A Partial History of Lost Causes

When I received this book and I read the synopsis I could not for the life of me remember why I decided to review it. It was so very different from what I usually read. As I started to read I was almost immediately enthralled and suddenly very happy I had chosen to read the book. Not that it is a happy book, not by any means, but Ms. duBois has a writing style that just pulls you in and almost refuses to let you out.

Irina Ellison grows up in the shadow of a father dying by inches from Huntingdon's disease. She learns at a very early age that she has inherited the gene for the disease and lives her life with the foreknowledge of her death. She foregoes attachments both with friends and lovers knowing how her life with play out.

After her show more father dies she finds a letter he wrote to Chess World Champion Aleksandr Bezetov asking a question that was never answered. On a whim Irina travels to Russia to get the answer her father never received. Aleksandr is running a hopeless campaign for president against Putin at the time of her arrival and living under a cloud of death himself.

Will she find her answer? Read the book. You won't be disappointed. It's like no other book I have ever read. Not easy, not simple, and nothing is clear cut, but the writing - the writing is just plain magical. Even when dealing with the worst that life has to offer. Irina is cranky, miserable and very hard to like and to be honest I didn't like her at all. It's rare for me to enjoy a book when I can't like the main character but I truly found it hard to put this one down. Aleksandr was no peach either. An arrogant, unpleasant teenager who didn't improve with age. And yet, the prose sings. It is one of those books that I know will be even better on a second read. show less

First of all, some of the best writing I’ve had the pleasure to read in a long time; Dubois is very talented.

In this story, a young American woman has learned she has inherited Huntington’s disease, which she had seen take away her father’s mind such that he was no longer himself for years before dying. Average symptoms begin at age 32, and she doesn’t want to burden the loved ones around her by having them watch her go through the same thing.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, a chess prodigy grows up in squalor and hardship in Soviet Russia, but has some opportunities to make a better life for himself because of his abilities. He falls in with political dissidents and runs a huge risk by distributing their newsletter. show more He compromises his ideals somewhat as he rises to chess champion of the world, but later in life is openly critical of the government under Putin, and runs for office against him.

The American finds that her father had written the Russian a letter, asking him how he coped with a chess match at the point in which he knew he was doomed to lose. Somewhat absurdly, she drops everything in her life and travels to Russia to find him, and to ask the same question.

The plot may seem a little odd, but it’s woven together well and I found this a wonderful book.

What are the lost causes? Facing a cruel terminal disease that, before killing, will slowly strip one’s mind of all memories, and ability to control one’s body. Being at the top of one’s game, but knowing that someone (or something) will come along and knock you down soon enough. Attempting to make progress against a totalitarian, corrupt regime, knowing that one’s cause cannot win, at least in the short-term, and knowing that to struggle is to make oneself a target, and yet doing so anyway.

What does it mean to come to terms with one’s transience, with the meaninglessness of one’s tasks in life? How does one live under such compressed and absurd circumstances, how does one love? Because of their situation, they are improbably bond together, and have heightened awareness to the conditions that I suppose we all face in lesser form. There are no magic answers to the hard questions, as there are none in life. They continue on with introspection and dignity, and the result is both poignant and uplifting.

Quotes:
On death:
“My father had a limitless capacity to be touched by the histories of other nations, the fates of other people – and more than that, he loved the intricate ballet of advance and retreat. He loved it all in real life as much as on the chessboard. Like Lear – like anyone – he wanted to see who won and who lost. He wanted to see how things would turn out.
And if I’m honest, that’s a good part of my grief these days. Not a majority – that’s composed of good old-fashioned fear, the animal will to survive tangling with the cold pronouncements of medical science. But a fairly significant amount – maybe 15 percent or so – is just sorry that I don’t get to see the end.”

On the death of a parent:
“I opened the window and thought about my father. Like most people, I was not my best self at twelve. And it bothered me sometimes to think of this version of myself as the last vision my father had of me before his mind went – as if this made any sense. As if he was standing on the opposite end of some magic beam of rainbow light, remembering me in my youth, carrying around a smudged mental snapshot of who I used to be. Really, it was the other way around. But in weak, sentimental moments, I wanted to tell him: look. I grew up with a sense of humor, anyway. You would have liked me if you didn’t already.”

