The Hour of Revelation

The French writer and philosopher Muriel Barbery became a star after publishing her second novel “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” (2006)—only in France it sold over two million copies, brought the author a dozen prestigious literary awards, was translated into forty-plus languages, and since then each book by Barbery has only confirmed her status as the queen of bestsellers. Her new novel “The Hour of Revelations” and her previous one, “Only the Rose,” form a large, unified picture: a story with its chapters unfolding as the protagonists live their unquestionably interconnected lives without meeting either in time or in space.
In “Only the Rose,” a forty-year-old woman travels to Japan to find roots lost since birth and to understand her unfamiliar deceased father, who remained off-screen throughout the novel; only Rose is on-screen. In “The Hour of Revelations,” she stays off-screen, while on-screen is the main hero—Rose’s father, a collector and dealer of contemporary Japanese art, Haru Ueno. His irresistible love of beauty, from early youth, gave him an impeccably precise eye for the beautiful and drove him away from the countryside to Kyoto.
“The Hour of Revelations” is a poetic, heartfelt, and profound story of Haru—his friends (artists by profession or by nature), his love for his daughter—love at a distance, delicate and persistent—and his gradual, unavoidable self-discovery. Against the backdrop of Japan, where the author lived for several years—a country both unfathomable and endlessly captivating—a quiet and piercing drama unfolds. In it, beauty hides in the smallest details; melancholy is inseparable from the joy of life; and death and birth are essentially the same. First time in Russian!