The Memory Artist

3.1
49 Reviews
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Introduction:
Winner of The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award 2016.How can hope exist when the past is so easily forgotten? Pasha Ivanov is a child of the Freeze, born in Moscow during Brezhnev's repressive rule over the Soviet Union. As a small child, Pasha sat at the kitchen table night after night as his parents and their friends gathered to preserve the memory of terrifying Stalinist violence, and to expose the continued harassment of dissidents. When Gorbachev promises glasnost, openness, Pasha, an eager twenty-four year old, longs to create art and to carry on the work of those who came before him. He writes; falls in love. Yet that hope, too, fragments and by 1999 Pasha lives a solitary life in St Petersburg. Until a phone call in the middle of the night acts as a summons both to Moscow and to memory. Through recollections and observation, Pasha walks through the landscapes of history, from concrete tower suburbs, to a summerhouse during Russia's white night summers, to haunting former prison...
Added on:
June 30 2023
Author:
Katherine Brabon
Status:
OnGoing
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The Memory Artist Reviews (49)

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Jennifer

June 24 2016

I found this book to be flawed in its construction. I say this with much disappointment because some of the writing is very good. There are a few zingers such as the description of us as the bewildered authors of dreams (pge 28), the parallel between forgotten words and waves (pge 60) and the never ending promise of 'becoming communism' (pge 80), which in this passage shows how this promise operates almost as an opiate of the masses to keep them in compliant anticipation. But there weren't enough of them to overcome what I didn't like about the book.<br /><br />Not much seemed to happen, either plot wise or emotionally; the terrain of the book appeared to be unvaried. So there wasn't much for my memory of previous passages to hook onto and recall at later points. As a result, I was reading the book trying constantly trying to recall where certain people and places fitted in, which I found a bit troubling for a book about memory and memories.<br /><br />On reading chapter 33, I finally felt a sense of intrigue as to the book's theme of memory, memories &amp; how this intersected for the character. However, it was a bit too late by then as I felt that up till that point the main character had not moved from his particular melancholic vantage point. If only the author had started with this chapter.<br /><br />For me, the writing never changed pace or tone and remained stuck at a lethargic pace. I have no problems with characters remaining 'stuck', as this can be the tension within a story that keeps the reader reading. But when the writing seems stuck too, that can make reading feel like a chore rather than a joy.

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Michael

May 03 2016

Elegant prose and a clear voice define “The Memory Artist”, the debut novel from Katherine Brabon. The story, set in and around Moscow and St Petersburg/Leningrad, follows the narrator Pasha as he seemingly drifts through time and space attempting to make sense of his life after the fall of the old Soviet order. Like many others before and since, he discovers that freedom can be rather discomfiting and existence lacking in purpose, after a lifetime of defining yourself in opposition to a force that no longer exists.<br /><br />A recurrent theme in the work is the exploration of memories and maps; both of these many-layered and subject to constant revision (additions, omissions, and concealments), and both unreliable aids to navigation. Brabon makes much of the anchoring of memory to time and place, although she also examines memory’s ability (paradoxically) to transcend both.<br /><br />I found echoes of Foucault’s “History of Madness” in the premise that a person is insane when labelled so by psychiatric discourse; truth effects extended here to the State, whose discourse overpowers even that of psychiatry, and can thus consign those who disagree with it wholesale to the ‘other’ and have them committed to its care. Whole generations of Soviet citizens accepted the normalcy of such practices, or acquiesced through fear.<br /><br />This is an intelligently written story which requires close reading on occasion, and close attention to nuanced ideas. Such attention is rewarding however, perhaps especially for those who can recall times when they seemed on the cusp of creating, writing, painting something significant only to find themselves reflecting later on these intentions, which had become by then the history of a future which will never be. <br /><br />© 2016 M Wildenauer