On democracy:
“Democracy is the least bad form of government, he says. It maximizes the liberty of the individual, and in this world – in this uncertain, claustrophobic, ever shrinking world, but really, in any world – is that not the highest good? Is there anything more important than writing what you think, and saying what you think, and walking along a river at night unsupervised? Maybe he doesn’t say that last part. And one day in Russia, he says. One day in Russia, too.”

On empathy, or lack thereof:
“I always felt guilty for ruining the other person’s day, and the other person invariably felt guilty if their day hadn’t been sufficiently ruined. I will admit it sometimes felt strange to me to make the confession to someone and later catch them laughing, or flirting, or eating a sandwich, instead of tearing at the injustice of it all or sitting quietly at the center of a grand and monstrous grief. The disaster of my life might be only the worst thing another person heard that afternoon; they might have forgotten by dinnertime; they might have been more heartbroken by watching certain movies. I’m always confronted, quite horrifically, with my exact net worth in the eyes of the other person – whether they cry, or have to sit down, or pull their mouth into the expression of a frown even though their eyes are somewhere else.”

On love lost, and memories:
“And then, just like that, her mouth was on his, although he wasn’t sure how. One moment he’d been speaking, and another moment the space between their mouths had disappeared. He drew one hand to her face, brought the other to feel the small instrument of her rib cage. Then she was drawing back, with each beat of his heart she was disappearing from his arms, and it seemed to him that he would always remember this: a sequence of snapshots of a woman, laughing with her eyes down, in each image a little farther away.”

And this one, which I loved:
“It was startling how completely an absent person could fill the empty spaces in your brain – how all the uncharted dark matter could illuminate to reveal nothing but the same face, the same voice, carbon-copied over and over like a piece of underground artwork. It was bewildering, the way that reality could be overtaken, wrestled down, and murdered by the sheer weight of possibility. It was nonsense, he’d be the first to admit, to pine for a year for a woman whose moment in his life had been incidental, glancing, as implausible as a meteor shower or a brain aneurysm. She had bobbed to the surface of his life, then disappeared again. She’d hovered for half an hour above his personal lake of loneliness, a sea monster in a smudged photograph, probably not even real. She’d been above water for minutes. She’d barely even waved.”

And:
“Then I understood, from the way Aleksandr clenched his jaw and the way he erased his eyes and the way his words seemed to shiver on a tightrope, that he had loved her. And I was struck by the unforgivable stupidity of refusing love. And I was further struck by the violence of my own mistake, and I felt lucky for the limited time I would have to live with it.”

On meaninglessness:
“When you get ready to die, you look back over a lifetime and try to unravel its enduring questions. You retroactively assign meaning to chaos, you make coincidence into portent. You scan your past for moments that might have been road signs, and then you try to see which way they were pointing. It’s an unrelenting striving for tenuous links, a dazed hunting for patterns that may or may not exist. You are a child looking for a lost thing in the sand, racing against the tide and the approaching darkness, trying desperately to remember where you might have buried it.”

On mortality, and travel:
“This world is stranger and more beautiful than could ever be imagined ahead of time. I am struck with enormous gratitude for having gotten to see some of it.”

“I look down at this strange, partially discovered place and think of all the others that exist, half formed and lurking, in my mind: the sheets of light wheeling over the Andes; the snaking, sculpted sand dunes of Namibia; the ancient cities cluttered with a millenium’s worth of objects left lying around – when the volcano erupted, when the city was sacked, when the plague swept through the streets and crumpled half the population in a week. There are many things I have not seen. But there are a few things that I have. Maybe living in the world for a time is enough, even if you don’t get to see all of it. Maybe it is enough. At any rate, it will have to be.”

