Natalka Sniadanko

Chebrets v molotsi
Thyme in the Milk

Novel. Folio, Charkiv 2007, 218 pages
Original in Ukrainian. Russian translation available.

A mother who commits suicide. A father who was largely absent even before the divorce. A grandmother who is too old to bring up a little girl. A country which no longer has anything in common with the world of childhood. And a lover who prefers to send postcards from abroad rather than giving happiness a chance at home. Loss, destruction and alienation seem to be the determining constants in the life of the protagonist, Sofia. The young girl who is initially the first person narrator thus cuts off the traumatised part of herself and switches to the third person for the rest of the narrative which deals with the everyday business of growing up and how, through the power of storytelling, the little everyday miracles win the day despite the anguish of her own story. Miraculously, the mother comes back to life and the father reappears, together with companions lost along the way. And in letters Sofia experiences her grandmother as a vibrant young woman who is full of life. This is exactly what happens to the narrator herself. By turning away from herself and focussing her empathy on other people (these being the figures who give the book’s chapters their names), she ultimately finds herself and arrives in the present in the end. A book about a bygone era in the Ukraine, about a slow, unmoving age, the last static remains of which seem as removed as if seen through a pair of binoculars the wrong way round, such that they are no longer distinguishable from an illusion. And also a book about the healing effect of memory.

Агатангель - Agatangel

Novel. Folio, Charkiv 2006, 287 pages
Originally written in Ukrainian. Russian translation available for review and translation.

Tygyryn is a curious little town in Eastern Galicia. It is an artistic and intellectual centre and a breeding ground for new ideas. In its midst: the journalist and heroine Horyslava Galychanko. The latest scoop: Galicia is to be separated from the rest of the Ukraine. The relevant parties and newspapers are immediately set up in order to propagate the notion. Crackpot marketing strategies are used to try and adapt to the prevailing "pop culture". And that is where the problems start. The newspaper’s founder does not have sufficient funds, his paper constantly alternates between serious and boulevard in order to sell enough copies. A foreign consultant from the West is brought in to stabilize the situation. He absconds again in next to no time and is ultimately exposed as a political spy. The heroine, too, has to accept that betrayal is at work not only in her own personal liaisons. Her pet, a small rat which she carries around with her, turns out to be a little surveillance robot which has filmed her everyday life for a popular reality show in Western television.

A political farce which outdoes itself with absurdities, wackiness and weird characters. Evil to he who thinks evil. All of the locations and the characters are of course fictional. Similarities with Ukraine’s Orange Revolution are purely coincidental.

Колекция пристрастей - Kolekciya pristrastei
A Collection of Passions
Novel. Piramida, Lviv 2001/ New Edition Folio, Charkiv 2004, 287 pages
Originally written in Ukrainian. Russian translation available for review and translation.
SOLD to dtv Germany

Olesja is growing up as a Ukrainian teenager in the late 1980s. She comes from a "good family", has a conservative upbringing and, where boys and sexuality are concerned, has different ideas to her parents. Yet she is not always interested in what is considered by her contemporaries to be "in". Instead of George Michael, Michael Jackson or the singer of a Russian boy group, she falls in love with an ugly, fat and non-sporty boy from her school. And she is unable to talk about this "misfortune" with any of her friends. Instead, she engages in lively discussions about the "proliferation" of the sexual revolution, discussions which find their way into translated rock music lyrics in Ukraine a few years later. Her first boyfriend is of course a rocker who she meets at night on the balcony like Romeo and Juliet. The fact that she specifically wants to lose her virginity to a Russian-speaking boyfriend does not make it any easier for her to be a "good" Ukrainian. The young man is just as wound up as she is and ultimately a "trigger" is needed. In the end Olesja goes to Germany as an au pair where, initially with a host family in Baden-Baden, she gains experience in a variety of German passions, the possible and impossible. Later, as a student in Freiburg, she becomes familiar with the all too tempestuous passion of her Italian roommate. In the end, she gets to know and love the old aristocratic passions in Hermann Hugo Siegfried. Her parents welcome the young offspring of the German aristocracy as if he were already the bridegroom. Yet, as it says in the novel: "A story about passions simply has to end with a wedding and in the best of vaudeville tradition of course it is not the couple that the reader expects that marries."