VLADIVOSTOK CIRCUS, lovely tale of self-discovery through running away and joining the circus

VLADIVOSTOK CIRCUS
ÉLISA SHUA DUSAPIN (tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$15.95 trade paper, available now

August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Tonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent . . . when I think of all those little bodies suspended between earth and sky, it makes me smile to remind myself that for some of them, their first flight begins with a fall.

Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar.

As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok is winding down, leaving the windy port city empty as the performers rush off to catch trains, boats and buses home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas.

What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion, set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean and immersing the reader into Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.

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My Review: In less time than it takes Houellebecq to clear his throat in The Possibility of an Island, a book which goes on a similar trip, Dusapin starts and finishes this story. Nathalie is a woman who leaves, finds, and abandons in a country that, unluckily for the author, is an international pariah at the time her novel appears in English. Even more unluckily, it features a Ukrainian acrobat performing in a Russian circus troupe. So, through no fault of her own, Dusapin has created an artifact of a bygone time in this story.

Swiss-educated Nathalie has a fashion degree, which she is using in Vladivostok, Siberia, to work with a troupe of acrobats as they pursue a very difficult performance piece. So, already the theme of leaving is prominent: She left tidy, bourgeois Switzerland for the extreme edge of the wildest place in a wild country, Siberia, at the edge of Russia. The country is itself at the edge of the Asian continent; something I think a lot of people forget is that Korea, Dusapin's previously centered culture, is very close to Siberia. Nathalie is now, temporarily, in a port city, working with a troupe of performers who tour with a circus, and who are practicing an extremely difficult maneuver called "the Russian Bar," a name that carries a whole different cultural freight of metaphor in 2024 than it did when she wrote the book in 2020.

This is, one would expect, the McGuffin, the thing that motivates the action but, in itself is fungible. I thought it sounded like a great McGuffin for a young woman abandoning the bourgeois life that a Swiss fashion design degree virtually condemns one to, by literally running away from home to join the bloody circus.

Only partially true.

We do indeed have the young woman (instead of Daniel, the narrator of The Possibility of an Island and my idea of "the Houellebecqian man") on a voyage of self-discovery among the acrobats. Their extremes of hard, dangerous work, their deeply set bonds of trust built from many, many painful falls and much incredibly focused work on balance and dexterity, aren't exactly subtle metaphors for the young woman who abandons an entire life in Switzerland to start afresh to encounter. The work that Nathalie does, the external and honestly almost extraneous work of dressing these finely honed athletic bodies pales beside their training. Her choreography likewise is just a way of getting them out of one position in time to enact another athletic feat, while telling a story.

So she is only a part of the externals, the appearances of the actual group...the men and women whose work and commitment to each other, to building their trust in each other, makes the act...verb and noun...possible in the first place. But this semi-outsider is the one needed to refine and design the public face, the pretty dress that they need to sell the act...verb and noun...to a group of judges.

Okay? You with me on the meaning, and the stakes?

But the McGuffin is decidedly not just the moitvator here. Author Dusapin, deft of phrase, makes this McGuffin into a deeply explored reality:

Backstage, a pungent animal smell hits me. Straw scattered on the ground. Streaks of dirt on the walls. Like a stable but with velvet lining—hoops instead of horses, waist-high wooden balls, metal poles, tangles of cables, drones in the shape of planes, straw hats hanging on hooks. Leon tugs a cord and the curtains part.
–and–
She places a chair on the bar, balances it on two legs. They hold it in place for as long as they can, barely moving a muscle. Sometimes Leon is there with me. He explains to me why exercises of this kind are so important: the flyer has to rely entirely on the bases for balance and not try to stabilise herself at all. Think of Anna as the chair, he says, that’s how passive she has to be. It’s one of the hardest things about the Russian bar discipline.