On Moscow:
“Moscow was upon us in bits, incrementally visible through the murk. The traffic was horrendous, the graffiti multilayered and emphatic. The men were light-skinned and square-jawed, with the kind of bland good looks that have always made me feel slightly menaced. In the women you could see the jostling of the centuries. The old women were Tolstoyan and nearly toothless, with gnomic features and fiercely wrapped handkerchiefs. The young women were as elaborately assembled as the women of the Upper West Side, although some were elegant (swept hair and dark clothes, sparse and gleaming bits of jewelry) and some were tacky (bejeweled bosoms, tricked-out hair, the ruffled pelts of varies unidentifiable Siberian weasels). They moved through the streets like the competing emissaries of various historical periods. In front of a department store, a man sat on a box with a chained and collared chimpanzee. I watched everything in a daze, retroactively registering the miracle of air travel.”

And this one, which I laughed over and admired for the writing:
“The smell, too, was different. Both cities, I noticed, smelled bad – unforgivably, devilishly, abusively bad – in places. There was a smell in one corner near my hotel in Moscow that seemed to make the air opaque; your knees wilted, your spirit flagged, when confronted with it. It seemed concocted, preordained. It didn’t seem like the kind of smell that could have emerged organically without supernatural intervention. If some people look at the complexity of the universe and see proof of God, I look at the dire complexity of that smell and see the suggestion of Satan.”

On relationships, and meeting new people:
“I could see Viktor Davidenko gearing up to think me some kind of puzzle, and this never works – not because people solve you, particularly, but because they learn there’s nothing much to solve. Seeing yourself through somebody else’s eyes is liking taking a guest through your long-unvisited apartment. The bits of your personality that you’ve come to take for granted are like the souvenirs of a life you are already bored of remembering. This old thing?, you want to say, pointing to your personal trivia or your political beliefs or your body. Got in Barcelona for four euros. It’s not real. This joke? I make it all the time. You’ll get sick of it. I am sick of it. But the new person doesn’t know that yet, and you are not actually about to tell him.”

On transience:
“I slid my tongue along my lower teeth, feeling the unevenness that had resurged in recent years. All that orthodontia, such an investment, for what? Though I knew this was a rabbit hole that did not warrant pursuing. When you thought about it, everything – all of life – could seem a series of wasted preparations. Why did you exercise, and why did you consume the appropriate staggering amount of vegetables per day? And why were you vain about your body or your brain or whatever it was you were vain about? And why did you sob for a week and refuse food and lie the wrong way in bed and watch the necrotic light creep over the horizon only because a boy who never loved you still did not? Such anguish, such narcissism, such ahistoricism. All the grand projects were, after all, not so grand. Little petty fits, all of them, piecemeal staving off of the inevitable, scraps and dregs of self-distraction, all of it existing only to mitigate the fact, the central fact, the unbelievable irreducible fact, of our transience.” show less

I am drawn to novels about Russia. Why not. For decades it was our partner in the dance of potential mutual and world destruction. It has all the political intrigue you could want. It's awesomely vast. It's European, but it's European in a way quite different from the the familiar comfort of western Europe. The many hardships that drive down life expectancy there can make for potentially good stories, a poor trade off for Russians surely but useful for novelists.

So I was intrigued by the plot of this book. In modern Russia, a world chess champion braves the threat of death to lead the futile task of challenging the autocratic and corrupt rule of Vladimir Putin. In America, a young college professor with a death sentence of her own in show more the form of a hereditary genetic disease finds a letter her father wrote to this Russian decades ago. Her father, about to lose himself to this genetic disease, wrote to ask how one should carry on in the face of certain oncoming defeat. He imagined the Russian might have an answer. No answer came, and now the young American, casting about for a way to react herself, decides to move to Russia, find this man, and get that answer.

The setup is just the smallest bit awkward. Chapters alternate between the Aleksandr of the past almost three decades as he opposes and finally conforms (in a troublesome sort of way) to the Soviet regime, involved in both dissident politics and chess, and Irina in present day America and Russia. Both characters are richly drawn and their psychology and motives well established. The payoff comes about arguably somewhat improbably, with Aleksandr, now opposing the Putin regime, impulsively hiring Irina to be one of his three closest assistants, but if that's accepted then their relationship develops realistically and finally touchingly, nicely avoiding anything maudlin in its hardheadedness.