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Peter

May 04 2016

This is a beautifully crafted and rewarding book to read.<br /><br />At first, I did not understand Pasha’s apparent indifference to the death of his mother. However his matter of fact response became understandable when seen against the backdrop of the political oppression and state sanctioned disappearances that happened to the dissidents that his parents mixed with. I came to feel that Pasha’s attitude represents an emotional ignorance or deprivation that afflicts victims of trauma, many who are not allowed to grieve or even understand the acts that affect them. (Anya as a child sleeping furthest from the front door.) Pasha, and his contemporaries, are victims of the oppression of the past, having to deal with the memory, some if it reconstructed, or lack of it. It took me a while to understand that but I think that this was me, not the story.<br /><br />I have always been a lazy reader, tending to skip over hard to pronounce names and unfamiliar words but with this book I decided “No”, I should make an effort and then I realized. Within the writing is the gentlest rhythm that is totally invisible otherwise. Upon trying to pronounce the Russian names: I perceived this rhythm, the book immediately became more Russian, I felt closer to the story, the writing jumped out at me further than it previously had. I immediately wondered, like the author’s reference to yellow houses, how many other Easter eggs (or babushkas) had she planted for the more insightful reader. For this reason I want to read it again as I became much closer to the novel as I read on.<br /><br />Within the book I thought that there was a beauty to the writing: delightful turns of phrase showing that the writer has a vivid capacity to communicate. This beauty at times quite shocked me also. Reading about Pasha’s personal conflict with words and art, past violence and memory I was struck by the author’s capacity to write with beauty about acts of oppression and horror. There are better examples, but rather than spoil those … “Thinking of all those physicists mining coal, … the poets and teachers digging canals, the engineers, doctors, young parents buried in unknown, unmarked graves with a single, neat, horrific hole in their skulls, makes you wonder what might have been.”<br />That ‘single hole’ conveys the horror, the detail, the injustice of an event of mass killing under the Stalin era with such an economy of writing - it is a single sentence of structural beauty. It so deftly demonstrates the bluntness and matter of factness which many people forced to endure trauma must then live with. There are many more such sentences which rewarded me as the reader.<br /><br />The issues dealt with in the book have no nice neat edges or bright happy endings. Indeed, the false light of the constant twilight of Russian summers haunts the characters in this book. I think that the author may leave a clue (or perhaps a babushka: open one and your find another, then another – I think I have worked this out) when she says “… you can’t give a system like that (Stalinism) the dignity of an explanation”, then going on to provide the reader with a clever revelation about question marks in her book. Pasha does find a type of resolution never the less.<br />This is a book of Literature. <br /> <br />The Memory Artist also took me on a wonderful tour of Russian history providing lots of snippets that will stay will me. (E.g. The Philosopher’s Ships)<br /><br />In talking of the past of another country, does the author offer anything to contemporary Australians? If one thinks of Australia’s lack of protection for political or corporate whistle-blowers, the wasted lives of refugees held in off shore detention centres, the political and institutional indifference to victims of child abuse, the stolen generation and women who suffer domestic violence then, YES. We are not so far from Pasha’s conflicted state of dealing with a past that he only partly understands. <br /><br />The Memory Artist can teach us to better understand the intergenerational damage and its effects upon memory and how individuals might deal with the effects of both.<br />

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Lisa

April 29 2016

This year’s Vogel Award winner, The Memory Artist is a departure from the kind of Australian themed books that we have become used to with this prize. Recently the award has brought us some really impressive books, novels which have tackled important issues such as Aboriginal dispossession in Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party; Soviet interference in Australian affairs in Document Z by Andrew Croome; and the ethics of following orders in After Darkness by Christine Piper – but all these novels would have been eligible for the Miles Franklin Award too because they have presented Australian life in any of its phases. But The Memory Artist is set entirely in Russia, almost entirely in Moscow and St Petersburg, and the novel explores the process of recovering the memory of Stalinist repression. Brabon has tackled a large canvas for her award-winning novel.<br /><br />Repression. I have used this entirely inadequate word to summarise decades of Stalin’s violence against his own citizens. Unknown millions died in the wake of collectivisation and the Great Purge which took place in the 1930s. As Stalin consolidated his power, not to be relinquished until his death in 1953, a climate of terror descended. Rivals, dissidents and intellectuals fell to an ever-expanding network of informers, and they disappeared without trace, either to the gulags or to ‘psychiatric’ institutions, or else were shot and buried in mass graves. After Stalin’s death there was a brief period of liberalisation known as The Thaw under Kruschev, but it didn’t last long and in 1964 Brezhnev took power and a repressive cultural policy was restored.<br /><br />Brabon’s novel begins with the birth of its narrator Pasha in 1964, covers his childhood during the Brezhnev Freeze, and explores the flowering of hope and optimism as Gorbachev introduced economic reforms (perestroika) and new freedoms under ‘openness’ (glasnost). When it’s 1986, Pasha is twenty-four. He thrives in the new atmosphere in Moscow. He goes to street protests on the Arbat (a pedestrianised street in central Moscow); he listens to music that used to be forbidden; he gets to wear jeans; and with his girlfriend Anya he plans to research and write the history of repression. Both he and she have parents who were victims of the Freeze, and Pasha has childhood memories of covert dissident meetings in his mother’s apartment. Now he can tell the story, he thinks.<br /><br />To read the rest of my review please visit <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/06/05/the-memory-artist-by-katherine-brabon-vogel-winner-2016/">https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/06/05/t...</a>

