Russian Winter

I really wanted to like Russian Winter (#108) by Daphne Kalotay, but I could only muster an indifferent reaction to the book after I trudged all the way through it.  After all, the book jacket promises "...a luminous first novel - a literary page-turner of the highest order..." in this book about a prima ballerina from the Bolshoi Ballet who defects to the West during the Stalin era.  She dances in Paris and in London, but eventually winds up at the Boston Ballet as an artistic director for many years.  She decides late in her life to sell her fabulous collection of jewelry to benefit the Boston Ballet.  But Nina Revskaya has been keeping many secrets, and as news of the impending auction spreads, instead of purging her secrets along with the jewels, she finds that they are catching up to her instead.

Sounds like it should be interesting and exciting, yes?  Nyet!  Several times I almost gave up on this book, and I'm sorry I didn't.  The plot kept switching from Boston to Russia, from the past to the present, and from character to character at a glacial pace without moving the plot forward appreciably, but with heavy emphasis on the literary style. The feeling this reader got is that this is literature and that if I didn't appreciate it, it's because I'm not intellectual enough.  Ms. Kalotay has many literary credentials; she has taught at my alma mater Boston University, and has been a Fellow at a number of prestigious writers' workshops, but I think she's forgotten that the most important thing in a novel is the story.  If the author foreshadows events so heavily that the denoument elicits a yawn instead of a gasp, or creates characters with whom you can neither empathise or care enough to want to know what happens to them, what's the point?

I didn't learn anything new about the world of ballet; yes, I used to be a season ticket holder of the Boston Ballet when I lived in New England, but still...  The jewels that play a featured role in the plot are a set of Baltic amber, complete with an insect inclusion in every bead.  Ugh!  I found the idea so repulsive it was hard to even read about them in such detail.  The one thing that surprised me about this book is the poetry she includes that is supposedly written by the ballerina's husband, a minor Soviet poet.  I don't normally care for poetry, but if Vicktor Elsin were a real person, I would be looking for a translated copy of his work.

Would I recommend that you hunt down a copy of this book for your own collection?  Reader, I wouldn't.  I'll be glad to return my copy to the library and get on to something more meaningful.