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The Secret History of Moscow
Every city contains secret places. Moscow in the tumultuous 1990s is no different, its citizens seeking safety in a world below the streets — a dark, cavernous world of magic, weeping trees, and albino jackdaws, where exiled pagan deities and faery-tale creatures whisper strange tales to those who would listen. Galina is a young woman caught, like her contemporaries, in the seeming lawlessness of the new Russia.
In the midst of this chaos, her sister Maria turns into a jackdaw and flies away — prompting Galina to join Yakov, a policeman investigating a rash of recent disappearances. Their search will take them to the underground realm of hidden truths and archetypes, to find themselves caught between reality and myth, past and present, honor and betrayal … the secret history of Moscow.
In the midst of this chaos, her sister Maria turns into a jackdaw and flies away — prompting Galina to join Yakov, a policeman investigating a rash of recent disappearances. Their search will take them to the underground realm of hidden truths and archetypes, to find themselves caught between reality and myth, past and present, honor and betrayal … the secret history of Moscow.
311 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 1, 2007
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February 5, 2018
The Secret History of Moscow is, judging by the wide range of reviews, the literary equivalent of an optical illusion:
You might read it and feel disconnected from the characters, as if you were living in a grey ice-slushy day with errands to run that mean wet boots and snow down your neck. Or you might read it and see the characters as part of a cultural mosaic, set against the background of gentle, fat flakes of snow falling out of a soft grey sky, the air crisp and fresh. The first time I read it, it was more of the first. The second, I was concentrating less on the primary characters and plot, and enjoying the tale-within-a-tale style, that gave tiny glimpses into Moscow and by extension, Russia.
"Yakov tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice. Nothing was ever easy, and he resented that his visit to a magical kingdom of fairytales was turning into a series of interviews. And corpse examinations."
It begins with Galina in the bathroom, struggling with her feelings. Her sister takes over and before one can turn around three times, has turned into a jackdaw and left her newborn baby behind. Finding her sister, Masha, becomes Galina's quest and raison d'être, bringing her first into contact with Fyodor, an alcoholic street artist, and then to Yakov, a divorced policeman settling uncomfortably into failure. When they witness a flock of crows disappear into a puddle, they know something mysterious is going on. Fyodor leads them to a subway station and they fall through an opening into the Underground.
"She always knew it would be a subway, and once again she lamented her lack of persistence. All this time she thought she was delusional, but in reality she wasn’t delusional enough to keep the hope alive."
Comparisons--not the least of which is Neil himself--abound to American Gods, but I'll be honest--this was far more palatable and charming. As we meet each entity in the narrative, we learn about a small piece of Russian history. Galina is a story of both mental illness and being a single female in modern Moscow. Fyodor indirectly illustrates the relationship between the Gypsies and townfolk. Yakov's grandfather gives insight into the days of control by the state and suspicion of outsiders. Countess Elena, wife of a member of the Decembrists' Revolt explains the no-win choices she faced. Sovin is a portrait of a plant scientist who fought in the wars and still ended up sent to a labor camp. Hershel was a Russian Jew in 1886 when persecution ramped up.
"Everyone liked to think that the worst was over, and that they were either important or inconspicuous enough to survive. Herschel smiled sadly at their self deception and felt embarrassed by his conceit—he was not so different from them after all."
Much of the history can be said to be grim, but that's what forgotten history means, isn't it? New York City's underground would no doubt have indentured servants, refugees starving in an overcrowded Irish tenement, women who were burned to death in factory fires with no exits. So perhaps these missing stories are indeed grim, and hard to connect to, but there's something to be said for just bearing witness to the descriptions, endeavoring to understand the cultural moment, that makes it worthwhile. That it is wrapped up in solid writing with interspersed forgotten fairy tale characters makes it more interesting.
"This place is for those of us who don’t mind being small, who can live without being noticed. Those who are not ashamed to hide. But even we fade away eventually— you can’t be small forever without disappearing."
The plot becomes almost secondary; though Galina has a single-minded focus on her sister, nearly no one else does, including Sedia. The Underworld is concerned about the incursion of the top world into their own and wants some reconnaissance done. For the plot-driven reader, this may prove unsatisfying. The format is almost--but not quite--the tale-within-tale story of In the Night Garden or Life and Death are Wearing Me Out. I finished the book quickly, but something about it called for a re-read. I thought the second time even better, a very satisfying, cathartic experience. A truly modern fairy tale, it may be one I have to add to my own library.
“He was still wide awake when the morning came - the light changed imperceptibly underground, with the glowtrees flaring up brightly, and the shimmer of golden dust that remained suspended in the musty air, as if millions of butterflies had shed the scales of their wings in midair.”
four and a half nesting matryoshka dolls
You might read it and feel disconnected from the characters, as if you were living in a grey ice-slushy day with errands to run that mean wet boots and snow down your neck. Or you might read it and see the characters as part of a cultural mosaic, set against the background of gentle, fat flakes of snow falling out of a soft grey sky, the air crisp and fresh. The first time I read it, it was more of the first. The second, I was concentrating less on the primary characters and plot, and enjoying the tale-within-a-tale style, that gave tiny glimpses into Moscow and by extension, Russia.
"Yakov tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice. Nothing was ever easy, and he resented that his visit to a magical kingdom of fairytales was turning into a series of interviews. And corpse examinations."
It begins with Galina in the bathroom, struggling with her feelings. Her sister takes over and before one can turn around three times, has turned into a jackdaw and left her newborn baby behind. Finding her sister, Masha, becomes Galina's quest and raison d'être, bringing her first into contact with Fyodor, an alcoholic street artist, and then to Yakov, a divorced policeman settling uncomfortably into failure. When they witness a flock of crows disappear into a puddle, they know something mysterious is going on. Fyodor leads them to a subway station and they fall through an opening into the Underground.
"She always knew it would be a subway, and once again she lamented her lack of persistence. All this time she thought she was delusional, but in reality she wasn’t delusional enough to keep the hope alive."
Comparisons--not the least of which is Neil himself--abound to American Gods, but I'll be honest--this was far more palatable and charming. As we meet each entity in the narrative, we learn about a small piece of Russian history. Galina is a story of both mental illness and being a single female in modern Moscow. Fyodor indirectly illustrates the relationship between the Gypsies and townfolk. Yakov's grandfather gives insight into the days of control by the state and suspicion of outsiders. Countess Elena, wife of a member of the Decembrists' Revolt explains the no-win choices she faced. Sovin is a portrait of a plant scientist who fought in the wars and still ended up sent to a labor camp. Hershel was a Russian Jew in 1886 when persecution ramped up.
