Vita Nostra

Sixteen-year-old Sasha is enjoying a pleasant beach holiday with her mother, when she becomes aware that a strange, unsettling man is watching her. The man coerces her in an impossible-seeming fashion into performing certain odd, seemingly meaningless, mildly transgressive actions, with bizarre results. Then he tells her she's been accepted to a college she's never heard of, much less applied to. And she will be attending. Or else. Even once she gets there, though, it's not at all clear exactly what she's studying. But it seems to be doing something worrying to the students...

It's tempting to think of this as a sort of weird, dark mirror of the Harry Potter books. The obvious comparison here is with that other dark school-for-magic show more story, Lev Grossman's The Magicians, and, indeed, there's a blurb from Grossman on the cover. But I have to say, I liked this a lot more than The Magicians. (Or at least the first book. The rest of the trilogy did grow on me.) And the general vibe of the two is very, very different. Whereas The Magicians feels as if it sort of sucks everything magical out of magic, this one feels positively permeated with a deep, profound feeling of something mystical and extraordinary -- despite the fact that the students mostly aren't doing things that we might conventionally think of as magic, and words like "magic" are never used.

Exactly what the students are doing is hard to say. I do think that, if I'd read this in a worse, less patient mood, I might have found myself annoyed and frustrated by how opaque so much of this is, how little is explained, and how much of what we are told or shown is expressed in ways that are abstract or oblique or perhaps even flat-out nonsensical. But I'm very, very glad I did read it in the right mood, one that allowed me to fully appreciate the way in which the authors are approaching something that is literally impossible: giving us a glimpse into the process of learning something so deeply alien that it simply cannot be understood by human beings... and a viewpoint character who must herself become something non-human and incomprehensible if she is going to master it. It's audacious and fascinating and more than a little disturbing, and it worked for me much, much better than I might have expected it could.

I should note that this was translated from Russian, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of some of the translation choices. There were definitely a lot of moments where I felt like the translator must have been struggling to find an English word to express whatever was in the original, and ended up landing on one that felt a little off, or inappropriately obscure or something. In another novel, maybe that would have bothered me more, but in this one perceiving it all through an obvious extra layer of translation maybe just enhances the overall feel of strangeness and provokes some actually appropriate thoughts about the ways in which the words available to us do or don't fully capture meaning. Anyway, despite all that, I found the novel very readable and fully capable of evoking the intended emotional reactions, so I think we can say the translator was doing the really important stuff right. show less

A reread for my book club

I loved the book the first time I read it, a long time ago. I was overwhelmed, as in ”what is this???” and ”this is the weirdest book I’ve ever read!” But you never reread the same book, because you are not the same reader. So, I am not overwhelmed now, yet the book is brilliant and I see things I hadn't seen before and my thoughts on the reread were not the same.

Your regular ordinary world is slowly turning into a strange, nightmare one. I loved how it was done in the first pages.

This novel is an ode to the power of language and symbols, the gorgeousness and the horror of it. It is about finding meaning in chaos and darkness, through language.

The horrible things done to the students and the show more manipulation hit me very hard this time. I wonder if only someone who has lived through oppression and experienced a totalitarian society in all its ghastliness and absurdity could have imagined this world. I kept thinking about all the beautiful young things burning so bright, and those who would step on them and twist, twist, twist, until people are remade to suit somebody else.

Towards the end of the book, I started wondering about those text fragments that coalesced out of chaos (this is the power of the reread!). So I googled one of them and found Aristotle ☺ It warmed my heart, of course.

I must confess that I did not understand the ending on the first read. That’s because I swallowed the book whole, dived into it, and then came up gasping for air, wondering what just happened. This time: the oppressors of any kind would have you believe that Love = Fear. The ending is Sasha’s answer to that, and it is full of courage and brilliance.

That quote at the end is from the Gospels. Oh. show less

What an absolutely brilliant concept. I found it somewhat slow to get through the start of the book, but it hooked me more and more as it went on - I finished parts 2 and 3 in two days. Props to the translator for doing such a brilliant job translating such specific concepts and such powerful lyric writing.

The atmosphere of this book is intense, and familiar in its own way as someone who’s finished a degree - the restless nights and stress were reminiscent of my own third year, turned up several notches by the particular pressures of the program.

Four and a half stars; I’ll keep it on my shelf and recommend it highly.

Reviewers cannot resist linking Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s Vita Nostra with Harry Potter, but they usually have to settle for something like Harry Potter as written by Tolstoy, or better, Harry Potter as written by Kafka.
Connections with HP are ready to hand. There is a girl, Sasha, who is repeatedly told she is special. And there is a magic school with teen romance. Students there learn a brand of magic, are transformed, grow wings, and learn to fly, but such connections mislead.
The Institute for Special Technologies in the village of Torpa is no Hogwarts. Its tawdry campus is symbolically located on a street named for Sacco and Vanzetti, the anarchist Italian immigrants who were executed for murder in America after a trial that show more was a travesty of justice.
None of the Institute students are there by choice. They seem abused, downtrodden, and desperate. The professors routinely use threats and intimidation to achieve their educational ends, which are concealed from the students until the final high-stakes matriculating exam.
The creepiness starts right away. Sasha is recruited by a Svengali who tells her she must swim naked to a buoy each morning before dawn. When she gets home, she vomits gold coins containing the Institute’s logo. Failure might endanger her or her family.
What it has to say about adolescence is darkly Jungian. As a critique of education, it suggests quite literally that it turns students into abstractions that rob them of their humanity. I am too uninformed to say what it says about Russian-Ukrainian politics. show less

