A review by trilbynorton
Vita Nostra by Marina Dyachenko, Sergey Dyachenko

challenging dark mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

There are concepts that cannot be imagined but can be named. Having received a name, they change, flow into a different entity, and cease to correspond to the name, and then they can be given another, different name, and this process - the spellbinding process of creation - is infinite; this is the word that names it, and this is the word that signifies. A concept as an organism, and text as the universe.

In many ways, Vita Nostra is the anti-Harry Potter. Both feature young people getting invited to weird schools to study an unusual curriculum, making friends, passing exams, and clashing with teachers along the way. But whereas Harry Potter creates a cosy pseudo-Victorian stasis that readers would love to live in themselves (to the point of hurling themselves at a wall in a London train station), Vita Nostra instead takes place in a hostile and unpleasant institute which no one in their right mind would wish to attend. Students aren’t invited with magical letters but essentially blackmailed into attending; they don’t study fun and easily recognisable subjects like Potions and Charms but a mysterious subject simply named “Specialty” which is never actually explained to them; and instead of getting the loving support of a friendly faculty, students are antagonised and bullied by mean teachers to the point of mental breakdown.

There is a point to the academic belligerence, although we are left as much in the dark as the students until late in the novel. There are hints throughout, to do with the relationship between language and reality, but I won’t spoil anything here. Suffice to say that Vita Nostra is one of the strangest books I have ever read. The strangeness is imparted in large part by the slippery prose, in an excellent translation from the novel’s original Russian; in even simple descriptions of places and people, the book’s prose seems to loosen the reality of the world. Now that I’ve read it, Vita Nostra is going to stay in my head for a very long time.