"Everyone liked to think that the worst was over, and that they were either important or inconspicuous enough to survive. Herschel smiled sadly at their self deception and felt embarrassed by his conceit—he was not so different from them after all."
Much of the history can be said to be grim, but that's what forgotten history means, isn't it? New York City's underground would no doubt have indentured servants, refugees starving in an overcrowded Irish tenement, women who were burned to death in factory fires with no exits. So perhaps these missing stories are indeed grim, and hard to connect to, but there's something to be said for just bearing witness to the descriptions, endeavoring to understand the cultural moment, that makes it worthwhile. That it is wrapped up in solid writing with interspersed forgotten fairy tale characters makes it more interesting.
"This place is for those of us who don’t mind being small, who can live without being noticed. Those who are not ashamed to hide. But even we fade away eventually— you can’t be small forever without disappearing."
The plot becomes almost secondary; though Galina has a single-minded focus on her sister, nearly no one else does, including Sedia. The Underworld is concerned about the incursion of the top world into their own and wants some reconnaissance done. For the plot-driven reader, this may prove unsatisfying. The format is almost--but not quite--the tale-within-tale story of In the Night Garden or Life and Death are Wearing Me Out. I finished the book quickly, but something about it called for a re-read. I thought the second time even better, a very satisfying, cathartic experience. A truly modern fairy tale, it may be one I have to add to my own library.
“He was still wide awake when the morning came - the light changed imperceptibly underground, with the glowtrees flaring up brightly, and the shimmer of golden dust that remained suspended in the musty air, as if millions of butterflies had shed the scales of their wings in midair.”
four and a half nesting matryoshka dolls
June 25, 2011
I really want to talk about crack babies to talk about how I feel about this book. That's what I'm thinking about. "Mariel, they are born into a disrupted world and missing a chemical/spiritual/whatever balance..." and then I think crack babies 'cause my attention span is shot and I'm a half thought kinda person on good days.
I'd take a picture of my mind map and the connect the dots if I could. (They show a picture of a dog's head when joined! Because that's what my mind thinks of when it thinks of Russia. I've collected images of Russia that are probably not normal. One of them is The Golden Girls dream sequence of the girls visiting the country in Soviet era.) My mind was at odds with what I was reading and what I wanted to read about. Like, I had ideas and feelings under the surface and then none of them happened. My heart was in the wrong place. It's not good to read a book that is all over in what it wants to say when you're mind is already all over the place. I'm gonna blame Sedia anyway 'cause she could have written something better than a tolerable urban fantasy.
All of this is really with me as a reader in mind. I don't know if anyone else craves fantasy about heart what-ifs, the emotional equivalent of sunrises and sunsets. Gone today and tomorrow. It is enough to SEE it relating, pull on threads of history and if it were a tin can phone you'd get an echo back that sounded oddly like your own shout. (Like hearing The Beach Boys all over elephant 6 music.) I don't read lots of urban fantasy because I want to know what to expect. That's not the same at all! (Sunsets are not the same.)
Now I'm thinking of this:
The wikipedia page for "Twilight Sleep" says: "Twilight sleep (English translation of the German word Dämmerschlaf[1][2]) is an amnesic condition characterized by insensibility to pain without loss of consciousness, induced by an injection of morphine and scopolamine,[3] especially to relieve the pain of childbirth. This combination induces a semi-narcotic[4] state which produces the experience of childbirth without pain, or without the memory of pain.[3] The term 'Twilight Sleep' is also sometimes used to refer to modern intravenous sedation."
(Okay, wiki also says) Women who gave birth this way could not remember having their babies.
And the drugs had effects on the infants. Bad effects.
Doing the half thought thing I remembered it as ways to numb oneself to what is happening and going through in historical comas. Sleeping awake and then the crack babies as all the missing "health" of loving family and future.
People who are born addicted, dependent, troubled and existing in a world of twilight sleep. Russia in the 1990s and upside down. What does the world look like underground when it is not right side up? This is what I WISH the book was about. It became a I'm Russian and I want to tell you things and I think I'm saying the half life stuff too but it is really getting buried under all the talking about what I want people to know about Russia book. Politics. Ugh.
Ekaterina Sedia surely hears my voice in her head talking to her when she writes her books. She ignored me again. Crack babies! She had to have heard me say it was twilight sleep, and being born into ghosts and not history book cliffnotes. If it is the under the boot of the footnotes of history then why did they walk on in walk on parts in a travelogue? (Don't get me wrong. My mind had no problem imagining any of it. "Secret History" must've been amazing in Sedia's head, before she'd written it.) She did an excorcist twist head around and faced back to the front. Like the turning the tables boots who boot out the old pairs of shoes treading on everything. Aristocrats! Really? Communists? Oh my god!
The fish floundering on dry land was the same damned land! Bars, and woods, and history like I've heard this shit so many fucking times already. (I groaned when the very first place they go to is a fucking bar.) Fish out of water stories should be about breathing. I want to be in a new world to notice what is taken for granted. If it is the same land it is still taken for granted. Same side up.
Not that the Decembrists and dripping from dead dog's eyes and terrible Ivans and useful Jews and everyone being poor together isn't haunted eye look (dripping dead dogs!).
So how do the losers of life fit into history as life? It's twilight sleep and waking up drugged into that history. That's what I feel. The directionless sad in youth are fed hope it'll all be different, you'll be a PAGE in a book that can be turned and felt and smelt (the real kind of books that have their own smells), once you get out of town and get to college. Underground? Torn from one and stitched together and it's a magnificent all new quilt? Nuh uh.
I thought Sedia was gonna listen. In the beginning Galina is afraid. I felt at home in 'Moscow' with her for the ripped into the world maladjustedness of that fear. Staring into dark subways and dreaming there's more. Finding treasures like stairwells and broken glass (six year old me thought nothing was more beautiful than broken green glass) in to save for building what looks like it doesn't belong there and should be somewhere magical. Galina turning her fear of insanity into a comfort blanket to dismiss all the unknown, sacrificing freedom and chances for that safety. I almost felt I saw Moscow through HER eyes... (That was until the lessons started in.)
Does it ever seem like fantasy and sci fi is naturally technophobic? I couldn't name one that isn't. It's the phobic part that's important. The dark fantasy in imagining the worst that can happen. Odds with the world phobic. Worldophobia. Afraid of everyone. (A man walks into a bar.... That's the punchline.)
