This story is told in the language of both cheerful and sad. Here you’ll find “The Kingdom of Ice and Snow,” and “The Kingdom of Sun and Smiles.” A careful reader will most likely see— and understand the prototypes of what the author hid in the fog: parables and simple allegory. But that fog is transparent. So what?
It’s all the more interesting. Because the true life of native land and the recognizability of certain foreign places are woven in an amazing way together with a good, entertaining fairy tale, where pearl-sea hunters and ancient seekers of verbal pearls live. And, of course, here love blossoms—fragrant and vivid. A huge love, very rare in intensity of passions. And here, alas, thunder tragedies and upheavals of a world scale—those that happen on Earth only once every hundred years.