Sergey DyachenkoReseñas

Reviewers cannot resist linking Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s Vita Nostra with Harry Potter, but they usually have to settle for something like Harry Potter as written by Tolstoy, or better, Harry Potter as written by Kafka.
Connections with HP are ready to hand. There is a girl, Sasha, who is repeatedly told she is special. And there is a magic school with teen romance. Students there learn a brand of magic, are transformed, grow wings, and learn to fly, but such connections mislead.
The Institute for Special Technologies in the village of Torpa is no Hogwarts. Its tawdry campus is symbolically located on a street named for Sacco and Vanzetti, the anarchist Italian immigrants who were executed for murder in America after a trial that was a travesty of justice.
None of the Institute students are there by choice. They seem abused, downtrodden, and desperate. The professors routinely use threats and intimidation to achieve their educational ends, which are concealed from the students until the final high-stakes matriculating exam.
The creepiness starts right away. Sasha is recruited by a Svengali who tells her she must swim naked to a buoy each morning before dawn. When she gets home, she vomits gold coins containing the Institute’s logo. Failure might endanger her or her family.
What it has to say about adolescence is darkly Jungian. As a critique of education, it suggests quite literally that it turns students into abstractions that rob them of their humanity. I am too uninformed to say what it says about Russian-Ukrainian politics.

È stato faticoso leggerlo, ho dovuto intervallare con altri libri per alleggerirlo, è stato un viaggio in una torbida melassa. Non so se l'ho capito appieno o se c'è una mancanza di fondo, ma... bello, a modo suo.

A reread for my book club

I loved the book the first time I read it, a long time ago. I was overwhelmed, as in ”what is this???” and ”this is the weirdest book I’ve ever read!” But you never reread the same book, because you are not the same reader. So, I am not overwhelmed now, yet the book is brilliant and I see things I hadn't seen before and my thoughts on the reread were not the same.

Your regular ordinary world is slowly turning into a strange, nightmare one. I loved how it was done in the first pages.

This novel is an ode to the power of language and symbols, the gorgeousness and the horror of it. It is about finding meaning in chaos and darkness, through language.

The horrible things done to the students and the manipulation hit me very hard this time. I wonder if only someone who has lived through oppression and experienced a totalitarian society in all its ghastliness and absurdity could have imagined this world. I kept thinking about all the beautiful young things burning so bright, and those who would step on them and twist, twist, twist, until people are remade to suit somebody else.

Towards the end of the book, I started wondering about those text fragments that coalesced out of chaos (this is the power of the reread!). So I googled one of them and found Aristotle ☺ It warmed my heart, of course.

I must confess that I did not understand the ending on the first read. That’s because I swallowed the book whole, dived into it, and then came up gasping for air, wondering what just happened. This time: the oppressors of any kind would have you believe that Love = Fear. The ending is Sasha’s answer to that, and it is full of courage and brilliance.

That quote at the end is from the Gospels. Oh.

I read reviews that call this book the greatest fantasy novel ever, and, while I don't personally agree with that, there is definitely a lot to like ---the gradual reveal about the Institute for Special Technologies, Sasha's emotional and physical development and the other "changes" she goes through, the deeply drawn and interesting characters that were her teachers and classmates, her connection and disconnection to and from her family, and the connection to the systems of language --- all added up to an intriguing and enjoyable book. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator was excellent.

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: ???!

Audio Narration
The narrator is Jessica Ball. I thought her narration worked really well for this story, although it might have grated on me in a different story if she’d used the same tone. She spoke in a light, almost overly cheerful type of tone that somehow enhanced the darkness of the story.

I think the only complaint I had with the audio format had nothing to do with the narrator, but probably with the editing. There needed to be longer pauses between section breaks. It was jarring at times the way the story flowed from one section to another. Sometimes the only way I knew there had been a section break was because the story unexpectedly shifted in time.

Story
I can’t explain much about this story without revealing too much and spoiling the fun of discovery. Things are happening to the main character that she doesn’t understand and we learn more about what’s going on along with her. The story is told from the perspective of Sasha, a girl in her mid to late teens at the start of the book. It starts off with her on vacation with her mother at a beach. She encounters a creepy man who seems to be stalking her. When she fails to evade him, he demands that she accomplish a strange and seemingly pointless task. If she refuses to comply, Sasha knows something terrible will happen. Things get stranger from there.

In some ways this story was really very repetitive. It’s most obvious at the beginning, when Sasha is completing tasks, yet I didn’t get bored with it because I was very curious to see where things were going. Later, at the school, it also got quite repetitive in the sense that Sasha tended to follow the same patterns in the way she dealt with what was going on. That started to wear on me a little. But overall the story held my interest well and kept me curious to learn more.