I was thinking about twilight sleep before page 107. One line and it might have been throwaway (chances are high). "It was like the sleep paralysis he used to get as a child- a feeling of utter helplessness and despair, and it felt like it was his fault." (The he is Yakov the police detective. Yakov is as boring as I now expect all police characters in urban fantasy to be. That's a lot of boring.)
Now wake up! There's no Secret History. It's what you can't live with. Why couldn't that have been the story? It sucks that Sedia is Mariel deaf because she gets the sick fantasy feeling of walking with your head down and keeping distances as a way to see the Peter Pan shadows (and secret histories). It's probably wrong though. Like how there aren't dinner parties waiting in the sky for teenaged misfits it isn't magic to feel that alone in your bedroom parties are all there is.
Maybe I am annoyed because the reason behind the Muscavites turning into birds (crows, crows, crows!) wasn't that interesting after all. But... birds! And Russia! Why wasn't this great? (Sorry, I don't mean to crow.)
Okay, I'm reluctant to mention this next part because most other reviews already do: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman quotes that Sedia does for Moscow what he hoped his book did for London. I'm also reluctant to mention this 'cause I already did my bit about Mieville's Un Lun Dun looking like a girl at the prom wearing the same dress as another prom attendee. Originality is overrated. The world is the same (more or less) for a lot of people. That doesn't mean anything that happens there is. Like the Russian folklore was influenced and borrowed from multiple sources. Why not? It makes sense. Natural, even. That's how stories live! (I already did my bit about Gaiman coming up with the same idea as Dianna Wynne Jones for another book. Stop ripping off other reviewers, Mariel! God, you are so unoriginal. Like everyone else already mentioned Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere!) Neverwhere was good. It wasn't perfect either. (What happens to people who fall through the cracks? I will probably never tire of those kinds of stories.) If they could surprise me. Give me what I didn't know I wanted. Why does anyone stare into dark abysses and wonder about the other side? How does anyone sleep and not feel paralyzed... And what about the land that the fish squirms on? Does it change the fish? Does the fish change it? I am probably a jerk expecting what is probably meant to be a typical urban fantasy (shows me for reading one that mentions a detective in the plot blurb!) to care more about interesting enough sounding plot and setting. But... c'mon you author guys, listen to me!
The ending was a wallow (depressing as shit). I don't know about you, Sedia. You're good but seem to miss the point of your own stories. We watch to go on living, not to give up for the future.
The Hall of Presidents is the worst Disney ride for a reason! (I still think history matters for crack baby reasons.)
I'd take a picture of my mind map and the connect the dots if I could. (They show a picture of a dog's head when joined! Because that's what my mind thinks of when it thinks of Russia. I've collected images of Russia that are probably not normal. One of them is The Golden Girls dream sequence of the girls visiting the country in Soviet era.) My mind was at odds with what I was reading and what I wanted to read about. Like, I had ideas and feelings under the surface and then none of them happened. My heart was in the wrong place. It's not good to read a book that is all over in what it wants to say when you're mind is already all over the place. I'm gonna blame Sedia anyway 'cause she could have written something better than a tolerable urban fantasy.
All of this is really with me as a reader in mind. I don't know if anyone else craves fantasy about heart what-ifs, the emotional equivalent of sunrises and sunsets. Gone today and tomorrow. It is enough to SEE it relating, pull on threads of history and if it were a tin can phone you'd get an echo back that sounded oddly like your own shout. (Like hearing The Beach Boys all over elephant 6 music.) I don't read lots of urban fantasy because I want to know what to expect. That's not the same at all! (Sunsets are not the same.)
Now I'm thinking of this:
The wikipedia page for "Twilight Sleep" says: "Twilight sleep (English translation of the German word Dämmerschlaf[1][2]) is an amnesic condition characterized by insensibility to pain without loss of consciousness, induced by an injection of morphine and scopolamine,[3] especially to relieve the pain of childbirth. This combination induces a semi-narcotic[4] state which produces the experience of childbirth without pain, or without the memory of pain.[3] The term 'Twilight Sleep' is also sometimes used to refer to modern intravenous sedation."
(Okay, wiki also says) Women who gave birth this way could not remember having their babies.
And the drugs had effects on the infants. Bad effects.
Doing the half thought thing I remembered it as ways to numb oneself to what is happening and going through in historical comas. Sleeping awake and then the crack babies as all the missing "health" of loving family and future.
People who are born addicted, dependent, troubled and existing in a world of twilight sleep. Russia in the 1990s and upside down. What does the world look like underground when it is not right side up? This is what I WISH the book was about. It became a I'm Russian and I want to tell you things and I think I'm saying the half life stuff too but it is really getting buried under all the talking about what I want people to know about Russia book. Politics. Ugh.
Ekaterina Sedia surely hears my voice in her head talking to her when she writes her books. She ignored me again. Crack babies! She had to have heard me say it was twilight sleep, and being born into ghosts and not history book cliffnotes. If it is the under the boot of the footnotes of history then why did they walk on in walk on parts in a travelogue? (Don't get me wrong. My mind had no problem imagining any of it. "Secret History" must've been amazing in Sedia's head, before she'd written it.) She did an excorcist twist head around and faced back to the front. Like the turning the tables boots who boot out the old pairs of shoes treading on everything. Aristocrats! Really? Communists? Oh my god!
The fish floundering on dry land was the same damned land! Bars, and woods, and history like I've heard this shit so many fucking times already. (I groaned when the very first place they go to is a fucking bar.) Fish out of water stories should be about breathing. I want to be in a new world to notice what is taken for granted. If it is the same land it is still taken for granted. Same side up.
Not that the Decembrists and dripping from dead dog's eyes and terrible Ivans and useful Jews and everyone being poor together isn't haunted eye look (dripping dead dogs!).
So how do the losers of life fit into history as life? It's twilight sleep and waking up drugged into that history. That's what I feel. The directionless sad in youth are fed hope it'll all be different, you'll be a PAGE in a book that can be turned and felt and smelt (the real kind of books that have their own smells), once you get out of town and get to college. Underground? Torn from one and stitched together and it's a magnificent all new quilt? Nuh uh.
I thought Sedia was gonna listen. In the beginning Galina is afraid. I felt at home in 'Moscow' with her for the ripped into the world maladjustedness of that fear. Staring into dark subways and dreaming there's more. Finding treasures like stairwells and broken glass (six year old me thought nothing was more beautiful than broken green glass) in to save for building what looks like it doesn't belong there and should be somewhere magical. Galina turning her fear of insanity into a comfort blanket to dismiss all the unknown, sacrificing freedom and chances for that safety. I almost felt I saw Moscow through HER eyes... (That was until the lessons started in.)
