The New Sweet Style: A Novel Book

Vassily Aksyonov (Generations of Winter) is clearly a man of vast ambitions: his writing has an invigorating wildness, veering off into the stratosphere at regular intervals. Aksyonov was forced to leave Russia in the '80s because his work was considered too controversial for publication. One senses there is nothing he would not satirize, even the "great Russian writer" aristocracy he so clearly sees himself descending from. At times his remarkable, frustrating The New Sweet Style seems composed in great Russian writer drag--an elaborate and garish parody of the old style, a fabulous product of that country's strange vanishing. At the novel's shifting center is Alexander Korbach, a director-folksinger-Renaissance man who has been forced out of Russia and seeks fame in America. He steps off the plane in New York expecting to be greeted by the press, but they're entirely focused on a tennis player, and in this sad passage Aksyonov beautifully renders his exaggerated sense of his own importance: Korbach dragged his suitcase on its little trolley around the terminal for no less than an hour and drank water from a fountain so that he wouldn't have to order a Coke in English, until the staggering thought hit him: No one is meeting me here! Yet Maurice told me that they would! That there had been loads of reports in the American press! Every American he met had exclaimed: "Alexander Korbach! It's a great name in the States!" The New Sweet Style is a long, sometimes confusing book, but its pleasures are vast, its multitude of characters consistently engaging and distinct even as they crowd in on one another. Aksyonov occasionally engages in metafictional asides that can be intrusive, like someone talking during a movie. But when he shuts up, the sounds and colors flourish and his world becomes as vivid as a spinning vodka dream. --Emily WhiteRead More