Nikolai GrozniReseñas

I was surprised by how much I liked this. Part travel-logue, part Dharma bums, it tells the story of a young Bulgarian piano prodigy, who gives up his studies at Berlee and moves to Dharamsala to become a Buddhist monk. The writing was fresh and funny with lots of vivid descriptions of every day life.

was he meditating regularly? or was he just learning the tibetan language and studying texts with masters, and doing the classes and debates? I guess I wanted to know more about his actual practice - that's what I was expecting this book to be about. there were those stream-of-consciousness monologues here and there, about time and space collapsing - as if he was having a spiritual breakthrough, or on the brink of one. maybe I wanted more of that. I did love Tsar a lot. Geshe Yama Tseten was hilarious, with his encyclopedia of marine life. And Vinnie!! What a bizarre collection of characters.

It looks like a classic coming of age story. A teenager has major trouble with authority, and is more interested in drinking, doing drugs and having sex than doing what the adult world expects of him. Until, finally, big bad reality catches up with him and forces him to deal with the consequences.

But this skeleton frame is really the only thing unoriginal about this story, which quite frankly blew me away. For the setting here is the Musical Academy for Gifted Children in Sofia, Bugaria, in the years just before the fall of the iron curtain. Konstantin is not an ideologist, he’s just rebellious and has no patience for the strict regime at the Academy. He’s skipping classes to have sex in the attic with brilliant Irina, he’s cheating at tests, he’s selling school property to his hoodlum pals, he’s taunting the party’s informants, he’s constantly pulling pranks. And he gets away with it too, since he’s a genius pianist, a true wonderchild. He threads the thin line, his grades are more than wobbly - but he knows the school will never let him go, he will always defeat the mediocre by doing what he loves. Until the day his best friend Vadim, the other piano ace at the school, gets expelled, with no chance of ever seriously performing again. Suddenly, Konstantin’s beef with the teachers takes a very serious turn. Suddenly, the stakes are very high. Suddenly, music and futures and lives are destroyed.

This is probably the best coming of age story I’ve read ever. Grozni’s blend of dirty realism and lyrical descriptions of classical music is just right, and even an illiterate like me gets caught up in Konstantin’s imagery around Brahms, Bach and Chopin. You can really tell that Grozni himself has a background in classical music. The city Sofia is also beautifully caught, as are the late times of Bulgarian communism, a tired system with few earnest defenders, and the civil war in the faculty between the artistic teachers and the academic ones – the brutality of the latter only matched my the naivety of the former.

Best of all though, is how this books glissandos from bawdy entertainment to something very very serious, until I find myself silently gasping “oh no” at some of the final twists. I picked up Wunderkind at a sale, mainly to get a Bulgarian entry for my Europe Endless challenge. I wasn’t expecting the best book I’ve read this year.

This is a dark, gritty, sometimes difficult read set in Bulgaria prior to the fall of communism. The narrator of the story is Konstantin, a brilliant but disillusioned adolescent pianist who is training at a special high school for musicians. Despite its musical focus, the school never ceases to push party doctrine on the students. Konstantin finds himself disgusted at the "sheep" mentality of those around him which is in stark contrast to his own rage against the system.

There is a heavy focus on music throughout the novel. I have a musical background, but I was lost in some places. I didn't find that this detracted from the story (although it did feel a bit frustrating at times). The point, however, is not the technicalities of the music, but the meaning of the music in the story-- how it moves the characters, drives them, punishes them, owns them, and saves them. Music is the one light in Konstantin's dull, grey world, his source of meaning; his relationship with the music and with those who speak his same language is touching, and eloquently portrayed.

