpa Max
• Themes:  parental loss, national identity, family secrets, multiplicity of emotions
• Review:  I think this is a marvelous piece of literature!  The plot, characters, and writing are all marvelous. I keep a reading journal, in which I include quotes that I like along with interesting ideas from a novel.  The list is equally long for this book.  Docx starts with the death of a wife, mother, and mystery.  He then sets up pairs of characters who play off of each other through a difficult, soul-searching period of their lives.  The pairs include twins, two gay lovers, an ex-seminary student/heroin addict and a brilliant struggling pianist, the past and the present, childhood v. adulthood, mother v. father.  I might normally give a novel 4 versus 5 stars because there are a few slow, overly drawn out periods in the story, but the vast majority of this novel merits 5 stars for story, ideas, characters and some lovely prose!