Things fell apart for me toward the end. A big premise of the story is that it’s impossible for the people who know what’s going on to explain anything of substance to the people like Sasha who are still in the dark. This of course frees the authors to not have to explain anything substantial to the reader if they so choose, and I felt like this was what happened here. It was all quite nebulous and metaphorical, which is something I tend not to have a lot of patience with. I like more solid plots, whether intricate or simple, and I like all the puzzle pieces to fit together by the end and form a clear picture in my head, regardless of whether the author explains to me what the picture is supposed to be or leaves me to infer it on my own. I was particularly unsatisfied by the abrupt and ambiguous ending.

Maybe reading this in print would add greater clarity than what I got by listening to an audiobook, but I suspect in this case I would have had a similar reaction in print. There is another related book published, so maybe that answers some questions. This was originally published in Russian. The original series has four books, but only the first and fourth have been translated into English. However, if I understand correctly, I believe the second and third aren’t directly related to Sasha’s story and the fourth book, which is translated, continues it.

I’m somewhat undecided on continuing this series in print someday, but I’m leaning toward no. It was interesting and held my interest, but it was ultimately unsatisfying. I suspect this is more a factor of the authors’ writing style than it is a matter of the story simply not being complete yet. I’m rating it at 3.5 stars and rounding down to 3 on Goodreads.

I was somewhat amused when I tried to listen to part of the audiobook during a road trip. I don’t do great with audiobooks while driving, so I only listened for maybe 30 minutes before I’d had enough and tried to switch back to music. And suddenly I felt as trapped as Sasha in my situation, because I could not get out of the audiobook. The car’s screen would claim I’d switched to FM, or whatever else I tried to switch to, and then the audiobook would keep playing. And playing. And playing. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the phone. It kept playing. And playing. And playing. I ultimately had to disconnect my phone from the car and let it sit for over a minute before I could reassert my own will about what I listened to in my car.½

I thought The Scar, Vita Nostra, and The Burned Tower were all such remarkable reads that I was excited to get my hands on this book as soon as it came out.

Unfortunately it was a mixed bag for me. There's a lot of good setup and development here. Alyona, her creepy stuffed bear, her chaotic relationship with Alexey, and her quest are wonderful. Unfortunately, it's Alexey who guides us through this story and he is a difficult protagonist to spend time with. His DJ persona I found both repellent and dull. I wanted much more of the musical quest and strange psuedo-family dynamic, and much less of DJ Aspirin womanizing at clubs and rambling full pages of nonsense into a microphone with zero charisma.

BUT if you don't mind an unlikeable protagonist, you may appreciate this one more.

Read 10%, got uttlerly and unbelievably bored, gave up. First, the rhythm killed me, second there really was no characters or much plot, third I expected a fantasy and got a straight up YA. Really not to my taste. Too boring, too lame, too YA. Perhaps Westerners are impressed by the "exotic" background, but for me it was just everyday, boring day to day East Europe life.

Vita Nostra was first published in Ukraine in 2007, in the original Russian. After garnering prizes and a cult following, this novel by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko is now being published by HarperCollins in an English translation by Julia Meitov Hersey. It has been compared to «The Magicians» by Lev Grossman, who has claimed that Vita Nostra «has become a powerful influence» on his own writing. A Goodreads reviewer describes it as «Harry Potter, were it written by Lev Tolstoy». It’s a helpful analogy, but one which does not really prepare you for the novel’s enthralling weirdness.

It starts out like a slice of post-Soviet realism, with Sasha Samokhina, the 16-year old protagonist, vacationing at a rather sordid resort with her (single) mother. Sasha notices that she is being stalked by a stranger, whom she cannot avoid, however hard she tries. Things soon take a turn for the bizarre. When Sasha finally speaks to the stranger, he sets her awkward challenges which border on the abusive, and test her physical and psychological endurance to the limit. The price for failing is high – one near-miss brings about nearly fatal consequences for the persons closest to Sasha. It turns out all these rather disturbing goings-on are a prelude to Sasha being called to join the mysterious «Institute of Special Technologies». Potterheads will be disappointed to learn that this is no Russian Hogwarts. It is situated in the nondescript provincial town of Torpa; its more advanced students seem deranged or crippled; its lecturers are threatening; its curriculum, and particularly the dreaded «Specialty» lecture, seems maddeningly – and pointlessly - difficult. And there’s a clear sense that failure is simply not an option. Throughout the novel, Sasha considers not entering the Institute and, eventually, escaping from there. But can she ever bring herself to do that when it would put her life and her family in mortal danger? The atmosphere of dread never lifts – and it is accentuated by the fact that for most of the book, neither Sasha nor the readers are really aware what the course is all about, what its aims are and what it will all lead to. Like the protagonist, we are kept in the dark and slowly discover (part of ) the truth with her.

