The Dream Life of Sukhanov
by Olga Grushin
Penguin, HK$109
Readers who skip the 'about the author' blurb until they've finished the book will surely be startled by the fact that Olga Grushin was born in 1971 and that The Dream Life of Sukhanov is her first novel. The work is so accomplished, in content, structure and language, that most will expect a more experienced writer - not to mention one whose first language is English. Dream Life, shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers last year, is an examination of the life of Moscow-based painter Anatoly Paylovich Sukhanov, whom we first meet in 1985 when glasnost (openness) is heralding change in the Soviet Union. Once married to art, and enamoured of geniuses such as Sandro Botticelli and Marc Chagall, he sold out in the early 1960s for the hand of the beautiful daughter of a famous state-sponsored artist and a comfortable life. He now has a top job as editor of the Communist Party-sanctioned journal Art of the World and lives in an extravagant home filled with servants. But then, inexplicably, everything solid seems to melt when he's asked to write an objective article about Salvador Dali, whose work he and fellow apparatchiks previously condemned. The surreal increasingly becomes part of his life while the curtain slowly falls on the Soviet Union.
