...an unabashed, panoramic view of the landscape of human consciousness affected by time, place, faith, and faces ... Lisa Hayden’s translation reads beautifully and carries the poignancy well ... In the vein of Dostoyevsky, religion here is not an enemy to be vanquished, but rather a consolation and a means of deciphering the mechanisms of the human mind and the world—seen and unseen ... Draped in thoroughly Russian trappings, The Aviator speaks to common experience while soaring into realms that enfold the human drama below.
Vodolazkin does not spare us the gruesome particulars: the groans of the dying, the stench of the seasick. The Aviator is filled with scenes like this: intense flashes of lived experience, crisply focused, rich in sensory detail ... The Aviator is not verbose, but it certainly wears its ideas on its sleeve, and the arc of the narrative is as simple and clever as a philosopher’s parable. But this is also a deeply emotional book, and often it is these probing questions that give human depth to the characters ... The Aviator is a quietly radical novel.
...[an] engaging new novel ... Those familiar with twentieth-century Russian history will delight in the swirl of memories that emerge over the course of the narrative ... The Aviator has been ably translated by Lisa Hayden. The novel will hold special appeal for those with an interest in Russian history and for fans of literary mysteries.
Innokenty is an intriguing character who stoically and bravely faces what has happened in the past and what his life is now. There are two beautiful love stories ... This book also addresses the possibilities of science and what scientific advances can do to us as humans. I loved this story in diary entries ... This format made the pages fly by. A brilliant, thought-provoking read.
Vodolazkin’s grip on this narrative is iron-tight, and what we take at first to be Innokenty’s pathology – or the working out of a literary method – turns out to be something much more important: a moral stand, of sorts.