Does it ever seem like fantasy and sci fi is naturally technophobic? I couldn't name one that isn't. It's the phobic part that's important. The dark fantasy in imagining the worst that can happen. Odds with the world phobic. Worldophobia. Afraid of everyone. (A man walks into a bar.... That's the punchline.)
I was thinking about twilight sleep before page 107. One line and it might have been throwaway (chances are high). "It was like the sleep paralysis he used to get as a child- a feeling of utter helplessness and despair, and it felt like it was his fault." (The he is Yakov the police detective. Yakov is as boring as I now expect all police characters in urban fantasy to be. That's a lot of boring.)
Now wake up! There's no Secret History. It's what you can't live with. Why couldn't that have been the story? It sucks that Sedia is Mariel deaf because she gets the sick fantasy feeling of walking with your head down and keeping distances as a way to see the Peter Pan shadows (and secret histories). It's probably wrong though. Like how there aren't dinner parties waiting in the sky for teenaged misfits it isn't magic to feel that alone in your bedroom parties are all there is.
Maybe I am annoyed because the reason behind the Muscavites turning into birds (crows, crows, crows!) wasn't that interesting after all. But... birds! And Russia! Why wasn't this great? (Sorry, I don't mean to crow.)
Okay, I'm reluctant to mention this next part because most other reviews already do: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman quotes that Sedia does for Moscow what he hoped his book did for London. I'm also reluctant to mention this 'cause I already did my bit about Mieville's Un Lun Dun looking like a girl at the prom wearing the same dress as another prom attendee. Originality is overrated. The world is the same (more or less) for a lot of people. That doesn't mean anything that happens there is. Like the Russian folklore was influenced and borrowed from multiple sources. Why not? It makes sense. Natural, even. That's how stories live! (I already did my bit about Gaiman coming up with the same idea as Dianna Wynne Jones for another book. Stop ripping off other reviewers, Mariel! God, you are so unoriginal. Like everyone else already mentioned Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere!) Neverwhere was good. It wasn't perfect either. (What happens to people who fall through the cracks? I will probably never tire of those kinds of stories.) If they could surprise me. Give me what I didn't know I wanted. Why does anyone stare into dark abysses and wonder about the other side? How does anyone sleep and not feel paralyzed... And what about the land that the fish squirms on? Does it change the fish? Does the fish change it? I am probably a jerk expecting what is probably meant to be a typical urban fantasy (shows me for reading one that mentions a detective in the plot blurb!) to care more about interesting enough sounding plot and setting. But... c'mon you author guys, listen to me!
The ending was a wallow (depressing as shit). I don't know about you, Sedia. You're good but seem to miss the point of your own stories. We watch to go on living, not to give up for the future.
The Hall of Presidents is the worst Disney ride for a reason! (I still think history matters for crack baby reasons.)
March 17, 2016
Nakon trećine knjige nisam bila optimistična. Iz naslova i opisa sam očekivala jedno, početak knjige mi je najavio čudnu misteriju i ubrzan tempo i onda se odjednom sve razvodnilo. I u tom trenu se treba vratiti i razmisliti o naslovu, jer ova knjiga je stvarno "tajna povijest moskve", priča kroz poglavlja različite kratke priče, priča o slavenskoj mitologiji, i ruskoj kulturi. Radnja s početka je samo pokretač i neće biti tako "brza" kako se možda u početku očekuje.
Meni je knjiga divna, i iako mi nije uvijek uspjela na dugo zadržati pažnju, želim je čitati nanovo i imati internet uz sebe da googlam sve što se spominje. Preporuka za mali odmak od zapadnjačke mitologije i kulture!
Meni je knjiga divna, i iako mi nije uvijek uspjela na dugo zadržati pažnju, želim je čitati nanovo i imati internet uz sebe da googlam sve što se spominje. Preporuka za mali odmak od zapadnjačke mitologije i kulture!
July 18, 2010
It does help to have either a knowledge of Russian Fairy Tales or a source to look them up in when reading this book.
That said, this is a good book. Sedia tells the story of Galina who is looking for her missing sister. It is wonderful to read a fairy tale influenced novel where the women actually get along and where sisters like each. Kate Crackernuts is another fairy story where the sisters are friends and not rivals.
Sedia does an excellent job of mixing fantasy and real people. Her idea that the myths of city go underground is an interesting one. It makes me wonder what lies beneath the city of Philadelphia. Betsy Ross sewing the flag, perhaps? Sedia presents an archeology that is less about place and more about culture. This might be why there is not a true sense of Moscow (though I've noticed this in the work of Sergei Lukyanenko as well.
That said, this is a good book. Sedia tells the story of Galina who is looking for her missing sister. It is wonderful to read a fairy tale influenced novel where the women actually get along and where sisters like each. Kate Crackernuts is another fairy story where the sisters are friends and not rivals.
Sedia does an excellent job of mixing fantasy and real people. Her idea that the myths of city go underground is an interesting one. It makes me wonder what lies beneath the city of Philadelphia. Betsy Ross sewing the flag, perhaps? Sedia presents an archeology that is less about place and more about culture. This might be why there is not a true sense of Moscow (though I've noticed this in the work of Sergei Lukyanenko as well.
August 4, 2012
I don’t know a lot about Moscow, or even Russia in general. If I had more free time, I would devote some of it to feeling guilty for this gap in my knowledge. Some day I might even get around to rectifying it by reading some informative books on the subject, rather than fantasy (which, I’m given to understand, is not always 100% factual—odd, that). But not today! No, today I’ll talk about The Secret History of Moscow, in all its dark and magical glory.
Ekaterina Sedia writes fairy tales. The Alchemy of Stone is a fairy tale about a clockwork woman who wants to be a real girl. The Secret History of Moscow is a fairy tale about a woman who, out of place and out of touch with our own world, uncovers a secret one while searching for her sister. When Masha turns into a jackdaw after giving birth in their bathroom, Galina wants to know why. Along the way, she meets a cop who has been investigating similar disappearances. They, in turn, meet a street artist who leads them into another world—underground—where the detritus of Moscow’s past has slunk.
