The Russian writer Anna starobinets, given over to her fantasy narrative and science fiction dark, she gave a specific turn to her work as a result of a personal trigger that led her to that crude realism exploited in the autobiographical. Ghosts attack from remote dimensions or from the real world. You never know.
So in his steps from one threshold to another, from exploratory fiction of new planes to the realism dictated by experiences, Starobinets rediscovers the craft of writing with that irrepressible drive to tell their stories. Early compared to greats of the fantasy genre such as Stephen King o Poe, Anna leads us along that winding and always interesting path of a work that underpins disparate genres but that always shines with that luminosity of proposals loaded with verisimilitude thanks to its characters.
Not in vain, the great virtue of a narrative with a hook is to provide those who inhabit the plots with that intelligent, wise characterization, difficult to learn as a writing craft. Anna brushes the psyche of her protagonists so that each action takes on special relevance. The allegory of the day, the deepest horror, the most untimely humanity that springs from a simple, perfectly vivid gesture... All of this is knowing how to write to move. And Anna achieves it fluidly, from the imprint of someone who was truly born to tell stories.
Top 3 Recommended Books by Anna Starobinets
You have to look
Do not think of a pink elephant ... the well-known phrase about the subconscious in this case implies that invitation to take control in the face of the ominous. We cannot help but face an unsettling situation that is coming our way. And then the pink elephant grows and turns black, it runs towards you while you lie down, waiting for circumstances ...
In 2012, Anna Starobinets discovered, in a routine visit to the doctor, that the child she was expecting had a birth defect incompatible with life. What begins as the chronicle of a failed pregnancy, ends up becoming a true horror story.
Starobinets narrates with extreme harshness and heartbreaking humanity the pilgrimage through the health institutions of his country, his subsequent trip to Germany and the mourning for his lost son. You have to watch it triggered a storm in Russia when it was published, as it dared to address the taboo of power that women have over their own bodies. A story of pain and resistance as bold as it is clarifying, as intense as it is real, about a silenced trauma.
Refuge
Anna's strange and laudable capacity for narrative miscegenation explodes in this novel with a disturbing symphony around diverse settings and misplaced characters, alienated by changing environments and always recognizable at the same time ...
At once a realistic novel about the disintegration of a family, a fantasy world created from myth and folklore, and a contemporary parable about the end of the world, Vault 3/9 manages to keep the reader one foot in the disturbing terror of Starobinets, and another in a gripping plot, demonstrating how fantasy and reality interact.
Perfect mix of a real world and an imaginary one, Shelter 3/9 is a fascinating novel by one of the renowned masters of contemporary fantasy. A story built from fairy tales and internet conspiracies, the fundamental foundations of Western culture, and the limits of contemporary science, this is a novel that manages to draw a clear and worrying portrait of the world in which we live.
The Live
Since Malthus mathematized overpopulation on Earth, a lot has happened. And more or less the matter has been weathered. Within the plague that we are, the worst omens point to the unsustainable. And science fiction has been approaching it from the fantastic plane for a long time so that no one is caught off guard.
After The Great Reduction, the population of the Earth remains fixed at three billion inhabitants. Nobody dies: at the end of their lives people are reborn in some other part of the globe; an incarnation code holds information about your previous lives. There are no longer individuals, each human being is nothing more than an element in a greater consciousness, The Living One.
This central brain decides everything: where people will live, what their work will be like, how long they will be allowed to survive in their current incarnation ... Until a human being without a code is born, and the entire planetary system is threatened.
This novel, among the finalists of the prestigious Russian Natsionalny Bestseller and Strannik awards, once again demonstrates the talent and literary qualities of Anna Starobinets, one of the leading figures of the new Russian literary generation.
