A review by anneofgreenplaces
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov

4.0

3.5 rounded up. This was a different narrative experience than I'm used to, and I'm not sure if that's due to a difference in literary culture, the eccentricities of the writer, or the style of the translation; I'm also undecided about whether I liked that difference, on balance. The story and its ambience somehow managed to be simultaneously placid and mundane, and laced with moments of adrenaline or tension or sinister incursions of violence and oppression, the evidence of which in the protagonist's psyche seem to recede as quickly as it arose. Most of the time I could accept this overriding placidity as inherent to the character and possibly an ironic undercurrent or deliberately understated contrast to the conditions of war--and in hindsight that aspect of it is very powerful; those moments stand out like flint in sand. While I was reading, however, I was bored and/or taken out of the narrative by strangely wooden narration or dialogue a bit more often than I would have liked. Again I'm not sure if this is down to a lack of familiarity with the style or translation. But usually, just as my attention was slipping, something would happen that moved the needle or left me intrigued enough to keep reading, or a particularly good personification of the setting sun would slip in (I would have enjoyed more of that language). When the surreal imagery that I gather Kurkov is known for became more obvious toward the end, mixing those states of being more insistently, I thought the book gained some dimension (and maybe some things went over my head before this). In any case, I did gain some context for the landscape (both political and physical) and people of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which was one of my goals in reading the book. It was surreal in itself to read a book set during a war that was ongoing on the time and has escalated nightmarishly since; there were some chillingly prescient moments. At the same time the detached tone and my perosnal remove from the situation sometimes made it hard to process that it wasn't some fictional or past setting, separate and over with now. By the end, though, I had imagined enough times how the future of this narrative would be so bleakly disrupted--helped along by the ongoing lack of resolution in the narrative--that the reality of it sank in.