I’m not sure what to do with The Secret History of Moscow. I’m not sure what to say about it, or really how I feel about it. It was OK. Sedia kept me interested, kept me wanting to know how it would all turn out. But now that I’m finished it, I discover that it has left almost no impression with me. That makes it difficult to review.
Wherefrom this malaise? I blame the structure of the narrative, the way Sedia chooses to tell this story. Galina, Yakov, and Fyodor waste no time discovering the underground, a twisted sort of fairyland where gods go to wither and die…. And then they stay there. For a while. They sort of loaf around an ersatz inn, chatting with Yakov’s grandfather and learning a little about the locals. Is it interesting? I guess. But it’s a lull, one that belies the otherwise urgent beat of the plot drum. There are people missing, birds flying through reflections in puddles to other worlds … I wanted to jump up and yell, “You have to get a move on!” I wasn’t reminded of it while reading, but as I write this review, I’m spurred to compare this to Bridge of Birds . I’m not sure why—perhaps the fairy-tale qualities of both tales—but the latter definitely has more pulse-pounding action even as it fully embraces whimsy and wonder.
The Secret History of Moscow, on the other hand, sort of plods along. The characters are cool, even sympathetic. The deposed and dispossessed mythological figures are also fascinating. Sedia draws from a diverse range of backgrounds, creating a kind of mythological mosaic, a sampling of ideas from the various cultures and times that have called Russia home. I wish she did them all justice, but the book is so short that we get only the slightest glimpse into these characters and what they represent.
Galina’s choice, at the end, was a good way to end the book too. It makes sense, given what we know of her—but at the same time, I wish we had spent more time with her in Moscow, seen more of her life. Does she have any friends? No one who will really miss her? Was her life really that one-note? Sedia writes well, but if she were an artist she would own only one, really wide paintbrush, and paint in bold and sweeping strokes across a smoky, ashen canvas.
I liked the book, but I don’t feel enthusiastic about it. It’s competent but not compelling. I don’t mind tossing my recommendation in there, if you think this is your thing, because there is nothing outright poor about The Secret History of Moscow. But it didn’t excite me either.
Ekaterina Sedia writes fairy tales. The Alchemy of Stone is a fairy tale about a clockwork woman who wants to be a real girl. The Secret History of Moscow is a fairy tale about a woman who, out of place and out of touch with our own world, uncovers a secret one while searching for her sister. When Masha turns into a jackdaw after giving birth in their bathroom, Galina wants to know why. Along the way, she meets a cop who has been investigating similar disappearances. They, in turn, meet a street artist who leads them into another world—underground—where the detritus of Moscow’s past has slunk.
I’m not sure what to do with The Secret History of Moscow. I’m not sure what to say about it, or really how I feel about it. It was OK. Sedia kept me interested, kept me wanting to know how it would all turn out. But now that I’m finished it, I discover that it has left almost no impression with me. That makes it difficult to review.
Wherefrom this malaise? I blame the structure of the narrative, the way Sedia chooses to tell this story. Galina, Yakov, and Fyodor waste no time discovering the underground, a twisted sort of fairyland where gods go to wither and die…. And then they stay there. For a while. They sort of loaf around an ersatz inn, chatting with Yakov’s grandfather and learning a little about the locals. Is it interesting? I guess. But it’s a lull, one that belies the otherwise urgent beat of the plot drum. There are people missing, birds flying through reflections in puddles to other worlds … I wanted to jump up and yell, “You have to get a move on!” I wasn’t reminded of it while reading, but as I write this review, I’m spurred to compare this to Bridge of Birds . I’m not sure why—perhaps the fairy-tale qualities of both tales—but the latter definitely has more pulse-pounding action even as it fully embraces whimsy and wonder.
The Secret History of Moscow, on the other hand, sort of plods along. The characters are cool, even sympathetic. The deposed and dispossessed mythological figures are also fascinating. Sedia draws from a diverse range of backgrounds, creating a kind of mythological mosaic, a sampling of ideas from the various cultures and times that have called Russia home. I wish she did them all justice, but the book is so short that we get only the slightest glimpse into these characters and what they represent.
Galina’s choice, at the end, was a good way to end the book too. It makes sense, given what we know of her—but at the same time, I wish we had spent more time with her in Moscow, seen more of her life. Does she have any friends? No one who will really miss her? Was her life really that one-note? Sedia writes well, but if she were an artist she would own only one, really wide paintbrush, and paint in bold and sweeping strokes across a smoky, ashen canvas.
I liked the book, but I don’t feel enthusiastic about it. It’s competent but not compelling. I don’t mind tossing my recommendation in there, if you think this is your thing, because there is nothing outright poor about The Secret History of Moscow. But it didn’t excite me either.
March 31, 2009
The Secret History of Moscow reads like a fusion of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and American Gods, only set in Moscow and populated by Slavic deities.
On the one hand I can't say that I'm much enamoured by any of our protagonists, which is not to say that they are not good characters. They are, in fact, rather well-written individuals with layers of personality and lots of spirit--I just happen not to like any of them. As always, I've fallen for the minor league players. It's doubly more fascinating when Sedia writes for them their own mini-biographies. What is more interesting than hearing about other peoples' lives--provided that they lived something worth listening to?
Moscow itself is that rather well-used picture of a grey and used city. Its citizens seem to live on the edge or barely live at all; remembering either the glorious past or the bleakness of the present. It's something that's rather typical in Russian literature: from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Lukyanenko and his compatriots. It would be interesting, for once, and very out of the norm to read something about Russia that lacked the shadow of sadness evident in so much of its literature.
I hover between a 3 and a 4 for this and finally decided to round up due to my sunny disposition. They should really through out some half stars.
On the one hand I can't say that I'm much enamoured by any of our protagonists, which is not to say that they are not good characters. They are, in fact, rather well-written individuals with layers of personality and lots of spirit--I just happen not to like any of them. As always, I've fallen for the minor league players. It's doubly more fascinating when Sedia writes for them their own mini-biographies. What is more interesting than hearing about other peoples' lives--provided that they lived something worth listening to?
Moscow itself is that rather well-used picture of a grey and used city. Its citizens seem to live on the edge or barely live at all; remembering either the glorious past or the bleakness of the present. It's something that's rather typical in Russian literature: from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Lukyanenko and his compatriots. It would be interesting, for once, and very out of the norm to read something about Russia that lacked the shadow of sadness evident in so much of its literature.
I hover between a 3 and a 4 for this and finally decided to round up due to my sunny disposition. They should really through out some half stars.