There's a lot more detail about the specifics of the Russian Bar, and while I applaud Author Dusapin for making the physicality of the act...verb and noun...so starkly plain to us, and drawing our attention to the extreme discipline it takes a woman to perform as expected under the constant pressure of a hypercritical, unseen audience, its details are rather more prominent in the story than my interest in them required. It gave me rather less pleasure, then, than Author Dusapin's previous novels did.

But let's be clear about this: I enjoyed this novel a good deal more than most. I enjoyed the lovely translation. I enjoyed the thought-provoking metaphor of acrobatic performance for a young woman's acquired presentation of self; I enjoyed the Asian setting's evocative potentials. This is a compact, intense dose of good storytelling.

INTO SIBERIA: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, a sort of anti-travelogue

INTO SIBERIA: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia
GREGORY J. WALLANCE
St. Martin's Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a book that ranks with the greatest adventure stories, Gregory Wallance’s Into Siberia is a thrilling work of history about one man’s harrowing journey and the light it shone on some of history’s most heinous human rights abuses.

In the late nineteenth century, close diplomatic relations existed between the United States and Russia. All that changed when George Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system and his eyes were opened to the brutality Russia was wielding to suppress dissent.

Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs or on horseback. He endured suffocating sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear. Prisoners in the mines were chained day and night to their wheelbarrows as punishment. Babies in exile parties froze to death in their mothers’ arms. Kennan came to call the exiles’ experience in Siberia a “perfect hell of misery.”

After returning to the United States, Kennan set out to generate public outrage over the plight of the exiles, writing the renowned Siberia and the Exile System. He then went on a nine-year lecture tour to describe the suffering of the Siberian exiles, intensifying the newly emerging diplomatic conflicts between the two countries which last to this day.

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My Review: Russia always seems to have vicious, cruel, authoritarian governments. George Kennan documented the horrifying repressions of the tsarist regime of Alexander III, father of the ill-fated Nicholas II. The adventurous man whose trip through Siberia Author Wallance is epitomizing first went to Siberia, governed by our then-close ally Russia, to lay a telegraph line across the country beginning in 1864 and eventually have it reach Western Europe. There was an Atlantic cable to England, but the Atlantic has these terrible, damaging things called "hurricanes" every so often, and then there's that big line of volcanoes up the middle of it that periodically erupts here and there...think Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull, 2010...so it has always made sense to have a backup.

Kennan spent a couple years doing the work, and was in love with Siberia by the end of it. The US and Russia, after a long period of close ties that peaked after we bought Alaska from them in 1867, began getting terrible reports about the political prisoners being abused in Siberian prisons. Kennan, by now a professional journalist, was widely thought to be the best possible person to investigate the situation on behalf of the US. He was vocal in his love for Siberia. He said publicly that he felt the complaints of terrible conditions were unlikely to be true...prisoners' families could join them there, after all!

Kennan and artist George Albert Frost traveled through the tsarist penal system, documenting conditions as they found them. Kennan wrote an eleven hundred-page exposé of the horrors they witnessed; Frost's drawings and photographs were included. Frost himself suffered a breakdown—what we would call today PTSD—and really was never quite the same again.

Kennan never lost his love for Siberia and its people but he became an implacable detractor of the Imperial Russian government. He had the evidence to back his outrage and disgust up. He devoted his next decade to a lecture tour enlightening audiences to the facts of what was euphemistically called "the Exile System" of political repression. When, decades later, the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, Kennan famously said that "the Russian leopard has not changed his spots."

I read this fascinating history of events I'd had only a passing awareness of in the context of Kennan's report to Woodrow Wilson about the Bolsheviks and his subsequent criticism of the Wilson Administration's pusillanimous response to them. His 1885 trip was touched on, but I now know why he was tasked by Wilson with preparing the ignored report. This book, not at all a long read, brings the full awfulness of Kennan and Frost's experiences to life. It is nothing short of gut-wrenching at times. It is extremely carefully footnoted and supplied with an admirable bibliography. I believe Author Wallance has done everything except invent time travel to bring us the best report of the facts possible. His contextualization was emotionally honest, but not of the sort that leads me to mutter, "don't try so hard."