These gradual revelations makes Vita Nostra eminently readable, despite the fact that its plot is not really spectacular and often built on abstruse concepts. At one level, it can be enjoyed as a coming-of-age or college novel, one in which Sasha Samokhina experiences love and grows into an independent adult. At the same time, the fantastical elements give it an added dimension, making us wonder what the heck is going on at the Institute. By the end of the book, we notice that the novel has prodded us into considering weighty philosophical concepts, such as fate and free will – do we really have choices, or are these set by others, or by our own fears and limitations?

This was one of the most mind-boggling, unusual and memorable books read this year – and probably the one with the most striking cover. If I chop off a couple of stars from my rating it is because I found the language used rather awkward – I can’t say whether it’s the translation or a quirk of the original, but I felt that the shifts from colloquial to a more high-flying style were clunky and unconvincing. But this is, ultimately, a novel one reads for its baffling ideas – I recommend it precisely for being so strange.

Read more at http://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2018/12/bad-education-vita-nostra-by-marina-an...

The set-up for this is basically Harry Potter: a bunch of kids get recruited into a magic school. But this isn't really a young adult book. It's quite a bit darker than your average YA. For one thing, the kids are coerced. The professors incentivize their pupils mainly through fear. Bad Things will happen if they slip up. Bad Things do happen when they slip up. Like relatives dying. Loss of sanity. Existence ending. Fun diversions such as Quidditch do not exist.

Nonetheless, the main character is a teen and I think most YA fans would like this story, even if it's not been marketed as YA fiction or considered as such by its authors (at least as near as I can tell).

The Dyachenkos have crafted a tense story with a flawed by quite likeable protagonist. The support cast, even the dour and strict professors, are well-done too. Never clichés or motivated by simplistic things like being 'bad' or psychopaths or dumb or whatever.

Sasha is the star pupil of her class and beyond. Her power and ability grow quickly in just the first couple years at the institute. Too quickly for her physical and mental development. That Sasha thirsts for knowledge only complicates things. She can't help but read ahead, to experiment, to test. Willpower does not figure into it much of the time. At time's she simply gets so drawn in she's unaware she's going too far. And this is something that takes her professors a while to appreciate.

Sasha endangers herself and those around her, and even potentially the world itself.

The authors handle the situations Sasha gets herself into deftly. I never felt them to be repetitive or tedious. And the school being what it is, you really do wonder whether she'll make it. The Dyachenkos kept me in suspense at least. Sure, I figured the odds were she would make it, but not making it always seemed to be in the cards. And so the ending didn't shock me either way. The suspense bore me along beautifully.

Vita packs a fair bit of mystery. At first, the nature of the School of Special Technology is a cipher. What is the technology? How is it special? How are Sasha and her fellow students special? The students are kept in the dark and so is the reader. They do not know enough to be able to understand the answers to those questions. For the most part, Sasha and the reader learn about the nature of the school and Sasha herself through Sasha's experiences. With a little supplementation by Sasha's teachers and advisor's here and there.

And so, along with whether she will pass or fail, Sasha's true nature remains a mystery right up until the end, making for a book that, while not quite unputdownable, I thoroughly enjoyed.

Sasha is a 16-year-old who’s approached by a strange man while she’s on vacation with her mom. The man stalks her around until she relents and starts performing strange, pointless tasks he gives her. Once he deems the tasks finished, he tells her that she has been accepted into a special school, and she doesn’t really get a say in whether she goes or not. This is the carrying theme throughout the book. Strange men tell her what to do, she does it against her will because they know better, fearing constantly for the safety of her family, and getting more and more sucked into the weirdness that is being taught at the school.

I think the premise here is interesting, and the concepts the book introduces by the end are very original and inventive. I also think this book is the best representation of “dark academia” I’ve actually read. This is not a murder mystery of entitled assholes attending university. This is, in fact, dark academia.

I find it a little difficult to rate this book. I didn’t really enjoy the reading experience, nor the writing style, but I did appreciate what the book was trying to do. In the end my biggest issue was that this felt a lot like listening to someone tell you a very intricate and convoluted dream they had. You can marvel at the creativity of their subconscious, but in the end nothing about it is really all that relevant to you, specifically.