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Carolyn

August 23 2017

I didn't initially engage with this novel and put it aside to read something with more energy. But I'm glad I went back to it. It is a melancholy, cerebral novel, a meditation on memory and the role of the artist in commemorating or trying to bring back past events. <br /><br />I recently read The Wish Child which explored, in part, how ordinary Germans were swept up in support of Hitler, through propaganda and fear. The Memory Artist looks at the effects of another dictator, Stalin: how people experienced his reign of terror and also how they dealt with the revelations about the system once reforms were introduced. The narrator, Pasha, the son of dissidents, is attempting to reclaim the past, after his mother's death in 1999 makes him face memories of childhood, love and political activism. <br /><br />The time in this novel shifts between the 60s (the Brezhnev era), the late 80s and early 90s (Glasnost and Perestroika under Gorbachov) and the late 90s when the Soviet Union had collapsed. It also moves between the cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. Brabon studied Russian history at university and began to write about these issues in a factual way before deciding her ideas needed the novel form. She was successful in winning Australia's Vogel Award in 2016 (for a first novel manuscript). <br /><br />The novel tells us how people disappeared; how the dissidents spoke of them to insist on their existence when the state denied it; how poems and stories were recited and passed on but never written down; how layers of reality existed beneath the reality imposed by the state. <br /><br />Another aspect of the Stalinist regime which the novel emphasises is the use of psychiatric institutions to incarcerate those opposed to the system - on the premise that one had to be mad to do so. Pasha interviews people who experienced these institutions and tries to write about it. However, he always feels he falls short. <br /><br />The reclamation of the past - when it does come - comes not only through physical evidence such as mass graves but - seen as more important in this book - through words, through art, through monuments, through maps and through experiences of the landscapes of memory. A particularly moving section is when Pasha goes with an older man to visit a village where one of the many Gulags used to be. Another is Pasha's experience of the dacha outside St Petersburg that he feels as "a halfway point, balancing precariously between a past I was trying to recall and a present I was barely in. A place where memories came to gather and where present time, such as it was, didn't touch." Pasha and his friends are distressed at the way so many young Russians move blithely into a new Western-style culture, willing to bury the past in forgetfulness. <br /><br />Once I adapted myself to the quiet mood of this novel and took time to absorb the ideas of memory and the role of the artist, I admired it very much. I found some of the time shifts confusing, some of the characters hard to remember and the pace rather too slow at times (so not quite 4 stars for me). It will be interesting to see what this new Australian talent will do next. If it is anything as complex and deeply researched as The Memory Artist, we may have to wait a while.

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Leeanncb

July 17 2016

This author writes beautifully but apart from that the novel appears to be nothing more than a vehicle for exposition on history and philosophical musings on the nature of memory. It is a missed opportunity for us to feel for the sufferings of the Russian people through connecting with her characters. Unfortunately the characters are too flat for this to happen including the main character who is unvaryingly chronically depressed and apathetic throughout. There is no strong narrative, the tone and pace of the novel are equally unvarying and the structure at times difficult to follow. By all means let the prose wash over you and gently rock you to sleep but don't expect to be engaged.

