Brisbane

Book excerpt: In this complex novel from the winner of two of Russia's biggest literary prizes, a celebrated guitarist robbed of his talent by Parkinson's disease seeks other paths to immortality. For readers of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Umberto Eco, and Solzhenitsyn, this richly layered new novel from the author of Laurus follows a musical prodigy in search of inner peace as he faces an incurable disease. Like Vodolazkin's earlier novels, this personal story of a lifetime quest for meaning will resonate with any mortal who has grasped for eternity. At fifty, Gleb Yanovski, an acclaimed guitar virtuoso, is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Gleb accepts an offer from a writer, Sergei Nesterov, to recount his life for a biography. They meet regularly for several years and Gleb recalls his life: a childhood spent in Kiev, university studies in St. Petersburg, and years in Munich, where Gleb lives with his German wife, Katharina, and launches his career, rocketing from a tutor of Russian to a celebrity musician touring major international venues. In the dueling interplay between these first-person recollections and the biographer's narration, Gleb's life unfolds amid his changing attitudes towards music and death; over the years these two obsessions grow inextricably linked. Witnessing a girl drown in the Dnepr River causes Gleb to abandon music school - he sees that death defies music, as it does any other activity. His grandfather points him to religion, through which Gleb comes to see music as a way to overcome time, as a path to eternity. This is why Parkinson's disease shatters Gleb so severely: the illness deprives him of music, his only bulwark against death. And then Gleb meets Vera, an exceptionally gifted thirteen-year-old musician, whom he and his wife embrace as a longed-for daughter. Vera, however, is dying of a rapidly spreading kidney cancer, and their determination to forstall her imminent death is not enough. In his phone conversation with the girl's mentally ill mother, Gleb explains Vera's absence by saying the girl departed for Brisbane. Gleb's mother, too, has moved to Brisbane, the city of her dreams. From there, Greb receives fortuitous phone calls. Expanding the literary universe spun in his previous works, Vodolazkin dwells on time and eternity, belonging and the search for meaning. In Brisbane, the carefully knit stitches unravel into a puzzle: Whose story is it - the subject's or the writer's? Are art and love really no match for death? Is Brisbane our only hope for the future?