Sixteen-year-old Sasha is enjoying a pleasant beach holiday with her mother, when she becomes aware that a strange, unsettling man is watching her. The man coerces her in an impossible-seeming fashion into performing certain odd, seemingly meaningless, mildly transgressive actions, with bizarre results. Then he tells her she's been accepted to a college she's never heard of, much less applied to. And she will be attending. Or else. Even once she gets there, though, it's not at all clear exactly what she's studying. But it seems to be doing something worrying to the students...

It's tempting to think of this as a sort of weird, dark mirror of the Harry Potter books. The obvious comparison here is with that other dark school-for-magic story, Lev Grossman's The Magicians, and, indeed, there's a blurb from Grossman on the cover. But I have to say, I liked this a lot more than The Magicians. (Or at least the first book. The rest of the trilogy did grow on me.) And the general vibe of the two is very, very different. Whereas The Magicians feels as if it sort of sucks everything magical out of magic, this one feels positively permeated with a deep, profound feeling of something mystical and extraordinary -- despite the fact that the students mostly aren't doing things that we might conventionally think of as magic, and words like "magic" are never used.

Exactly what the students are doing is hard to say. I do think that, if I'd read this in a worse, less patient mood, I might have found myself annoyed and frustrated by how opaque so much of this is, how little is explained, and how much of what we are told or shown is expressed in ways that are abstract or oblique or perhaps even flat-out nonsensical. But I'm very, very glad I did read it in the right mood, one that allowed me to fully appreciate the way in which the authors are approaching something that is literally impossible: giving us a glimpse into the process of learning something so deeply alien that it simply cannot be understood by human beings... and a viewpoint character who must herself become something non-human and incomprehensible if she is going to master it. It's audacious and fascinating and more than a little disturbing, and it worked for me much, much better than I might have expected it could.

I should note that this was translated from Russian, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of some of the translation choices. There were definitely a lot of moments where I felt like the translator must have been struggling to find an English word to express whatever was in the original, and ended up landing on one that felt a little off, or inappropriately obscure or something. In another novel, maybe that would have bothered me more, but in this one perceiving it all through an obvious extra layer of translation maybe just enhances the overall feel of strangeness and provokes some actually appropriate thoughts about the ways in which the words available to us do or don't fully capture meaning. Anyway, despite all that, I found the novel very readable and fully capable of evoking the intended emotional reactions, so I think we can say the translator was doing the really important stuff right.

Ottimo

I liked it tentatively. The prose was all the time interesting, beautiful at points, and strange at others. The plot was amorphous and the ending only an ending to a part. There was a lot going on and not all of it was wrapped up.½

Great writing. Very bizzare fantasy. Moving ending.

**I received this book through the LibraryThing Member Giveaway program in exchange for an honest review**

This was a beautifully written book based in Poland and translated into English - and I have to commend both the authors and the translator for creating such a lyrical and magical, while also dark and eerie, story that I finished in under a week.

I will say that I did NOT find it to be a "dark Harry Potter" as some reviewers described - instead I would say it is a dark but poetic fairytale that is centred around a musically gifted and mysterious young girl taken in by a middle-aged DJ who doesn't seem to live for much beyond making money and having casual flings with pretty women. This story to me is far more about finding what is truly important in life, and creating meaningful bonds with others, than about magic and suspense (although it has both).½

eerie and compelling person or word

Where to begin? I have not read anything like Vita Nostra, ever. It's like if the Harry Potter books went down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. The narrative starts out strange and then only gets stranger from there.

The main character, young Sasha Samokhina, possesses the extraordinary raw potential to become... something more. To try and describe that 'something more' wouldn't do it justice. But she needs guidance. Enter the enigmatic Farit Kozhennikov, her frustratingly stern teacher.

To say much more here would be to say too much. Vita Nostra is better experienced by diving right in.½

Love is not when you are aroused by someone, it’s when you are afraid for that person.

This review can also be found on my blog.

I'm clearly in the minority here since all my friends loved this, but I found this book to be utterly incomprehensible. I had no idea what was going on 95% of the time and had so much difficulty following things. The book really leaves its reader to do a lot of the heavy lifting, so be prepared to make some leaps on your own to figure out what's happening. There were aspects of it that were really compelling, which is why it gets 2 stars instead of 1, but I got very little out of reading this and felt like it was so much longer than 400 pages.

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“To live is to be vulnerable”

I'm so incredibly mind fucked right now I don’t even know where to start…. This review is probably going to be a bit messy. Like my mind.

