Medusa's Gaze (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Lyubko Deresh | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

On a night train through a country gone dark, a man stares out at the void where the lights of Ukraine used to be and thinks of satellite photographs: a black patch in the middle of Europe, flecked with sparks. Somewhere out in that darkness, his oldest friend has gone to war.

The Medusa's Gaze follows four friends from Lviv -- a biologist, a businessman, a searcher, and the charming, unknowable Slavko, who enlists in the first year of the full-scale invasion and stops answering his phone. Solomiia, who has loved Slavko for ten unmarried years, waits for a call she dreads. Myroslav, riding that train, weighs the enlistment office against the life he hasn't yet lived. And threaded between their voices, a young woman from an occupied city by the sea tells the story of her survival the only way it can be told: as the myth of how Medusa was born.

Deresh's proposition is as old as Perseus and as current as this morning's air-raid alert: whoever looks directly at the unbearable turns to stone. Living through catastrophe means finding a mirrored shield -- friendship, philosophy, desire, story itself. Mapping its chapters onto the constellations, the novel moves from funeral trumpets on Rynok Square to arguments about consciousness in candlelit kitchens, ribald with memory and wide awake to wonder.

A cult figure in Ukraine since his teenage debut, Lyubko Deresh arrives in English at last -- with a novel about how people keep their souls when the lights go out.