This must be one of the most moving books I've ever read and it comes with an important warning - Brokken based his volume on actual events, but he's This must be one of the most moving books I've ever read and it comes with an important warning - Brokken based his volume on actual events, but he's also taken quite a lot of liberties with details and the compromise between accuracy and artistic license is important to keep in mind while reading.
Jan Brokken's biographical novel (or fictionalised biography) of Soviet pianist Youri Egorov recounts an incredible life, whilst at the same time providing the readers with the portrait of a society and an entire generation (those who were in their early 30s towards the end of the 1980s) facing the devastation of the AIDS pandemic. It's also an intimate portrait of a young man with incredible talent and of the relationships - at times loving, at times difficult - he had with his circle of lovers, friends and family.
Youri Egorov escaped to the West in 1976, when he was only 21-years-old and had started fearing that his homosexuality would cost him his freedom in the strict regime of the USSR. After a short period in a refugee camp in Central Italy, he was finally allowed to move on to Amsterdam, where he had some connections that would help him start his new life on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
His arrival in Amsterdam kicked off a brief but stellar career at the top of the classical music world. Egorov performed everywhere, recorded with all the most important musicians and orchestras of the time and was put under contract by EMI.
His professional success was accompanied by a personal life often flirting with excess and risks. Addicted to drugs and alcohol, reckless in his anonymous sexual encounters, prone to gambling, Egorov didn't fit the mould of the more traditional and conservative classical musician but was animated by restlessness and urgency that bleeds out onto his recordings, which are invariably beautiful and haunting.
Jan Brokken was part of Egorov's inner circle of close friends - together with Youri's long-time partner, Jan Brouwer, and a few others - and his book is a precise and often heartbreaking chronicle of the musician's inner turmoil.
There's something deeply moving in the story of this young, talented man split between two opposite worlds. His openness contrasted with the reluctance to discuss his homosexuality with his own family, his Russian-ness working as an undercurrent in the way he looked at the world, played the piano or contemplated the fragility of his own existence.
Reading the book while listening to Egorov recordings really makes you feel as if you're plunging deeply within his sensitive mind, as if the intervals, the things left unsaid, are as important as the notes played and the words being uttered.
A wonderful journey that I'd recommend you take if you read in Dutch or Italian because, sadly, the book hasn't yet been translated into English.
Let's get the rating question immediately out of the way: this was for me a glowing 5 stars and I utterly loved it.
Set over the span of roughly thirtyLet's get the rating question immediately out of the way: this was for me a glowing 5 stars and I utterly loved it.
Set over the span of roughly thirty-two years (from 1959 to 1992), Honeytrap follows FBI agent Daniel Hawthorne and Red Army lieutenant (or KGB agent?) Gennady Matskevich as they travel across America on the trail of the mysterious person who attempted the life of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Their journey is slow and winding - while they go from small towns to bigger cities, from rural America to more industrialised areas, Daniel and Gennady develop a tentative friendship that will slowly evolve into something more profound (view spoiler)[ that will survive separations, political upheavals, marriages and divorces. (hide spoiler)]
Daniel and Gennady are both wonderful characters. Daniel is romantic and idealistic, a bit of a classical Hollywood hero, whilst Gennady is sharp and witty, fascinated by America but still very critical of social inequalities and injustice.
They are also deeply complex characters, with areas of darkness and suffering that come up in the novel very slowly and subtly but in a heartbreaking manner.
Gennady is scarred by the brutality of his upbringing during WW2 and by the abusive system and hierarchy of the Red Army. Daniel, apparently wholesome and happy, an all American boy, is also tormented by his desires and frightened by previous experiences.
Their fragility and need come together in the "slowest of slow burns" (as eloquently put by my buddy reader Xia Xia Lake) and once they found each other... well, you'll have to read the book to find out.
As a long-standing lover of both Russian and American classics, I found Daniel and Gennady's conversations around Steinbeck, Dostoevsky and the like utterly delightful. The irony and levity Aster Glenn Gray put in those passages made me fall completely in love with the novel.
If you love historical fiction supported by solid research, amazing characters and wonderful writing, please, read Honeytrap!...more
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