I recommend it highly...but with the warning that delicate fleurs who don't enjoy details of physical cruelty should pass right by. I did, to be honest, feel as though these facts were rather more abundant than was strictly necessary. I had a half-star knocked off for feeling like I was being knocked in the teeth. As Frost's art exists, I wanted to see it, or some of the photos, just to see the realities behind the descriptions of the place itself, though not the abuses!

Not always an easy read, but a wonderfully immersive and interesting historical light on a country whose past binds it to the US.

SPRING IN SIBERIA, a well-honed spear of a story is thrust into one's readerly guts

SPRING IN SIBERIA
ARTEM MOZGOVOY
Red Hen Press
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 1985. Russia. As the Soviet Union disintegrates and Western capitalism spreads its grip across their land, the Morozov family finds itself consigned to the remote, icy wastes of Siberia. It is here that their only child, Alexey, is born.

A sweet and gentle schoolboy, Alexey discovers that reciting poetry learnt by heart calms his fears. That winter gales can be battled with self-invented games, and solace found through his grandmother’s rituals and potions. But when Alexey’s classmate, the son of KGB agents, confesses his love, the desire of two boys to be together clashes violently with the mad world around them.

Exploring the healing power of literature, the magic of first love, and the ways our family and homeland can save (or shatter) us, Spring in Siberia is a coming-of-age novel that, in the darkest of times, glows with hope and the yearning for freedom to be oneself—completely.

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My Review: A sweet, gentle childhood spent among adults who love him doesn't mean Alexey/Artem wasn't always made aware of how different he was from other boys. His father's mother, whose earthy peasant lifeway he came to root inside, never made anything easy but always taught him that he, and he alone, was responsible for his life by never excusing him from the work of wrestig food for his supper from the unforgiving Earth of Siberia. She taught him to accept the gift of belonging where you plant yourself with her stories of her own early life spent in the Russian west before she was sent to Siberia to care for her brother and then made her life there.

This lesson, above all, would serve the young man well: Make your own life, and thus your own happiness.

The entirety of Artem's...do pardon, Alexey's...life was spent in upheaval and dislocation as the old Soviet Union collapsed and a new old country Russia was (re)born. Being a child with a firm grounding in self-reliance, he takes the new world in his stride. I found his mother's transformation from a depressed, moping lump into a purposeful and energetic capitalist very interesting...and Alexey's trotting right along behind her, using the first money he ever earns by selling flower arrangements on a set of beautifully bound Pushkin books he sees in the local post office. It challenges this planned-economy-raised kid's willpower to save his money instead of spend it well beyond its breaking point, which everyone here should probably relate to. He sees his very first TV commercials and nothing on this wide green Earth will do but he must have some vile, neon-colored sludge to drink...much to his grandmother's appalled confusion, as he's been working with her to pick and preserve wild berries his whole life. What is suddenly so appealing about this new stuff?

In this quiet little moment in a boy's life, the entire tragedy-to-come of Russia: An old, bad system ends with nothing to replace it and a new on with inscrutable rules that aren't like the old rules confuses the bejabbers out of most people who aren't like Alexey's freshly liberated mother.

Her love for her son isn't smooth...he's mistaken for a girl a lot, is clearly a femboy, and is bullied mercilessly. Alexey's father, less successfully capitalist than his wife, is repulsed by the growing strangeness of his only child; the family disintegrates under the many stresses of the world. As Alexey enters adolescence, his isolation from his peers is ameliorated by the love of Anton, expressed in a sweet, sweet, strange and menacing scene on a balcony. Things for th young lovers go poorly, as one would expect them to, given the world's homophobia. Anton and Alexey, eventually, are driven apart by adult cruelty and hatred. How that plays out is so deeply sad, and so universally relatable, that I wanted to jump into the story and shepherd them through the hateful nastiness of small-souled bigots.

