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sage01 's review for:
The Half Life of Valery K
by Natasha Pulley
4 1/2 stars.
I've been trying to figure out how to review this novel for days now. I have a pretty strong background in Russian history, both Soviet and not, and so I kind of feel like I shouldn't have been surprised by anything in this book, but I was. I was gutted, my heart was shredded, I kept saying, "no!" aloud, to the story on the page, not least because Pulley draws her story from true events. Not least because my reading of Soviet history and the genocide perpetrated against the Russian people (to say nothing of everyone else) supports every single awful thing that happens here.
It is a marvel of a book. It is also utterly shattering.
Solzhenitsyn's In The First Circle tells the story of his time in the gulag, and the opening of The Half Life of Valery K reminds me strongly of it. The tone is similar enough to serve as a warning of things to come, and it's also a clue that every word Pulley writes is deliberate. Every line of dialog and every bit of self-censorship is intentional and eventually so ingrained that the characters don't even dare think their concerns, they only circle them allegorically.
It is harrowing.
Somehow Pulley wrangles a (relatively) happy ending out of this journey through horrific moral relativism , and along the way we see her usual themes of iron-willed women, gender dysphoria, and desperation for human connection in settings that literally kill people for seeking it. There's a polyamorous love story between the protagonist and his married male love interest and some wonderful m/f friendship.
The real life setting that inspired the novel is the Mayak complex nuclear waste disaster that took place at Lake Karachai in the late 1950s and its shuttering in the early 1960s. This resulted in a radiation poisoning event 20 times worse than that of Chernobyl.
I had a couple of quibbles, as usual. First, it was weird to me to read Russians using British slang. I get the desire to convey colloquial conversations, but it was distracting. Second, the sex scenes are so oblique as to only exist in hindsight. This is clearly intentional: homosexuality was illegal & people learned from childhood to censor their very thoughts, much less words, when it came to anything that might land one in the Lubyanka. But readers are not actually able to read the author's mind and most people haven't read as much history as I have, so I wish there were more -- words like "texture" or "rhythm" or "pressure" or "strength" in the narrative would have drawn in the outlines while maintaining sufficient terror of discovery.
That said, this was an amazing book. Excruciating at times, and surprisingly literary for historical fiction, but amazing all the same.
Content warnings: mass murder, non-mass murder, child harm, infant harm, animal harm, offscreen atrocity, offscreen atrocity against women, radiation poisoning, gulag conditions, Lubyanka conditions (including torture), trauma, psychological horror.
ARC
I've been trying to figure out how to review this novel for days now. I have a pretty strong background in Russian history, both Soviet and not, and so I kind of feel like I shouldn't have been surprised by anything in this book, but I was. I was gutted, my heart was shredded, I kept saying, "no!" aloud, to the story on the page, not least because Pulley draws her story from true events. Not least because my reading of Soviet history and the genocide perpetrated against the Russian people (to say nothing of everyone else) supports every single awful thing that happens here.
It is a marvel of a book. It is also utterly shattering.
Solzhenitsyn's In The First Circle tells the story of his time in the gulag, and the opening of The Half Life of Valery K reminds me strongly of it. The tone is similar enough to serve as a warning of things to come, and it's also a clue that every word Pulley writes is deliberate. Every line of dialog and every bit of self-censorship is intentional and eventually so ingrained that the characters don't even dare think their concerns, they only circle them allegorically.
It is harrowing.
Somehow Pulley wrangles a (relatively) happy ending out of this journey through horrific moral relativism , and along the way we see her usual themes of iron-willed women, gender dysphoria, and desperation for human connection in settings that literally kill people for seeking it. There's a polyamorous love story between the protagonist and his married male love interest and some wonderful m/f friendship.
The real life setting that inspired the novel is the Mayak complex nuclear waste disaster that took place at Lake Karachai in the late 1950s and its shuttering in the early 1960s. This resulted in a radiation poisoning event 20 times worse than that of Chernobyl.
I had a couple of quibbles, as usual. First, it was weird to me to read Russians using British slang. I get the desire to convey colloquial conversations, but it was distracting. Second, the sex scenes are so oblique as to only exist in hindsight. This is clearly intentional: homosexuality was illegal & people learned from childhood to censor their very thoughts, much less words, when it came to anything that might land one in the Lubyanka. But readers are not actually able to read the author's mind and most people haven't read as much history as I have, so I wish there were more -- words like "texture" or "rhythm" or "pressure" or "strength" in the narrative would have drawn in the outlines while maintaining sufficient terror of discovery.
That said, this was an amazing book. Excruciating at times, and surprisingly literary for historical fiction, but amazing all the same.
Content warnings: mass murder, non-mass murder, child harm, infant harm, animal harm, offscreen atrocity, offscreen atrocity against women, radiation poisoning, gulag conditions, Lubyanka conditions (including torture), trauma, psychological horror.
ARC