The political aspect of the novel is interesting, with a conspiracy theory about how Putin rose to power coming to the fore near the end of the book. As someone who values historical accuracy in works of fiction, I'm a bit troubled by the historicity of this, but it makes for a powerful plot thread so I'm going to take it with a grain of salt and enjoy the story. The personal aspect of the novel is astonishingly well done for a first time novelist, and very thoughtful and intelligent. It is full of well observed truths, as when Irina talks about the reactions she gets when she tells people of her fatal diagnosis:

"I will admit it sometimes felt strange to me to make the confession to someone and later catch them laughing, or flirting, or eating a sandwich, instead of tearing at the injustice of it all or sitting quietly at the center of a grand and monstrous grief. The disaster of my life might be only the worst thing another person heard that afternoon; they might have forgotten by dinnertime; they might have been more heartbroken by watching certain movies."

Quite enjoyable novel, in a bleak Russian sort of way. show less

When 12 year old Irina suddenly beats her father in chess, it marks the beginning of his downward slope into the terrible disability that is Huntington Disease. Her father followed the great Russian chess masters and once corresponded with the world champion Alexandr Bezetov. A letter found by Irina after her father's passing becomes the motivation for her journey to Russia, in search of the former chess player now turned political dissident. Irina, who at 30 knows that the genetic markings of her father will begin soon with her, is looking for an answer. It is the same question her father asked of the famous Russian: how do you continue to go on playing when you know the game will end in defeat.
Meanwhile in alternating chapters, show more (much like a chess match), we see Bezetov, starting back in 1980, when being a 20 year old prodigy could help propel a young mind out of poverty. Alexandr is taken to Leningrad's prestigious chess academy where he will eventually be groomed to be Russia's symbol of superiority. Alexandr' s journey from disgruntled star to heading a dissident party of Alternative Russia is the most fascinating part of the novel, a glimpse of Putin's Russia where any complaining voice may soon be silenced. As the 2008 Russian election grows closer, he too knows that he has no chance of winning. This is the set up for A Partial History of Lost Causes, a very well written, character driven story, remarkably rendered by a 35 year old in her first novel. Jennifer duBois was recognized as a National book award 5 under 35 winner and the Bookpage Best Book of 2012. It's amazing how talented a new novelist can be and how successful the Iowa Writers Workshop has been.

Here are some lines to remember:
"He hugged me. He smelled of ash, with wilder undertones of coffee and sky and liquor before noon."

Bezetov about his true love Elizabeta: "to pine for a year for a woman whose moment in his life had been incidental, glancing, as implausible as a meteor shower or a brain aneurysm. She had bobbed to the surface of his life, then disappeared again. She’d hovered for half an hour above his personal lake of loneliness, a sea monster in a smudged photograph, probably not even real. She’d been above water for minutes. She’d barely even waved."

Irina's reaction to her first meeting with Nikolai: "He leaned in closer to me. He stank of undercooked meat, of cheap alcohol, of the threat of violence. I thought I might faint from sheer character weakness."

And my favorite line: "I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time.” show less

A terminal diagnosis, the looming end to a relationship, those moments before the buzzer when a team is too far down to come back, a futile gesture, doggedly continuing a lost cause. How does a person go on in the face of certain defeat? That is the central question swirling throughout the narrative in DuBois' debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes.

It is 1979 and young chess prodigy Aleksandr Bezetov moves to Leningrad starting to win his way ever closer to being declared the world chess champion even as he unintentionally joins a small dissident political group devoted to exposing the abuses of the Communist government. He treads a thin line between being worthy of adulation and of being arrested (or worse) as far as the show more government is concerned.

Twenty-five years later, American Irina Ellison, who once watched Bezetov's chess matches on tv with her father, is looking for answers to how she should live her life. She watched her vibrant, intelligent father die a slow and horrifying death due to Huntington's Disease and she knows that she carries the same genetic ticking time bomb. She hasn't allowed herself to develop any close relationships with others, dreading the day she first manifests the jerking characteristic of the disease.