This was probably the weirdest book I’ve ever read. Let’s start there. The way “magic” works here is so unique, it’s not even magic, it’s kind of a science of life? I still haven’t quite figured it out, I’m confused but in a very good way. Our protagonist, Sasha, had to work hard for her powers and I loved watching her do it. It did not come easy to her, she cried and she went through all sorts of emotions to become what she needed to be. The Sasha at the beginning of the book is a completely different person compared to the Sasha at the end of it. Obviously, I mean three years pass throughout this. You get to watch this confused girl grow into a flawed but bright young woman.

This freaking school was brutal. They forced these kids to come and study a bunch of weird crap and if they didn’t then bad stuff happened. My first impression, naturally, was that this was a cult of sorts. That these kids were getting brainwashed. I was creeped but fascinated.

It was quite refreshing to not have romance be the focus of the book. Vita Nostra wasn’t really character driven but it also wasn’t plot driven, it was somewhere in between… Concept driven? Is that a thing?

The writing built these fascinating images in my head and it slightly reminded me of the way Laini Taylor’s works made me feel. I’m not saying you’ll like this if you like her stuff but try it out if you do.

As for the audiobook, which I listened to as I read, it was quite lovely. I would definitely recommend it. Without it, I would probably be a lot more confused. The narrators' voice was relaxing. She did, however, mess up most of the Russian names but it’s fine.,. I’m used to it lol

Well... That was a trip

This was a strange read. The "magic" in this book is not like anything you would expect. By the end things kind of make sense but... The ending was ... Interesting. A good read of you like school dramas. A great read if you like headaches after reading.

This sinister exercise in magical realism begins well enough, so you want to keep flipping the pages to see what the authors really have in mind. In the end though, the fate of the female protagonist leaves one scratching your head, making you wonder just what the hell is going on. Apparently, if one goes by an explanation offered at "Good Reads," successfully completing one's program of study at the school where most of the events happen means becoming an angel of the lord and the key to unlocking a new world; really!? I need to mull over this some more to decide whether the problem is me, or whether the authors aren't quite as clever as they think they are. Your enthusiasm for the more symbolist flavors of Russian literature will probably condition your reception of this novel. As a light spoiler I might note that the original Russian book cover art can be taken quite literally, besides being a glorious exercise in kitsch.

A little odd, but a very engaging story, all in all. It has a thread of, well, supernatural. And I think this was supposed to be thought provoking and have some "meaning" in the nature of the world, or people, or whatever. I don't read "meaning" in stories so probably missed the point. Of course, this did not take away my enjoyment of the story - if you accept it has a supernatural component, you can just go with the flow. You might even care about how the main character's life turns out...

The narration is very good. There is no gore or swearing or sex. Over all worth the credit.½

This review has been so hard to write. I'm not entirely sure if it will make sense to someone who hasn't read the book. I am making an attempt anyway.

At it's heart Vita Nostra is a story about that period of time of the early transition to adulthood, that 17-20ish age range, and just how terrifying that time truly is. All while being wrapped in a speculative fiction story about metaphysics. Never before have I felt a book's description has left me unprepared for what I was about to read. Yes, Sasha is chosen to attend a special school after completing some bizarre tasks for a mysterious stranger. And yes, that school could be considered magical if looked at a certain way. A Slavic Harry Potter this is not. I have been told a closer comparison is The Magicians though I have not read those books so couldn't say for sure.

Vita Nostra is easily one of the strangest reads I've experienced in a long time. The plot is deceptively simple. It doesn't follow standard story writing at all. There is no antagonist, no conflict as such, characters are semi-cardboard, there is a heavy undercurrent of fear and terror throughout. In any other book this would have seriously bothered me and yet here it is fascinating, engaging and makes for an almost compulsive read. Even with a slow pace I kept finding myself turning pages long after I should've turned out my light each night. It is a deeply philosophical read, heavy on the existentialism, and utterly brilliant.

For most of the book we are just as confused and in the dark about what's going on as Sasha is and we discover it right along with her. Once enlightenment is achieved, things get really weird! Metamorphosis is necessary. The ending is deliberately left open to interpretation.

I could see this as a love it or hate it book depending on how much you enjoy a Kafkaesque style. It also appears to be the start of a series. Based on Google translate of the summaries of the other books, the rest of the series seems to be completely unrelated and are not yet translated to English. This reads well enough as a stand alone.

So why three stars? I rate books on the enjoyment of my reading experience. Given the current state of the world and the underlying terror inherent in Sasha's story the book tended to trigger the generalized anxiety I have at the moment. I think I'd like to reread this again in a couple years and see how I do.

An interesting novel of metaphors for being educated and growing up. Some have compared it to Harry Potter, but I never saw that particularly while reading it, maybe on looking back.
I enjoyed it and it made me thoughtful, though at times it was thick.

Okay but..can I get more ending please?