Klotsvog is a novel about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the historical trauma of World War II—and it's a novel about the petty dramas and demons of one wonderfully vain woman. Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it.
Maya isn't an appealing character. She's far too vain and self-absorbed for that, but her voice draws the reader in, introducing us to a Jewish culture that is wounded, trying desperately to recover and maintain some dignity in a country that despises it ... Klotsvog isn't an easy story, but Maya is a brilliant character. Not just an unreliable narrator, she's an unreliable person, someone raised in hunger and fear who is desperate to find a comfortable place in the world. Khemlin has created an unforgettable character and opened a window onto a world more people should know about.
Margarita Khemlin’s masterful debut novel Klotsvog, which was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 2009 and is now brought to an English-speaking audience by Lisa C. Hayden, demonstrates just how unsuccessful love can be – particularly when it’s trapped in the antisemitic Soviet mechanism ... Maya’s soap-operatic life is delivered via a series of Vonnegut-like refrains...and with a Dostoevskean psychological precision. Khemlin also mixes Sovietisms with skaz – a style of breathless, conversational storytelling, exemplified by authors such as Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. The storytelling is sumptuous throughout, and Klotsvog is also memorable for its bold grasp on the legacy of anxiety. 'We didn’t have anybody’s examples to follow for love' Maya comments in the opening pages. Between the suffering of the past and the fear of the future, Khemlin shows how our relationship with love can be determined by our reckoning with ancestral pain.