| So what is this book about? Great question! No clue! Well, not entirely true: so we have our narrator and protagonist born (I think) on the night of the Tugunska Event, in which a meteorite crashed in the far-flung parts of the Siberia, and according to the book at least, I’d have to fact-check, did not actually impact, but created a forced that flattened millions of trees in the vicinity. Years later, our protagonist is uprooted as his family is killed during the Russian Revolution. When he’s a little older he joins an expedition to the scene of the meteor and the space ice (or affected ice) has some sort of transformative effect (especially if you hurtle a giant chunk of it into someone’s chest) and a new cult is formed as a result. Are they heightened beings? Have they really been reborn? Hard to tell as of yet. This novel is bizarre, especially for how no-nonsense so much of the prose is here. The beginning of it reminds me so much of Speak, Memory, where Nabokov loves being rich and living a rich cozy life, that it feels like a reference, but also Nabokov’s book is great in part because of how well it catalogued a fairly typical aristocratic life. Regardless, we’ll see what happens in the sequels. |
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2132742._)