Alexey, smart as a whip and hell-bent on not being like Them, goes to university on a "red diploma"—a free pass into the higher education system. He chooses, as did Artem the Author, to train as a journalist in a country about to lose even its unfree statee-supported press. He's trained to observe from birth by being Other, so he has a clear vision of how unfair the new system is to the old system's relicts. Here, then, is the main pleasure I got from reading this sad, oft-told tale of growing up Other in a world that genuinely and utterly, in a bone-deep way, hates you for being yourself.

It's not just gay people, it's not just smart people, it's Them...whoever it is that isn't like the one hating with all their tiny soul's capacty...and every living one of us is Them to someone. Alexey realizes this in a blinding, road-to-Damascus moment in a school hallway.

Life is cruel to Others. This well-honed spear of a story is thrust into one's readerly guts. You'e never again going to look at that butch girl or that femme of a boy and think "Other" after reading this story. Artem/Alexey is a human being and, as we follow him through a rough and turbulent upbringing in a hostile world without a safety net of any material, social, or spiritual sort, we can no longer pretend that we're not all guilty of glossing over the costs of our own quiet little prejudices. Emma Goldman, social activist and poet whose lines are on the Statue of Liberty in New York's front door to the USA, said:

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.

EASTBOUND, simultaneously propulsively paced and meditatively told translation from the French

EASTBOUND
MAYLIS DE KERANGAL (tr. Jessica Moore)
Archipelago Books
$14.00 ebook, $18.00 trade paper

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Aliocha is racing toward Vladivostok with other Russian conscripts packed on a trans-Siberian train. Soon after boarding, he decides to desert. Over a midnight smoke in a dark corridor of the train, the young soldier encounters an older French woman, Hélène, for whom he feels an uncanny trust. He manages through pantomime and a basic Russian that Hélène must decipher to ask for her help. As they hurry from the filth of his third-class carriage to Hélène’s first-class sleeping car, Aliocha becomes a hunted deserter and Hélène his accomplice with her own recent memories to contend with. Eastbound is both an adventure story and a duet of vibrant inner worlds. In evocative sentences gorgeously translated by Jessica Moore, De Kerangal tells the story of two unlikely souls entwined in a quest for freedom with a striking sense of tenderness, sharply contrasting the brutality of their surrounding world.


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My Review: First, read this:

Hélène smiles. She agreed to take Aliocha in without hesitation, without even really weighing his request, and whether suspect ease or absence of discernment it doesn't much matter, she felt overwhelmed by this young man, absolutely unique in the world in the face of his request, and she who had reserved both bunks in the compartment so she might be alone with an opening onto Siberia to remember and imagine—two ways of seeing clearly—she had welcomed this stranger. She turns her eyes and lets them drift outside: what's done is done.
–and–
...this sordid scenario where she gave herself the lucky draw, proclaimed herself the hero, the stranger who descends from the sky, saves you and then slips away, ready to rack up self-convincing statements—I did my utmost, I did all that I could—all the while knowing she’s incapable of believing it: the worm of guilt is already lodging itself in her gut.

