Kosmonavtov 80/81

“This entranceway is something—every neighbor is a character, and you can tell stories about each one for hours, even though Mikka lives here for only a short time—three weeks since she moved in.” This is how the novel by Mila Fakhurdinova begins, a young prose writer from Kazakhstan. The story about Mikki could have been told by Erlend Loe—with his love of cheerful absurdity—or by Karl Ove Knausgård, who is ready to meditate on every fallen eyelash. In fact, this book is built out of those seemingly unimportant “eyelashes.” It all starts with the theft of an expensive rug that the heroine left outside the door for a moment—and continues as a strange, semi-fantastical trip across the whole city, during which even a real psychic appears… Everything we love about Scandinavian “hygge” prose, and everything we haven’t yet managed to love in modern Kazakh prose, has come together in this novel. Tender, funny, quirky, and sincere—like loneliness.