And then Irina finds the carbon of a letter from her father addressed to Bezetov at the height of his career asking the improbable question of how to continue to play a game in the face of certain defeat. There is a non-answer from an unknown woman but no acknowledgement of the letter from Bezetov and so Irina decides that she is going to go to Russia and find the answer herself, even if it will be difficult to secure a meeting with Bezetov, who is now running a presidential campaign in opposition to Putin, having lost his chess title to IBM's computer many years prior.

As these two troubled and lost souls swirl around each other, with Irina ultimately coming to work for Bezetov's campaign, there is a continual exploration of the necessity and desirability of pursuing lost causes. Irina tells her own story in first person while Aleksandr's tale is told in the third person omniscient. This makes the story slightly more Irina's than Aleksandr's. Both characters though are very introspective and suffer from disappointment. Irina's manifests itself as a sort of aimlessness while Aleksandr's comes out as a dogged need to thrust himself into the political spotlight no matter that he fully expects to lose the election and perhaps be assassinated as well. Both characters, despite their obvious parallels, are very different, almost equal and opposite sides of the coin of life. How they each choose to move forward despite the fact that the endgame will certainly not be theirs is fascinating to watch.

The narrative itself is slightly depressing but the writing is gorgeous. DuBois has drawn a cold, unforgiving, and secretive place in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, imbuing it with an appropriate sense of tired menace. Setting here accurately reflects the internal struggles of the trapped characters. And while Aleksandr and Irina may have seperately found the way to persevere in the face of truly insurmountable odds, they are joyless in their discoveries. Perhaps that, ultimately, is the question that Irina should have asked: How to go on in the face of certain defeat but to still find happiness or at least satisfaction in the game. DuBois is a very talented writer and the book is one that will haunt me for some time but it definitely exudes an air of gloom, greyness, and resignation. show less

Originally published on Read Handed.

A Partial History of Lost Causes is the debut novel of Jennifer DuBois, due to be published in March. DuBois is in her twenties; in the photo on the back of my advance reader's edition, her face looks young and eager. Yet between the covers, she weaves a story of death, politics, and human nature that seems far beyond her years. She must have researched the heck out of this novel.

To me, the most complex element of A Partial History of Lost Causes is the Russian culture, political scene, and society depicted within its pages. One of the main characters, Aleksandr Bezetov, is a chess prodigy, eventual world champion, and for a time, the darling of Russian public relations. He plays by the rules of the show more Communist Party and his life is privileged and safe because of it. But bookending that experience are the years of Bezetov's life when he is truly himself - anti-communism, pro-democracy, out of naivety in his early life and on principle later. Now, in 2006, he is running for president of Russia against Vladimir Putin, knowing he will not win (and could, in all likelihood, die), but believing that the effort might make a difference someday in Russian politics.

Interestingly, when I got online today to write this review, I saw an article with this headline: "Big Moscow Protest Rally Against Vote Fraud Begins". It seems that Putin will soon be running for this third term, and tens of thousands of Russians are demonstrating against "alleged electoral fraud" and are urging "an end to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's rule." Electoral fraud, and worse, are rampant in DuBois's portrayal of Russian politics, stretching back to the 1970s. Today's news indicates that the image she creates of post-Soviet Russia may be all-too accurate. Is real democracy in Russia a lost cause? Certainly the fictional Bezetov's campaign in the novel is.

The second main character in A Partial History of Lost Causes is Irina Ellison, an American woman whose life itself is a lost cause. As a child and young adult, she watched her father's mind and body deteriorate from his Huntington's disease. In her early twenties she learns that she, too, has the genetic makeup for the debilitating illness. The doctors tell her that

"Inheriting from the paternal line makes for a younger onset. In the office, they'd told me that my CAG number - my number of clotted chromosomal nucleotides - was 50, corresponding to an average onset of thirty-two years of age" (pg. 22).