There is no question that the novel is very heavy, and difficult in places. The setting is dark (Sofia is constantly covered by rolling grey clouds), reflecting a monochromatic life of automatonism. Konstantin often seems like a beautiful, angry bird beating his wings uselessly against a cage. His musings about his life and the world around him are frequently depressing as he feels increasingly suffocated and trapped. It is the darkness of the tone that makes the novel so effective. It drives home, relentlessly and painfully, the cruel consequences of a system in which individiuals are sacrificed for the good of the whole, the playing field is unfairly evened out, and uniqueness and independent thought are discouraged. It is an unrelenting, unflinchingly honest portrait of life under the communist regime.

If I'm being honest, it was somewhat difficult to like Konstantin's character at first; he seemed distant, self-absorbed and arrogant at times. But his sardonic, philosophical voice is compelling and relentlessly honest. And as the story continues, he makes perfect sense as a product of his environment. Even the way his character narrates reflects that environment-- a place in which you never really let anyone see the "inside" stuff. The rich reward of this novel is that eventually we do get to see the real, deeper humanity of Konstantin, and it's worth the wait.

This is not a novel that's concerned with whether it makes you feel good, or whether you like the characters. It's a raw, real, honest novel that puts you smack in the middle of a nightmare world that could happen anywhere. It opens the door to that world, pushes you inside and insists that experience it for yourself. It is about showing the truth, and it couldn't do so effectively without its raw, unapologetic grit.

It's a tough read. There were moments I wanted to put it down. And I'm so glad I didn't, because I would have missed out. If you can stick with the tough parts, this novel has tremendous rewards in store. The language is at once tight, crisp and lush and has a beautiful, almost musical flow to it. This is a novel with something to say, and it will leave you uncomfortable, unsettled, and deep in thought, the way great literature is supposed to.

Konstantin is a child prodigy, playing the piano perfectly from a young age. He is sent to the best music academy in Bulgaria at the end of the Cold War right before the fall of the communist party. The story covers about two years of his life at age 16 and details the horrific abuse and hopelessness of the people during the late Eighties. The world Grozni has created seems almost out of a fantasy novel and it is hard to imagine a place where simple freedoms that we take for granted are nonexistent. The simple act of playing jazz is met with swift punishment and forced confessions of his unworthiness. As Konstantin finds himself rebelling against those in power, from his parents to the school teachers, he acts out and tries to lose himself in a daze of sex and alcohol ending up in a mental intuition before finally escaping into the real revolution taking place on the streets.

Each chapter begins with a music piece to set the tone and mood. I really wish that the book had come with a cd or playlist to listen to while reading since it would really enhance the story. It seems the story is based somewhat on the author's personal experience and I know even less about Bulgaria and that era than I should. This story truly enlightened me to the horrors that occurred in this era and location. It is not an easy book to read at times and even though there is a major surge in post apocalyptic novels for teens, this one proves that truth is stranger than fiction.

Wunderkind has so many aspects to it that make it a wonderful, engulfing read. Grozni has a way with words, and his writing is excellent. There's very few books that seriously impact me emotionally, but this was one of them. Sometimes after putting Wunderkind down for the night (and maybe it was just because I was reading late at night that I was so affected or because I'm still an angsty, stressed teenager), the whole loneliness and depression of the characters and setting made me feel like curling up in a ball. Even though I never noticed much plot to the novel, I never thought about this while reading. I was never bored, even though I was reading slower than usual! Grozni also writes about music in a way I've never before thought of it, a way I wish I could view it. Alas, I'm one of the mediocre musicians Konstantin so abhors.

Wunderkind reads like a (literary) dystopian novel at times, and I've figured out from reading this that a lot of dystopian plots and aspects have probably come from Soviet influences. Like with Holocaust books, I would look at the date Konstantin is writing (1987-89) and wish I could tell the characters to hang on for only one more year or two, then everything would be over.

