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A Magical Novel That Feels Real - ´Mother Doll´ by Katya Apekina
“The cook made kugel, and we lit candles, prayed and ate, without acknowledging that half the city was starving and burning, or that conversations about distant mutual acquaintances were interrupted by machine gun fire and the sound of breaking glass.”Ne₫e BƯNARK
September 9, 2024
Hello from Bibliobibuli Book-News, today I will tell you about 'Mother Doll', where people who still have humanitarian concerns despite going through a revolutionary period continue to live their lives as best they can in the midst of chaos, and where the protagonist reads the sentence above that haunts her mind while having Shabbat dinner with her aunt, uncle and grandmother with whom she lives.
The first edition of 'Mother Doll', the second novel by novelist, screenwriter, and translator Katya Apekina, the author of “The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish”, which was selected as the best book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub and other critics, the finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and also that was translated into Spanish and Catalan, hit the shelves in March 2024 with 320 pages and hardcover.
'Mother Doll', in which you can find the “Soviet Jewish Trauma” at the center of the novel, can also be called a wild story about multiple generations within the framework of a matrilineal intergenerational trauma. In fact, Apekina's novel can also be seen as a “Matryoshka Doll”. Apekina, who is herself a “Russian Jewish” immigrant, weaves diasporic parenting, superstition, and historical trauma, which form the basis of 'Mother Doll', with wit and skill. Katya Apekina was born in Moscow, moved to the US at the age of three, and currently lives in Los Angeles. Her interest in mediumship and psychics forms the basis of her new novel 'Mother Doll'. Set both in present-day Los Angeles and in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) during the Russian Revolution, 'Mother Doll' is no ordinary ghost story. Apekina's story takes the reader from the physical reality of one body inside another to the unfathomable possibilities of independent consciousness. Embracing the dream logic of Russian magical realism, the novel is ideal for those who want to read a meticulously layered historical fiction story. 'Mother Doll' is quite dark, but at the same time, it has the ability to keep the diasporic legacy alive in the minds of Soviet Jews and their orientation towards the world. Apekina's “Mother Doll”, which draws on the unpublished memoirs her grandmother left her after her death, is likely to linger in the reader's mind for a long time with its grandmother, ghosts, and heads rolling down the street 'like cabbage'.
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