She essentially has about ten years left to live a normal life. And, for the most part, she squanders it. She "fell into the dark depression [she'd] promised everyone [she] would avoid" (pg. 23):

"I started bringing home different men every weekend... It's a wonder that I escaped college without an unwanted pregnancy at the very least - full-blown AIDS at the worst. Somebody asked me about it once - a frat boy, strangely enough - as I was shrugging off the condom he dangled before me. 'Don't you worry about AIDS?' he said. And out loud I said no, not really, but in my head I thought, Please, please, please let me get AIDS so I can die of pneumonia, so my brain is the last thing out the door, so that when I die, it is actually me dying and not somebody else" (pg. 23-4).

She eventually earns a PhD and starts teaching freshman composition courses at a local technical college. She doesn't form relationships or hobbies or much of anything. She "lived a life with an eye to leaving it" (pg. 80):

"I could have had any or all - or most - of those things, I suppose, but my major characteristic flaw is an inability to invest in lost causes. When you are the lost cause, this makes for a lonely life" (pg. 31).

At thirty, Irina finds an old box of her father's containing newspaper clippings about the Russian chess champion Aleksandr Bezetov. The box also contains a copy of a letter her father had written Bezetov years earlier. In it, he asks the chess prodigy about matches he knows he will lose - "When you find yourself playing such a game or match or tournament, what is the proper way to proceed?" In other words, how does one deal with life in the face of a lost cause? This question is posed throughout the novel, especially once Irina decides to track Bezetov down herself to get a belated answer to her father's query.

A Partial History of Lost Causes is obviously a heavy novel - the terminal illness itself would make it such. Add a harsh, bleak Russian backdrop, oppression, and assassination attempts and you can't really expect to find much happiness. But the novel is introspective, philosophical, and multi-layered. Somehow amidst all the gloom, I emerged from the story with these lessons in mind: live your life to the fullest each day and, trying is often more important than winning.

I highly recommend Jennifer DuBois's A Partial History of Lost Causes to lovers of literary fiction, those interested in Russian politics, and anyone who desires to read a complex and philosophical first novel.

*The quotations in this post are from an advance reader's edition of the novel and may be different in the final version. show less

Please forgive me while I have a brief spaz out.

THIS BOOK WAS SO GOOD WHY DID IT HAVE TO END?!

Ahem.

I'm going to be struggling a bit to provide a useful review (sorry), partially because this plot is so layered and interesting, and partially because it was so great I'm really just shaking the book emphatically at the screen as if that would convey it's awesomeness.

Gary Shteyngart blurbs the book on the cover, saying among other things: "I wish I were her." To that I say: true story. I envy duBois' ability to take these seemingly different plot elements and themes -- chess, Russian politics, Huntington's Disease, terrorism, documentary film making, unrequited love -- and make them into one cohesive and coherent and captivating story. show more

First, I can't even summarize the plot well, so forgive me for doing it badly. Beginning in 1979, we follow Aleksandr Bezetov, a Russian chess champion, as he navigates the world of Communist and post-Communist Russia, and his eventual decision to embark on a seemingly doomed presidential campaign against Vladimir Putin. Having watched friends and enemies die and disappear, he's filled with a kind of pragmatic fatalism -- the same kind that fills American Irina Ellison. Thirty-ish, Irina has Huntington's, an incurable and debilitating disease that threatens to fully emerge any year, and on a whim, she decides to chase down the Russian chess champion that her father tried to correspond with decades ago. Once she finds Aleksandr, she becomes his copy editor, and joins his campaign, one that could be considered a lost cause.

The writing is great -- smart but readable, pretty but not overly descriptive -- and I just clicked with duBois' characters. The two leads aren't exactly heroes, nor are they anti-heroes; they're complicated and maddening people, compelling -- I followed them for 370ish pages without complaint and wanted, desperately, more. (It ended exactly where it needed to, though.) The last chapter killed me -- I'm kind of getting teary remembering! -- as it was so deliciously sad and bitter and sweet and pragmatic and hopeful. I reread it this morning on the train to linger with the feeling. Honestly, the whole book was like this -- moving without feeling trite, and coolly pessimistic without feeling unemotional -- and I clearly can't rave enough about it.

In the end, Jennifer duBois needs to be writing more novels, please. Immediately. And you need to read this one, stat. show less