Unfortunately, the engulfing writing didn't stick with the novel for its entire length. The high emotions lasted for about half the book, then it just gradually ceased to be quite so special. Still, I rank Wunderkind with my other favorite teen bildungsromans - The Body of Christopher Creed, Going Bovine, and Jasper Jones - though its literary flavor sets it apart from these as does its realistic Soviet setting based on the author's own experiences.½

Nikolai Grozni was a childhood piano prodigy well on his way to becoming a professional jazz musician when a sudden metaphysical crisis caused him to drop out of the Berklee College of Music and move to India to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk.

Turtle Feet is Grozni's articulate and thoughtful memoir about his years living in Dharamsala. Though Grozni moved to India to divest himself of his previous identity and devote himself to religious scholarship, it doesn't take long for a new life to begin sprouting in the space he had opened up. Though he does discuss some aspects of his Buddhist training, this book is less about his spiritual discipline than about how he was unexpectedly captivated by the chaotic beauty of Indian village life and the oddball cast of characters he befriends while simultaneously having fantasies of living a hermetic life in a remote cave.

Grozni is a skilled wordsmith with a wry sense of humor and impeccable eye for detail, and it is these talents that make the book both fascinating and a pleasure to read. I was quickly caught up in his colorful descriptions of how he and his other friends eeked out a surprisingly pleasant living in leaky rooms infested by snakes and rats. It becomes apparent very quickly that we need much less to survive than most of us in the West could fathom, and the free time granted by such detachment from materialism allows fruitful ground for other, more satisfying pursuits, including meditations on "the Indian Law of Probabilities, which states that some things happen or don't happen, again and again, for absolutely no reason."

Though Grozni introduces so many characters in the beginning of the book I couldn't keep them all straight, as the story progresses, his attention turns more specifically on his growing friendship with Tsar, a swaggering refugee from the Yugoslav wars. Tsar's quest for a solution to the problem of being an illegal refugee from a country that no longer exists provides and interesting structure for Grozni's musings on the nature of self and identity, and his juxtaposition of Tsar's brand of crazy wisdom with the formal lessons of Grozni's official teachers is offers some rich insights.

This is one of those books that makes me wish for half stars, for although there are many beautiful and funny moments found in this book, the ending was neither as tight or as satisfying as I had come to expect from the previous pages. But I'm bumping it up to four stars because I admire Grozni's willingness to open himself up in the process of de-mythologizing the world of Tibetan Buddhism and the quest for enlightenment in general. There are a lot of gems to be found here.

An interesting take on the experience of studying Buddhism as an ordained monk in India. He was a serious but somewhat skeptical student who befriended an odd bunch of other Western spiritual seekers and eventually decided to move on. This didn't go very deep and I hope he does a follow up with more emphasis on his philosohical musings.

I enjoyed this book. The protagonist is personable and his adventures colorful. But, really, the book doesn't deliver the sort of information that I hoped it to discover: a clear depiction of monk training in Dharamsala. Instead, we have the typical story of a young naif encountering "life" in unexpected ways: falling in with bizarre characters (Tsar, Vinne, Merrie Ann), receiving Buddhist instruction from a seemingly eccentric Geshe, training in Buddhist metaphysical debate, dealing with the squalor of life in Dharamsala (grey, lots of rain and mud, snakes, rats, fleas, and dingy chai shops).
Mostly, the book centers on Grozni's (Buddhist name: Lobsang) relationship to Tsar and that character's endless schemes to escape from India -- difficult because he doesn't have a passport. There isn't much about Grozni himself, his motivations, or the metaphysics of Buddhist thought; which is too bad because that is what I was most interested in. Tsar's adventures and the endless chess games with Vinnie, and the lopsided affairs of Merrie Ann are picaresque enough to hold one's interest, but they do not satisfy one's curiosity about Grozni. The juxtaposition of Tsar's metaphysics and chess-playing to the Buddhist debates and Geshe-la's instruction makes for interesting counterpoint, but, again, winds up, as inevitably does the book, as more of a divertissment than a substantial investment of what little reading time one might possess. On the positive side, the writing is very good; some of the descriptions of the mountains and surroundings exhibit quite masterful prose.