...deliciously mysterious ... Like Moskovich’s dark debut, The Natashas, Virtuoso depicts stark, casual brutality toward women. But sexual exploitation isn’t the star of this show. The range of themes — dislocation, exile, capitalism, and LGBTQ love — are all explored in such depth and visceral detail that it is impossible to determine a main theme ... Virtuoso isn’t a 'start-to-end' novel, in that it doesn’t rely on a build-up of momentum to achieve its goals. Many of its most dramatic, profound moments are spliced into the narrative, rather than waiting for you, like a reward, at the conclusion. Moskovich deftly flicks between narrators, timeframes, and tone ... Moskovich wanders quite far down the path of the weird but stops short of the absurd ... Nevertheless, the stream of episodes that reel with a riotous unpredictability may knock even the most steady reader off course ... Virtuoso is powerfully mysterious and deeply insightful, a page-turner precisely because you have no idea what to expect ... The true virtuoso, in both substance and style, is the author herself.
Yelena Moskovich’s books defy summary ... They roam among time periods and groups of characters, loop back on themselves via reappearing objects and colours, and purposely blur the real, the unreal and the surreal ... She demonstrates a profound commitment to language, and undergirds a jazz-like approach to narrative with steely insight. Virtuoso is an unusual read, and a tantalizing specimen of Moskovich’s talent ... A novel like this might be fun to dissect, but it is much more compelling to soak Virtuoso up, like a patch of moss soaks up rain ... This is not a sensible novel. But in its attention to language, its ability to reveal detail with sharp, original turns of phrase, it is a hypnotic one ... Virtuoso is also a bold feminist novel: it contains a world of love and friendship between women in which men and boys are both indistinct and irrelevant ... a fully realized vision of a strange world.
Moskovich’s mother tongue is Ukrainian, and while her English is faultless, there’s a pleasing otherness about her syntax and word choice, a sense that there are different languages operating just beneath the surface of the text. It makes for a reading experience that is always strikingly original, if occasionally baffling ... The novel’s ending brings together all of the narrative strands in a denouement that Moskovich handles brutally and brilliantly. Virtuoso is a fine, fraught, strange novel that builds impressively on the model Moskovich established with The Natashas.
...an evocative and encompassing experience – you feel the novel in the recess of your mind, sitting there and taunting you with its beguiling timeline, its array of robust female characters who wield dialogue as weapons and its surreal character studies ... Although the novel is written in flawless English, evidence of other languages lurks under the surface, which only enhance descriptions and dialogue, bending words and phrases in vivid and hypnotic ways.
Yelena Moskovich ’s second novel revels in its own complexity, blending humour and tragedy ... There are echoes of Elena Ferrante ... Moskovich’s work as a playwright shines through in these scene-like vignettes, slowly building the scaffold of each protagonist.
The quickest way to describe Yelena Moskovich’s novels is to say that her books are like David Lynch films. This, at least, is the comparison reviewers resort to most frequently to convey her surreal and lyrical style ... an arrestingly self-assured follow-up to her 2016 debut The Natashas ... Moskovich wears her weirdness with an indifferent dignity: Virtuoso is nonchalantly cool, heedlessly independent and puzzlingly askew. It’s also hard to resist ... Filmic, here, is the right word and yet still not enough ... Moskovich’s turn of phrase, often unexpected and poetically cryptic, that makes us see it ... Moskovich pulls this off with some skill, moving confidently between timeframes and narrators ... She is especially alert to how visceral and disconnected the experience of a body can be ... In the end, though, Virtuoso is entirely Moskovich, told in her idiosyncratic voice and informed by her strange sensibility. In its weaker moments, that strangeness can leave readers confounded ... At its best, though, Moskovich’s writing is compulsive and determined in its efforts to get at desire, grief and love.