Set in Russia and written by Ukrainian authors Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, Vita Nostra is primarily a book of dark academia that also contains elements of fantasy, coming-of-age, gothic storytelling, and psychological manipulation. The tone is one of foreboding. As the story opens, teenage protagonist Alexandra "Sasha" Samokhina is a seventeen-year-old on vacation with her single parent mother before applying to university. During their vacation, she realizes she is being followed by a mysterious man. He eventually contacts her and asks her to perform an outlandish task. She balks – why would she do such a thing? He answers with a threat:

“You will, Sasha. You will. Because the world around you is very fragile. Every day people fall show more down, break their bones, die under the wheels of a car, drown, get hepatitis or tuberculosis. I really don’t want to tell you all this. But it is in your interests to simply do everything I ask of you. It’s not complicated.”

The man tells her she will attend university at the Institute of Special Technologies. No one knows of this school, which is located in a remote region reachable only by train. She is told she must take certain classes, one of which is “Special Technologies,” but neither she nor the reader is told what this entails. It turns out to be a school unlike any other, with bizarre requirements, eccentric and mostly unlikeable professors, students who have been coerced into attending and do not get along very well.

The narrative covers Sasha’s education from her first to third year. During this time, Sasha is transformed in frightening ways. She has special powers that mystify her, and the teachers will not tell her why she has them or what they mean. She is scared and confused, but also reluctantly intrigued by it all. Linguistics plays a key role in the story (which I won’t spoil), and I think a large part of what spurred my curiosity is finding out how the language connection gets resolved.

It may be frustrating to those who prefer straight-forward stories. It reminded me of the old computer game Myst, where the user is dropped into a world with no explanation of what to do, where to go, and how to achieve the goal (or even what the goal might be). I read it as a metaphor for the transition between childhood and adulthood, navigating difficult obstacles that one does not always understand and trying to avoid adverse consequences. It is a book that requires patience and the ability to endure Sasha’s experience of cognitive dissonance. The ending is one that can be interpreted in multiple ways. show less

Published in English as Vita Nostra.

16-year-old Sasha is looking forward to her summer holidays: full of sun, swimming, and a bit of good ol' pitypar-- ahem daydreaming about romance. Instead, she finds a creepy dude who blackmails her into early morning bouts of swimming. Still, no holiday lasts forever, and Sasha can go back home and get rid of her creepy blackmailer, right? Riiiiiiight?!

Any contemporary, socially-aware person, will likely find a whole host of things wrong in this book:
- the creepy dude who thinks that bullying people for their own good, is perfectly acceptable
- the mother who's convinced that good things come to those who bribe their way to them
- the university with the study or else policy
- ... and the overall show more "mother/professor knows best" mentality that gets hammered home over and over again.

As much as I may now resent not having had the courage to pursue my actual interests during childhood, I can't help but wish I could be back in school, memorising all sorts of crap, hoping that it would be the answer to life, the universe and everything.

But for all its faults, there was something incredibly addictive about this story. With the weird tasks, rules and restrictions heaped upon the unfortunate protagonist, I became genuinely curious to see where everything would lead. And to the authors' credit, they certainly did their best to make things unpredictable, fantastic... and with plenty of things left unexplained.

On a completely unrelated note, the book helped me practice my mother tongue, since it appeared that Hungarian was the only translation where all three books from the series are available. I will never get over the giggle-inducing term for bribe money being "spreading money". As in, spreading butter on bread...

Score: 4/5 stars

If you can get past the very communist approach to education, you'll find a truly fascinating fantasy/sci-fi/coming-of-age story, starring a whole host of flawed characters who'll nevertheless worm their way into your heart. show less

Rating 3.5 out of 5

This book left me with seriously mixed feelings. I’ll admit that I was thoroughly engrossed for the first half, but my interest slowly waned. What I initially found to be so promising, mysterious, and intriguing, degraded into one of my least favorite plot devices: keeping readers and characters unnecessarily uniformed. That being said, the writing was lovely. Sometimes the spark of language is lost in translation, and that didn’t happen here, I don’t speak Russian so I can’t say for certain, but the prose flowed in a delightfully unforced way.

As the story drags on it becomes clear that main plot device is ineffability. The inability for what is being taught to be explained to the characters/students (the show more irony), the students being unable to communicate amongst themselves about normal problems, and Sasha, our protagonist, having communication failures throughout. I can handle this theme in limited doses, but not every conversation needs to end in “I can’t tell you that, you have to experience it” or “you couldn’t possibly understand it.” (*Cough* the point of a novel is to put things into words, so if the main plot elements can’t be put into words, what’s the point? Maybe try painting? Making a film? Some other form of media that doesn’t consist primarily of words?) If this book was whittled down to about half its length, I would have enjoyed it more, the ineffability plot wouldn’t have worn so thin. By the end of the book, I realized that despite all the happenings, the plot was actually really simple, and could have been greatly condensed.

Maybe I just missed the point? Maybe all the irks I had with this book were supposed to be there? Despite my complaints, this wasn’t a ‘bad’ book, or really even poorly written, it just didn’t work. I’m giving it such a high rating because I don’t regret reading it, I just wish it had some modifications. show less