At the end of a tunnel, the craggy relief engulfs the window and obscures the sky whole, leaving it to the traveller to invent the most plausible or the most wild off-camera scene, but Hélène doesn't need to invent anything, everything is happening here, right here in front of her: all she has to do is look at the soldier sleeping on the bunk to feel that his presence is absurd, out of place, and to see that something's off here, something's shortcircuiting. In the end, whether it was this young man or a bear stretched out there, it would amount to the same thing, the same enormity, as though the real was suddenly crumbling, subverted by powerful dreams or completely other substances capable of catalysing metamorphoses, as though the real was tearing apart under the pressure of a faint but immutable deviation, something far bigger, far stronger than it—but no, there are no dreams in Hélène's head, no drugs in her blood, the young man is well and truly there —indeed, he is the real, the tangible present moment of life, here, breathing with his mouth open a little, body rising and falling imperceptibly with each breath, and if she were to place a hand on him, on his pale and downy cheek, on his shoulder, she knows she would feel him alive, he would stir, open an eye and wake up.
–and–
...and {the mothers} gather around Valentina Melnikova, President of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers—they’re fearsome, boiling mad, determined, and if the cameras turn up they rush to fit their eager faces in the frame: I don’t want my son to go, and he’s not even a drinker! When reprieves run out, the next option is the false medical certificate, bought for an arm and a leg from doctors who slip the cash directly into their breast pockets, and the families who’ve been bled dry go home and get smashed in relief. If this doesn’t work, and when anxiety has bitten down night after night to the quick, then come the direct attempts at bribery.

No matter who or what it is you're running from, you end up entwined with other people...maybe not the same people you started your journey with, but in a connection, a relationship of some sort, with a person or some people...that is the one and only escape you, any more than Author De Kerangal's characters, cannot make happen, no matter how bad you think you want it. It is the crux of this intense record of the collision of the runaways here, a privileged outsider and a miserably exploited insider each of whom needs to run away from Life's consequences. They don't know each other and can't get conventionally acquainted because they share no verbal language, but they recognize each other unerringly as fellows of the social class "runaway". Neither can really be blamed for the intensity of the drive to escape circumstances they do not like and reckonings they cannot afford. Anyone who has made a major life-decision will comprehend this readily. It's not like we haven't faced our own inflection points; maybe we lacked the courage—or the intense, impelling force of terror—of these two who went through with separate but intertwining truly terrible decisions. Maybe we were just luckier than either of them. But I expect most will find the fact of the read to be that they are relatable, real-feeling fictional creations. These two impulsive seekers are people.

How Author De Kerangal achieves this feat is using deft and economical prose, concise to the point of terseness, that focuses our attention on externals and surfaces and appearances...that uses the novella's tight time constraints to force the reader's, just as the characters', experience of the story into the damned claustrophobic confines of a crowded car of, a narrow corridor on, a train, then finally a small but private compartment on a long, transcontinental train...the longest single line in the world crossing the vastness of Siberia at a steady, slow 60 kph (about 40mph). Then she forbids more than passing expansion of your awareness and attention by adding a hazardous dimension of being hunted for a dangerous act of commission, of each being guilty of an actual legally definable crime. Like the classic films noirs of the late 1940s through the 1950s...most especially 1952's The Narrow Margin, another claustrophobic train-set escape-from-consequences story (unaccountably to me not widely known or loudly praised) that ends ambiguously, not resolving the fates of the protagonists with the finality of lesser stories. What the payoff of the read is can be summed up in that most uncommon of endings: the open field, the wide horizon, the absence of compulsion at last in a story that has heretofore been about the characters' compelled actions all stemming from each one's initial impulsive law-breaking decision. Unlike the usual affect of such an ending, Author De Kerangal's storytelling creates the sense of a satisfying ending out of this indeterminate state.

This is a pleasure read for those waking up to the reality that this is a world whose misfortunates live lives that are not thought of as valuable in and of temselves, but only as compulsory and unwilling sacrifices to tired and rotting systems...patriarchy, its running dog of war...whose zombies continue to create and devour ever more victims world seemingly without end. These souls, previously NPCs, are finally coming into the focus of the world's storytellers. Ever more urgent in the increasingly callous and uncaring world many around the globe are working assiduously to create.

I'm not quite there on making this a five-star read only because its bottled-in-the-train structure, finely crafted though it is, did not quite do full justice to Hélène's point of view. I knew Aliocha and victimized insider's fears more intimately than Hélène's uniquely powerful-because-outsider status and honestly felt deprived by this. An extra 15pp fleshing out her very multivalently privileged character would've been the final shove into five-star-read-hood, and would still have left this a tight, compact novella.