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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Zuleikha / Зулейха открывает глаза
Guzel Yakhina / Гузель Шамильевна Яхина
Zuleikha’s story is a powerful one. Inspired by the author’s grandmother’s life, this novel follows a woman’s journey and her experiences during the dekulakization program of the 1930s.
It was originally drafted as a screenplay and then adapted to novel form, which I found interesting as the process is usually the other way around.
Yakhina’s prose is beautiful. She paints pictures with her words and immerses the reader in this distant world. She takes us into the mind of her protagonist and we stick with Zuleikha for over fifteen years, becoming so involved in her relationships and trials.
It’s a moving read and a big time page turner. Again, grateful for the translator, Lisa C Hayden, whose work on Volodazkin’s “Laurus” inspired me to read this book.
#Zuleikha #Зулейхаоткрываетглаза
#Yakhina #ГузельШамильевнаЯхина
Guzel Yakhina / Гузель Шамильевна Яхина
Zuleikha’s story is a powerful one. Inspired by the author’s grandmother’s life, this novel follows a woman’s journey and her experiences during the dekulakization program of the 1930s.
It was originally drafted as a screenplay and then adapted to novel form, which I found interesting as the process is usually the other way around.
Yakhina’s prose is beautiful. She paints pictures with her words and immerses the reader in this distant world. She takes us into the mind of her protagonist and we stick with Zuleikha for over fifteen years, becoming so involved in her relationships and trials.
It’s a moving read and a big time page turner. Again, grateful for the translator, Lisa C Hayden, whose work on Volodazkin’s “Laurus” inspired me to read this book.
#Zuleikha #Зулейхаоткрываетглаза
#Yakhina #ГузельШамильевнаЯхина
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
emotional
informative
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
3⭐️ doar pentru că a reușit să mă transpună în poveste și să vizualizez fiecare loc, altfel ratingul ar fi fost mai mic pentru că nu a reușit să mă facă și să simt…
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
It took me a long time to finish this book, longer than I had estimated at the beginning. "Zuleiha..." starts off strong and my initial feeling was one of awe. The first chapters had me devouring the pages one after another. I was excited to finally read about this conflicted woman, one so very different that the usual heroines we get in contemporary literature. Zuleiha's interior monologue was the kind of literature I so desperately wanted.
However, as the story progresses, we get this mixture, this soup of characters thrown together and which we stop seeing from Zuleiha's point of view. The way these characters are developed seems chaotic and shallow. We stop following our heroine, which only gets to intervene from time to time, while the author turns her eyes towards other people, but in a way that is neither coherent nor satisfying my need for getting to know them. I would have liked this novel a lot better if Guzel Yakhina kept the style from the first few chapters and only described Zuleiha's companions from her POV, instead of going back and forth between characters and ending up not fully developing either of them.
The action also feels rushed as the novel moves towards it's conclusion. While the events in the first part move at a slower pace, as we read on, entire chunks of time are missing or sped through, something that did not feel at all satisfying to me.
But, to end on a high note, what I most liked about "Zuleiha..." is the fact that we get to see a part of history that is often forgotten. Being from the ex-Soviet space myself and having grandparents that were either deported or relocated during the communist period, this novel gave me an idea, albeit crippled, about the struggled and sufferings of the people affected by the communist regime. I felt, throughout the novel, the raw hatred I still have for Russians, communists and the Western countries that didn't interfere and let this part of the world be subjected to dehumanising actions, to physical and psychological torture. The colour added by the Tatar culture that transpired throughout the first part of the novel is fantastic and I cannot for the life or me understand why the author, a Tatar herself, decided to forgo everything about it after the first chapters. Any book that makes me search the great internet for historical and cultural information is a good book in my eyes, though the writer got lost on the way and sort of forgot where everything started.
However, as the story progresses, we get this mixture, this soup of characters thrown together and which we stop seeing from Zuleiha's point of view. The way these characters are developed seems chaotic and shallow. We stop following our heroine, which only gets to intervene from time to time, while the author turns her eyes towards other people, but in a way that is neither coherent nor satisfying my need for getting to know them. I would have liked this novel a lot better if Guzel Yakhina kept the style from the first few chapters and only described Zuleiha's companions from her POV, instead of going back and forth between characters and ending up not fully developing either of them.
The action also feels rushed as the novel moves towards it's conclusion. While the events in the first part move at a slower pace, as we read on, entire chunks of time are missing or sped through, something that did not feel at all satisfying to me.
But, to end on a high note, what I most liked about "Zuleiha..." is the fact that we get to see a part of history that is often forgotten. Being from the ex-Soviet space myself and having grandparents that were either deported or relocated during the communist period, this novel gave me an idea, albeit crippled, about the struggled and sufferings of the people affected by the communist regime. I felt, throughout the novel, the raw hatred I still have for Russians, communists and the Western countries that didn't interfere and let this part of the world be subjected to dehumanising actions, to physical and psychological torture. The colour added by the Tatar culture that transpired throughout the first part of the novel is fantastic and I cannot for the life or me understand why the author, a Tatar herself, decided to forgo everything about it after the first chapters. Any book that makes me search the great internet for historical and cultural information is a good book in my eyes, though the writer got lost on the way and sort of forgot where everything started.