Nine Nineties

Anna Matveeva is a prose writer, author of the novels “The Dyatlov Pass, or the Mystery of Nine,” “Heaven,” “There Is!”; a collection of stories “Wait, I’ll die — and come.” She is a finalist of the “Big Book” award and the Yuri Kazakov Prize, and the recipient of the Italian Lo Stellato award for the best story of the year.

The heroines of the new audiobook are caught off guard by the 1990s: difficult, disorderly, and bad. But for many, these years became a “magic” time when what once seemed impossible comes true. Here a rich and secret guardian is found for an orphan; here a young man instead of going to the army leaves for Zurich; here fate sends a child to a woman doomed to be childless; and here Yekaterinburg can easily turn into Paris…

Matveeva’s gift is astonishing — purely Cortázar-like — leaving meaningful gaps in the narrative, which makes the story itself acquire a poetic elliptic quality, and please forgive me my French.

Viktor Toporov.