February 11, 2016
Ova knjiga je pravi uzitak za svakog ljubitelja slovenske mitologije i ruskih bajki. Pomalo nalik Americkim bogovima, ali ipak pravo osvezenje u moru zapadnjacke fantastike.
May 22, 2012
2.5
When I saw the reviews for this book I saw it discussed as a mixture of Neverwhere and American Gods - two books I love from Neil Gaiman. And while the comparison is a fair one when it comes to the premise of the story, it doesn't really live up to the comparison in execution.
I wanted to love this book. It's right up my alley, and it's a book that I should've loved, but while it was interesting, it just sort of fell flat. I think mostly it's because the characters never seemed really developed to me. Whether mortal or mythical, they didn't breathe.
Also the pacing. The first part of the story slowly unfolds as we learn the stories of the various players as they sort of meander around life and then on their quests, but then the ending sort of happens all at once, and I kept thinking I was missing pages or something because it all came together too neatly without any real rhyme or reason getting there. It sort of just happened.
There were good things to it. I really liked learning more about both Russian history and mythology, and seeing the depiction of life in Russia at the time was definitely one of the highlights of the book.
But, overall, I'm just left with the let down feeling that it could've been so much better than it was.
Again, it's not bad, really... it just... well, maybe my expectations were just too high. *shrugs*
ETA: I originally bumped my 2.5 up to 3, but I realized that the 3 was more left over for liking the premise and wanting to like it but if I compare it to other 3s, it just doesn't hold up. So I'm changing it to a downgrade instead of a bump. Still 2.5 either way, really, but, ya know...
When I saw the reviews for this book I saw it discussed as a mixture of Neverwhere and American Gods - two books I love from Neil Gaiman. And while the comparison is a fair one when it comes to the premise of the story, it doesn't really live up to the comparison in execution.
I wanted to love this book. It's right up my alley, and it's a book that I should've loved, but while it was interesting, it just sort of fell flat. I think mostly it's because the characters never seemed really developed to me. Whether mortal or mythical, they didn't breathe.
Also the pacing. The first part of the story slowly unfolds as we learn the stories of the various players as they sort of meander around life and then on their quests, but then the ending sort of happens all at once, and I kept thinking I was missing pages or something because it all came together too neatly without any real rhyme or reason getting there. It sort of just happened.
There were good things to it. I really liked learning more about both Russian history and mythology, and seeing the depiction of life in Russia at the time was definitely one of the highlights of the book.
But, overall, I'm just left with the let down feeling that it could've been so much better than it was.
Again, it's not bad, really... it just... well, maybe my expectations were just too high. *shrugs*
ETA: I originally bumped my 2.5 up to 3, but I realized that the 3 was more left over for liking the premise and wanting to like it but if I compare it to other 3s, it just doesn't hold up. So I'm changing it to a downgrade instead of a bump. Still 2.5 either way, really, but, ya know...
August 6, 2011
I really wanted to like this, but I just couldn't do it. The concept sounded fascinating--people turning into jackdaws, a hidden mythological underground, Russian folklore--but it was such a pain to read. Galina was obnoxious, and there wasn't enough to the other characters to give them anything. And she can't write dialogue. This was probably some of the worst dialogue I've read in a while. The prose and the descriptions of what people felt was okay, but the dialogue and even action sequences were awful. The stories, actually, were probably about the only good part. I liked Sovin's the best.
The other problem was it moved too slow and too fast at the same time. You spend the first 2/3 of the book learning the stories of the characters and the people underground, while supposedly they're on a quest to find out why people have been turning into birds, and then finally the last 1/3 dashes through that without any real explanation of WHY. Okay, so it's the thugs, and it's Likho and Zlyden, but Sedia never gives a good reason WHY they're doing this. What do the thugs have to gain? What do the demons have to gain? What's the point? And I don't really see how this all is reflective of Moscow and the period of glasnost. Was this supposed to be a parable? And if so, how and where?
And why?
The other problem was it moved too slow and too fast at the same time. You spend the first 2/3 of the book learning the stories of the characters and the people underground, while supposedly they're on a quest to find out why people have been turning into birds, and then finally the last 1/3 dashes through that without any real explanation of WHY. Okay, so it's the thugs, and it's Likho and Zlyden, but Sedia never gives a good reason WHY they're doing this. What do the thugs have to gain? What do the demons have to gain? What's the point? And I don't really see how this all is reflective of Moscow and the period of glasnost. Was this supposed to be a parable? And if so, how and where?
And why?
September 11, 2016
Iskreno, ne znam što bih mislila o ovoj knjizi.
Pomalo bizarna priča o podzemnom svijetu koji se krije ispod ulica Moskve, a u kojem su okupljeni najrazličitiji likovi, od bića iz mitologije do svakodnevnih ljudi koji su prošli neke užase u svom životu i uspjeli se od njih skloniti u podzemlje.
Počinje kao priča o misterioznom nestanku nekolicine ljudi i viđenjima ljudi koji se pretvaraju u ptice, a cijelu tu misteriju krenu istražiti jedan policajac, jedan umjetnik i jedna shizofreničarka. Na svom putu, njih troje susreću raznorazna mitološka bića i likove iz narodnih predaja, svoje vlastite pretke i znamenite povijesne osobe, a svijet u kojem se nađu nadrealno je bajkovit, ali i mračan.
Unatoč tome što je zanimljiva i maštovito postavljena, ova me priča znala i izmoriti. Puno je digresija, filozofiranja, propitkivanja ljudske sudbine i sudbine svijeta, a neke dijelove nisam uopće uspjela pohvatati, zbog čega mi se učinilo da se bit priče negdje izgubila. Zbog spominjanja gomile mitoloških likova, knjiga sadrži i velik broj fusnota, ali unatoč tome, teško se u svemu tome snaći bez prethodnog podrobnog poznavanja grčke i slavenske mitologije, kao i ruskih narodnih predaja, ali i povijesti.
Konačna ocjena: Začudan miš-maš bizarnih likova i čudne priče, čija mi je poanta tijekom čitanja nekako izmakla.
Pomalo bizarna priča o podzemnom svijetu koji se krije ispod ulica Moskve, a u kojem su okupljeni najrazličitiji likovi, od bića iz mitologije do svakodnevnih ljudi koji su prošli neke užase u svom životu i uspjeli se od njih skloniti u podzemlje.
