Читать книгу Very bad English / Очень плохой English - Яна Варшавская - Страница 4

I like novels like this one. Honest and open, like a conversation with a best friend. Maybe not the best, but the one ready to listen to you, which I think means a lot. The female lead character understands everything about herself, and doesn't even try to deceive herself anymore. She adds a little truth, a little bit of humor and completes the dish of her life with an interesting story. Only a woman who is honest with herself can talk about herself like this: «But I have nothing. Rather, I need everything. I have no apartment, no car, no summer house, no husband. Not even a dog. Oh yes… I have a dorm room. Six meters. From the threshold you can immediately collapse onto the sofa.»

It all begins with a letter from the unknown D. Frost, sent from America to Siberia. That's an intrigue! But then the letter story is forgotten, and the girl is waiting for her trip to the sea and Dubrovnik, she finds… a corpse at the door of her dormitory. What an amazing pun: «This stranger was the first dead man I saw…»

I'm very excited to tell you, reader, the whole plot of this first-class novel. It's very name, «Very Bad English», is worth mentioning. But we won't. We will not steal your hours of pleasure from «bathing» in a light, lively and alluring text. We can only add that if you are a fan of diary entries, you will come off to the fullest. Dates, nuances, small details and observations, open emotions are in the notes of the main character's sister. They sound like a separate song.

The author is very good at grasping reality and transferring to paper, conveying the mood and exposing women's internal dialogues. What is the other woman thinking? It's a mystery Yana Varshavskaya solved.

Maria Ziablova, journalist, criticist

The works of Yana Varshavskaya, both prosaic and poetic, retain a special atmosphere of mystery.

The novel «Very Bad English», which is defined as «female mystery,» is a narrative «about intricacies and unexpected turns of Fate…»

The roots of the plot can be found long before the beginning of the story. Two sisters, twins, were separated: their parents divorced, and their mother took one of the daughters with her. Their further fate destroys all accepted stereotypes about twins: they should have certainly become similar, choose the same life path, but this does not happen. On the contrary, they are contrasting, although this does not interfere with sisterly love.

The other twins are Dormidont, nicknamed Doremi, and Donald Frost. They are separated by oceans, borders and many other things… Fate seems to play with them: they meet in an Internet program, then, not allowed to speak or contact each other, they are immediately tear apart when the electricity is off.

At the same time, fate creates a different chain of coincidences, oddities, mystical events or simple surprises. The magic of numbers, the magic of general books, the magic of words – as if all the secret forces of the other world set the goal of connecting two pairs. They are led to each other to meet the «inexplicable secret», «the whisper of the Lord». Led to a happy ending and pairing.

However, «the two most important threads have remained unconnected. Doni Frost and Dorian Cooper… No one was embarrassed by the fact that young people are so alike and were born on the same day!» It seems to be a shadow overshadowing happiness. However, if you think about it, this means only one thing: the book of life has not yet been completed and, perhaps, another story will serve as a continuation.

SELECTION COMMITTEE I AS. PUSHKIN INTERNATIONAL LITERARY FESTIVAL

Crimea, 2019