Illegible

• A good book for anyone who wants to view the shadowy side of themselves from the outside. The protagonist is an ordinary member of the intelligentsia who never managed to become a great poet. And probably never could have. It is a book about the Soviet past taken from an unusual angle: there is no politics as such; a person's life is woven like a ribbon into the braid of the state's history. The author demonstrates a nimble style that isn't spoiled even by detailed descriptions of everyday grit and the unkempt reality of domestic life.

• I liked the novel “Illegible” because behind its pages I saw and felt living human beings. I am glad that I am voicing this thesis after my opponents, because one cannot really work with it in polemical discourse anyway. I cannot prove it—unless someone hung various sensors on me while I read and watched the needles fluctuate on a life-meter.

• One thing Gandlevsky's protagonist never allows himself is to complain about circumstances, even though all the ugliness is portrayed just as recognizably as the marvelous, magical, and multicolored Moscow, the ecstasy of spring, falling in love, and poetry, the sweet ache of unrequited affection... That is precisely the point: the novel possesses an unborrowed love of life and a sense of personal dignity. Not only does the hero cast an ill shadow upon the author, but the author also bestows upon him his own noble posture and poetic timbre.

• “Illegible” is a traditional novel, not an essay, not an article, not memoirs in one form or another. “Illegible” is a real novel. Paraphrasing Eisenberg: something else might not be a novel, but this certainly is. It is a novel with all the requisite twists and flourishes. With characters, with a sturdy plot that is genuinely enthralling. There is love, disappointment, and artistic creation. A genuine richness.

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