Počinje kao priča o misterioznom nestanku nekolicine ljudi i viđenjima ljudi koji se pretvaraju u ptice, a cijelu tu misteriju krenu istražiti jedan policajac, jedan umjetnik i jedna shizofreničarka. Na svom putu, njih troje susreću raznorazna mitološka bića i likove iz narodnih predaja, svoje vlastite pretke i znamenite povijesne osobe, a svijet u kojem se nađu nadrealno je bajkovit, ali i mračan.
Unatoč tome što je zanimljiva i maštovito postavljena, ova me priča znala i izmoriti. Puno je digresija, filozofiranja, propitkivanja ljudske sudbine i sudbine svijeta, a neke dijelove nisam uopće uspjela pohvatati, zbog čega mi se učinilo da se bit priče negdje izgubila. Zbog spominjanja gomile mitoloških likova, knjiga sadrži i velik broj fusnota, ali unatoč tome, teško se u svemu tome snaći bez prethodnog podrobnog poznavanja grčke i slavenske mitologije, kao i ruskih narodnih predaja, ali i povijesti.
Konačna ocjena: Začudan miš-maš bizarnih likova i čudne priče, čija mi je poanta tijekom čitanja nekako izmakla.
zzz-books-not-for-me
January 27, 2016DNF, 30%
Read on May 05, 2015
Not my cup of tea. I am a huge fan of Slavic Myths and legends, but this book was slightly too dark and depressing. I expected more magic, more wonder, more of a fairy-tale feel to it. Why cruel World? Why?
Read on May 05, 2015
Not my cup of tea. I am a huge fan of Slavic Myths and legends, but this book was slightly too dark and depressing. I expected more magic, more wonder, more of a fairy-tale feel to it. Why cruel World? Why?
June 27, 2022
"The Secret History of Moscow" is a charming little novel that is comparable to Neil Gaimans' "Neverwhere."
This book can best be described as a dark modern fairy tale retelling. It has a large cast of misfit characters that are a delight to interact with. This novel is very character driven. Knowing a bit about this history of Russia is helpful.
I felt like this book would be most meaningful to people familiar with Moscow in the 90s. Its not a deal breaker. My ignorance lent a sense of alienness to the reading and I am sure their are cultural connotations I missed out on.
This is far from a perfect novel but it is fascinating and I did learn from it.
3.5 stars
This book can best be described as a dark modern fairy tale retelling. It has a large cast of misfit characters that are a delight to interact with. This novel is very character driven. Knowing a bit about this history of Russia is helpful.
I felt like this book would be most meaningful to people familiar with Moscow in the 90s. Its not a deal breaker. My ignorance lent a sense of alienness to the reading and I am sure their are cultural connotations I missed out on.
This is far from a perfect novel but it is fascinating and I did learn from it.
3.5 stars
February 1, 2008
The Secret History of Moscow
Ekaterina Sedia
Prime Books
Kat Sedia's "new" book, (it came out sometime in 2007, but my reading schedule is slow as molasses) The Secret History of Moscow, is an intriguing novel about set in both the normal world of Moscow in the 1990s and in the strange underworld beneath it where both mythical figures from Moscow's past rub shoulders with Muscovites and visitors from many eras. When Maria, the sister of the main character Galina mysteriously turns into a jackdaw and flies away, Galina is compelled to seek out the hidden world beneath and around her.
Superficially, this novel is very similar to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, as Gaiman in his usual modest way suggests in a review of his own. Sedia I think builds on Gaiman's ideas of a mythical world mirroring (and underneath) our modern one - populating her 'mythic' Moscow with historical figures - gypsies, Jews from the pogroms, Napoleanic soldiers and Tajik warriors; and strange and curious creatures from stories like the voidyanoi, rusalki, and Koschei the Deathless.
The three main characters Galina, a woman who works as an English translator, Yakov the cop, and Fyodor the itinerant artist, are normal people who become aware of the strangeness that's disrupted their lives: They've seen things - people turning into blackbirds before their eyes or watched family members vanish, and are the only ones compelled to get to the bottom of what's going on. It took me a few chapters of character introduction to get into the book, but once things were set up I could barely put the book down. I didn't just want to know what happened next, I was sucked into the narrative. I almost didn't want it to end and was cursing the book was only 300 pages.
Sedia cuts out nearly everything for a breezy writing style that is fast-paced and extremely easy to read, only to come to jarring stops when she pauses to flesh out a character met along the way with their own story. This, it turns out, is an extremely good thing. Sedia's strengths at least in this story is creating incredibly engaging and interesting characters in a short amount of time. And with each of those characters, one gets a sense of the inevitable change of history around them.
As much as people in reviews I've seen have focused on the Russian-ness or Moscow-ness of the story, I don't actually see that as a strong point of the book. For all the fascinating observations of the changes of Russian style (from the crown Peter the Great refused to wear, to traffic snarls and the motives of car ownership in modern Moscow) one doesn't actually get a sense of Moscow as a character. Part, I think, is that descriptions throughout the book are notoriously spare. I never got a sense of the personality of the setting around me, or its character.
But what I did get from this book was a real sense of the struggle of otherwise normal people in events wildly beyond their control. And, in character after character, outsiders forced to view the normal events of a city from a distant, almost solitary perspective. This I think is much more universal - I'd even go so far as to say it's a primary focus of modern fantasy, and what sets apart bad fantasy which only offers an escape for those who feel outside modern culture, and good fantasy which offers empathy and understanding, and uses tools of mythology towards those ends. It's something Gaiman has always been uniquely good at and is a reason why his writing is so popular. Sedia's Secret History builds on this, and more.
I want to shout from the rooftops about this novel. It's just that great. More people need to be reading and talking about this book.
Ekaterina Sedia
Prime Books
Kat Sedia's "new" book, (it came out sometime in 2007, but my reading schedule is slow as molasses) The Secret History of Moscow, is an intriguing novel about set in both the normal world of Moscow in the 1990s and in the strange underworld beneath it where both mythical figures from Moscow's past rub shoulders with Muscovites and visitors from many eras. When Maria, the sister of the main character Galina mysteriously turns into a jackdaw and flies away, Galina is compelled to seek out the hidden world beneath and around her.
Superficially, this novel is very similar to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, as Gaiman in his usual modest way suggests in a review of his own. Sedia I think builds on Gaiman's ideas of a mythical world mirroring (and underneath) our modern one - populating her 'mythic' Moscow with historical figures - gypsies, Jews from the pogroms, Napoleanic soldiers and Tajik warriors; and strange and curious creatures from stories like the voidyanoi, rusalki, and Koschei the Deathless.
