Memoirs of a Muse: A Novel | Lara Vapnyar

Memoirs of a Muse: A Novel | Lara Vapnyar | Problems of a Muse

books:

Memoirs of a Muse:...

	Memoirs of a Muse: A Novel Lara Vapnyar Pantheon, 2006 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Lara Vapnyar, author of the prizewinning story collection There Are Jews in My House, brings us a poignant and comic first novel about a delightfully sincere modern-day muse. We meet Tanya as a typical Russian girl, living with her bookish professor mother in a drab Soviet apartment. As a teenager, Tanya becomes obsessed with Dostoevsky and settles on her life?s calling: she will be the companion to a great writer. Her memoirs tell of her immigration to New York after college, the stifling expectations of her Brighton Beach cousins, and the crucial moment in a bookshop on the Upper West Side, where Tanya attends a reading by Mark Schneider, a Significant New York Novelist.

Tanya soon moves in with Mark, ready to dazzle in bed, to serve and inspire . . . if only he would spend a little more time writing and a little less time at the gym, the shrink, and the literary soirees where she feels hopelessly unglamorous and out of place. But as she gradually learns to read English?struggling to better understand Mark?s work and her true role as Muse?Tanya also learns more than she expected about the destiny she has imagined for herself.

Animated by Vapnyar?s beguiling grace and vividness?with a narrative richness reflecting the great tradition of Russian realism to which she is a natural heir?Memoirs of a Muse is an altogether wonderful novel. It is a lively meditation on female capabilities and happiness, on the mysteries of artistic inspiration (and the absurdities of artistic life), and, perhaps most movingly, on the pain and wonder of the immigrant experience in New York City.

for more information click here

Couldn't put it down!

Vapnyar is one of those writers who is able to write in a way that transports readers to the scene - I felt, I smelled, I heard, I giggled... I couldn't put the book down.

This is a story of a Russian girl with a rich imagination and a longing for a life that is lived "to the utmost degree!". "But now I was fifteen, and that long-anticipated extraordinary talent still hadn't emerged. My many gifts rattled about like cheap jewelry in a sequined bag - there wasn't a single gemstone. Now what kind of fulfilling life could the likes of me lead?" Her language is honest and sincere (with ought being rude or shocking) and puts the story on a very intimate and familiar level.

for more information click here

Problems of a Muse

Imagine deciding to become a muse to a famous author when you grow up! That is just what Tatiana (Tanya) Rumer does in this very readable, comic and original novel. The problem is that Tanya craves to become a bad girl muse rather a good girl one. Her model is Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, Fedor Dostoevsky's muse. She vows to become like Polina and never like the "devoted, calm, domesticated" Anna Grigorievna, Dostoevsky's wife.

Unfortunately for Tanya, things do not go as planned with her writer, but there is a wonderful suprise ending for her ambition. This is a charming story with a twist of Russian irony.

for more information click here

The Loss of Self in Another

Tanya lives in Moscow with her professor mother upon whose bedroom wall is an array of pictures of the greats of Russian literature. The young Tanya is fascinated by the portrait of Dosstoyevsky. She spends her time reading about him and is especially fascinated by his stormy relationship with the charismatic yet difficult Polina Suslova Dostoyevsky's mistress. When Polina ends their relatioinship Dostoyevsky marries an unpreposssing girl, Anna Grigorievna, 24 years his junior. Anna is placid of temperament, tending to the needs of the great writer. Young Tanya decides it is her destiny to be the muse of a great man, to be the spark that ignites his great female characters as Polina did for Dostoyevsky.

Tanya is an attractive but otherwise unremarkable student who receives her college degree in history writing on such topics as the history of Russian makeup, and breakfast in ancient Rome. After having graduated she receives an opportunity to go to New York to live with her aunt and uncle, poor emigres trying to make lives for themselves and fit into the alien American culture. Finally her chance to be a muse comes when she meets Mark, a published writer at a reading in an upper West Side bookstore.

The much older Mark is a classic narcissist. He has little interest in Tanya's thoughts, memories even her sexual pleasure. She spends her days tending to his needs, waiting to inspire Mark to begin a new novel. In the process she abandons a career or even just a job and is being 'kept' by Mark as her professor mother reminds her during phone calls to Moscow. But as the years go on Tanya begins to suspect that something is wrong with their relationship. When Mark begins to write a new novel, and Tanya discovers in a biography of Dostoyevsky Mark's real thoughts about her, her belief in the importance of being a muse begins to unravel.

Although the progress of the relationship with Mark is predictable the juxtaposition of the relationship between Dostoyevsky and Polina, Dostoyevsky and Anna and Tanya's own life makes for an engrossing story. Along the way Vapnyar provides insights into the difficulties of the immigrant experience and what it means to lose one's sense of self in another. This is Vapnyar's first novel. She is a fine writer to be watched.

for more information click here

A Fascinating first Novel

Tanya is probably one of the most interesting characters I've encountered in a while. Growing up in Russia, she idolized the writer Dostoyevsky, after first seeing his picture as a little girl. Growing up, she hears of Dostoyevsky's muse, a spirited woman who inspirited him to write. At the suggestion of a teacher who is highly attracted to her, she realizes that she too wants to be a muse. She wants to inspire greatness and achieve immortality by having her actions inspire great art. When she travels to America as a young woman, she meets a frustrated writer who seems to be in need of a muse, and seems to be very interested in her. Tanya is overjoyed at first, but as time passes she realizes that something is not quite right about their relationship. As we read Tanya's story we also get to see Polina's story, the life of Dostoyevsky's muse as seen through Tanya's imagination.

There are a lot of great things about this story. As I said before, Tanya is an interesting complex character. As this slim volume is a coming of age story, we see all of the events that make her into the woman that she becomes. The story begins with her life in Russia and her relationship with her family (probably some of my favorite chapters in the book). We see her sexual maturation. We see her fascination with what many people consider to be the mundane and shallow parts of history, such as what people in the 19th century wore for makeup and used for birth control. We also get to see her life as a Russian immigrant. Tanya's move from one walk of life to another is very true to life. The book is written in a dreamy manner that makes it very pleasant to read. Yet my only complaint is perhaps it is too dreamy. Throughout the novel, all off the filler is simply skimmed over but by the end, I felt as if some of what was skimmed over could have been gone into a little more. I wanted to see more of this transformation that was so important for our main character. I wanted to slow down for a bit and watch as her time as a muse ends.

Beyond that speed bump, the story was highly enjoyable. This is an impressive first novel!

for more information click here

Chick-Lit with Telegraphed Punch

============
Ms. Vapnyar constructs lovely sentences of well-chosen words. The main story is juxtaposed with a fabricated diary of Dostoevsky's mistress, whom the heroine, Tanya, of "Memoirs" admires. The entire book is set in Simoncini Garamond, but a second typeface would have served well to delineate between Tanya's writing and the 19th Century diaries of Polina. (This book was published by Mark Z. Danielewski's house, Pantheon Books. They *know* about typeface changes!)

"Memoirs" would have been an excellent piece of short fiction, but it's been padded at the beginning with 88 pages of narrative about the female protagonist's childhood which does nothing for the story. This is almost half of the 212-page book. The second half of the book is much better than the first 88 pages.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

products you might be interested in