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Monique

April 28 2016

Thank you to Allen and Unwin for providing a free copy of this award-winning novel for me to read and review.<br /><br />I feel I must give this novel 5 stars because it is simply so well-written. The author is the deserved winner of the Vogel Award (for unpublished manuscripts by an author under the age of 35) for this atmospheric and melancholy novel of a young man emerging from The Freeze in post-Glasnost Russia. <br /><br />Pasha is the child of dissidents, and grew up listening to his parents and their friends discussing their cause and sharing their poetry and stories around his parents' kitchen table. He's a writer and feels compelled to record the memories of his parents and their peers, as well as his own memories of life before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. So much has been kept secret and with the emergence of Glasnost, and a new openness, he feels it's important to record what really happened before all the people who lived through it are gone. But he's having trouble getting anything finished. The thing that Pasha learns over time is that with the new freedoms comes a loss of purpose. They're no longer fighting for anything and life has become more about existence. He just can't seem to find the motivation to complete his task.<br /><br />This is not the sort of book that doesn't require much attention. Brabon is an artist herself, painting pictures with words, but I found I could only take it all in if I was in a quiet space, with the time to let myself sink into the prose. I tried reading it on the train next to the man on his phone (for my entire 22-minute journey; and in the Quiet Carriage, no less) but I couldn't concentrate. They're rather bleak pictures, too, because these are Pasha's memories and Pasha is not a happy man. Even when he is remembering times when he and his friends were happy, he doesn't feel very happy. He seems to float from one place to another without ever really being present in it, more of an observer, looking at everyone else living their lives but remaining separate from everything. <br /><br />Another feature of this novel I found challenging was the lack of quotation marks around the speech. Perhaps this device is employed by the author because this is Pasha's telling of speech which took place in his memories, or maybe I'm just a philistine and I missed something, but I found myself getting confused about who was "talking". The book is narrated by Pasha in the first person, so when someone would begin telling their memories and spoke about themselves, it would take me a line or two to realise I was reading speech and not just Pasha's voice.<br /><br />As I've said before this novel is melancholy. The language is beautiful and I enjoyed the book, but I didn't come away feeling fulfilled. The ending is slightly ambiguous and nothing is resolved, so I don't have that sense of satisfaction a reader usually looks for when they close the back cover. But still, I learnt a lot about Russian history and was glad to have met Pasha. I'd be interested to hear what others felt about what happened at the end...<br />

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Jessica Hailstone

October 07 2017

A haunting read, portraying the subdued, silent nature of Stalin's terror, and how it manifested in a silent, shocked people. <br /><br />For me, who knows very little about 90s Russia, I found it a great way to learn about the 'aftermath of Stalin', and counterculture's response. It demonstrates how long it can really take for a country to recover from such twisted horror. I especially love the idea of the absurd, violent and sometimes comic art that was created, a kind of underhand 'fuck you' to the people who were tying them down to psychiatric hospital beds.<br /><br />It's certainly a historical novel - if you're looking for fast action and drama, this will not be for you. Also I had to read some passages really quickly because they made my insides squirm, but I hate all things violent so I'm not a good measure of this. <br /><br /><br />The overriding message (I think) surrounds our inability to forget, despite the silence, portrayed in the narrator's nagging inclination to write his book throughout his life. And the need to remember past horrors, even though the main aims of Stalin's (and following leaders') aims were to distort memories and change history. The narrator has the most passion and excitement when fighting for lost and forgotten lives to be brought back, and there were some really well-written descriptions of death not being the end of us. <br /><br />I loved the tying together of maps in all the characters who the narrator interviews for his book: each one has it for their own purpose, and each use it to try and piece together fragments of their country's history in the wake of the horror, attempting to overcome the feelings of displacement and confusion created by a government that fed them a fake ideal rather than reality.

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Flevy Crasto

June 05 2016

A lovely read for a randomly picked book at the airport for my six hour flight to Bali. Of course the fact that it won the Vogel's award was a deciding factor and truly deserving.<br />I personally don't know much of the Russian history and have come to realize even fiction books as such do much research to represent history in its true essence. So this for me was an insight into some of its gory history. Pasha, I wish I could shake him up a bit and provoke him to do more with what he had. But he kept his sometimes lethargic attitude of a writer. How can you write a story of your life knowing you have covered all the important aspects yet not divulge into the "I" of the story.<br />It made me think of my own life - though not as dramatic - and wonder how would I write my story? who would read it? and why? The past, just a memory or is it? I think it is a selective memory. There are many things that one tends to forget about the past only realising it when someone else mentions it and so I could relate to his memory of his Father. And in so knowing his life I wanted him to be able to talk more to his mother, meet Anya again and write that book for Mikhail, for Oleg for every one of thoes aunties and uncles....I hoped!<br />Highly recommend you to pick this book and give it a chance, to play with your memories of life.

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Calzean

April 27 2016

There is a lot of books about Russia, Stalin and the fall of the USSR. But here is a fairly unique book which is narrated by a son of dissidents and covers the period from the 60s to the late 90s. A lot of questions are asked on how quick people can forget the past, how people did behave during the darkest hours, whether all the effort to seek an end to the Communist Party control of the USSR was worth it, and is the grasser greener in another country.<br />The narrator is a writer trying to write down his thoughts and of the stories he has accumulated. There is a lot of reference to Russian intellects, writers, poets and scientists and a little bit of knowledge on post WWII history helps to understand this melancholic story.