Opens Inward

5 hrs. 47 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Ksenia Buksha

Narrator Elena Kalinichenko

Description

“While Rita swims, I draw sketches: parents, coaches, boys and girls. It’s hardest to draw children because they’re always squirming. Constantly it turns out that on my paper there are four legs and three hands. But if you think about it, it’s true: when we sit, we have two legs, and when we run—twelve. When I draw, nobody notices me.”

“I bought myself a marker and started walking around the neighborhood, drawing, you know, different little people... Then I started often running into these guys I’d drawn on the walls, and I remembered how I drew each of them, and I felt warmer.”

Ksenia Buksha also draws a person with a single stroke, with one precise phrase. This book isn’t filled with characters or heroes, but with people. Strange, abandoned, tired, happy, unhappy—but always real. The author doesn’t invent them; she simply gives them a voice. The sketches come together into a single story, situations into a shared fate, and strangers turn into (and sometimes even become) close ones.