The three main characters Galina, a woman who works as an English translator, Yakov the cop, and Fyodor the itinerant artist, are normal people who become aware of the strangeness that's disrupted their lives: They've seen things - people turning into blackbirds before their eyes or watched family members vanish, and are the only ones compelled to get to the bottom of what's going on. It took me a few chapters of character introduction to get into the book, but once things were set up I could barely put the book down. I didn't just want to know what happened next, I was sucked into the narrative. I almost didn't want it to end and was cursing the book was only 300 pages.
Sedia cuts out nearly everything for a breezy writing style that is fast-paced and extremely easy to read, only to come to jarring stops when she pauses to flesh out a character met along the way with their own story. This, it turns out, is an extremely good thing. Sedia's strengths at least in this story is creating incredibly engaging and interesting characters in a short amount of time. And with each of those characters, one gets a sense of the inevitable change of history around them.
As much as people in reviews I've seen have focused on the Russian-ness or Moscow-ness of the story, I don't actually see that as a strong point of the book. For all the fascinating observations of the changes of Russian style (from the crown Peter the Great refused to wear, to traffic snarls and the motives of car ownership in modern Moscow) one doesn't actually get a sense of Moscow as a character. Part, I think, is that descriptions throughout the book are notoriously spare. I never got a sense of the personality of the setting around me, or its character.
But what I did get from this book was a real sense of the struggle of otherwise normal people in events wildly beyond their control. And, in character after character, outsiders forced to view the normal events of a city from a distant, almost solitary perspective. This I think is much more universal - I'd even go so far as to say it's a primary focus of modern fantasy, and what sets apart bad fantasy which only offers an escape for those who feel outside modern culture, and good fantasy which offers empathy and understanding, and uses tools of mythology towards those ends. It's something Gaiman has always been uniquely good at and is a reason why his writing is so popular. Sedia's Secret History builds on this, and more.
I want to shout from the rooftops about this novel. It's just that great. More people need to be reading and talking about this book.
April 21, 2011
I loved it, I'm even tempted to rate it closer to a 9/10. Probably it was easier for me, a native of Eastern Europe, to relate with the slavic mythological characters and with the post communist social commentary and this familiarity probably made me rate it higher than if this were set in a western / capitalist metropolis. Anyway, I find the style of Sedia very appealing to my tastes after Secret History and Alchemy of Stone, and I will be looking forward to her next books.
July 25, 2021
2.5 ⭐ rounded up. The first chapter was absolutely enthralling!!! Then it just kept switching character povs. I slowly dropped interest about halfway but still finished reading it. The writing was good but the plot petered out on me. It was good but I wanted more.
dnf
January 15, 2021I DNFed this at the 2 hour mark. In this case, it wasn't just the book, but the narrator as well.
The writing style is very elaborate and picturesque and poetic, which can be very enjoyable if I read it in a physical book, but I listened to this as an audiobook, and then it's easy to zone out when the writingstyle is so flowery.
The second this, as I mentioned, was the narrator. She was very monotone and flat. Combine that with the writingstyle, and it was a snoze-fest. At least for me.
I don't feel comfortable saying anything about the plot or characters, because I'm not sure what it was about
The writing style is very elaborate and picturesque and poetic, which can be very enjoyable if I read it in a physical book, but I listened to this as an audiobook, and then it's easy to zone out when the writingstyle is so flowery.
The second this, as I mentioned, was the narrator. She was very monotone and flat. Combine that with the writingstyle, and it was a snoze-fest. At least for me.
I don't feel comfortable saying anything about the plot or characters, because I'm not sure what it was about
December 10, 2023
Mislio sam utrošit koju minutu vremena i napisati obrazloženje ocjene ovog romana. Kad sam malo bolje promislio rekoh, dovoljno sam vremena potrošio na čitanje ovog užasa, ne trebam još i na pisanje osvrta.
February 6, 2009
I have yet to read a book by a Russian author that has all that many nice things to say about Russia or Russians. Something in the character of their artists just seems to provoke statements in the genre of, "You know what wrong with this place?" Having never been to the country, I'm uncertain what colors that world view.
Anyhoo....
It's strange after reading a sword n' horses fantasy for me to actually encounter a book that could have used more pages.
"The Secret History of Moscow" is a book about a woman who's sister turns into jackdaw and flies away. In her search for her sibling, she travels to the underworld beneath Moscow and encounters many of the fables and outcasts who have built a civilization beneath the regular world.
Have you ever reached the 2/3rds point of a book, noticed how few pages were left, and said, "There's no way in hell they're wrapping this up satisfactorily." This book had that feeling at the halfway mark.
Too much time is wasted on flashbacks and oddly the characters while rich in history are kind of weak in characterization even after knowing their back story. Again, this could have been resolved with more space and time.
There's enough going on in this universe to fill a book three times this novel's 300 pages, but it doesn't feel like it even has a third act. They discover the underworld. They figure out the crime. And then it ends.
The ultimate source of villainy isn't even all fleshed out or exciting. I was expecting Baba Yaga or some other terrifying creation to be working with the Russian gangsters in the story, making the reveal rather underwhelming.
Yet I recommend this book, and I'm willing to give it three stars for the great set up and the good pacing. More than anything Sedia's first novel just comes off as a little green, a bit inexperienced in crafting a tale so massive.
I will definitely be checking out, "The Alchemy of the Stone", which just came out in paperback.
Anyhoo....
It's strange after reading a sword n' horses fantasy for me to actually encounter a book that could have used more pages.
"The Secret History of Moscow" is a book about a woman who's sister turns into jackdaw and flies away. In her search for her sibling, she travels to the underworld beneath Moscow and encounters many of the fables and outcasts who have built a civilization beneath the regular world.
Have you ever reached the 2/3rds point of a book, noticed how few pages were left, and said, "There's no way in hell they're wrapping this up satisfactorily." This book had that feeling at the halfway mark.
Too much time is wasted on flashbacks and oddly the characters while rich in history are kind of weak in characterization even after knowing their back story. Again, this could have been resolved with more space and time.
There's enough going on in this universe to fill a book three times this novel's 300 pages, but it doesn't feel like it even has a third act. They discover the underworld. They figure out the crime. And then it ends.
The ultimate source of villainy isn't even all fleshed out or exciting. I was expecting Baba Yaga or some other terrifying creation to be working with the Russian gangsters in the story, making the reveal rather underwhelming.
Yet I recommend this book, and I'm willing to give it three stars for the great set up and the good pacing. More than anything Sedia's first novel just comes off as a little green, a bit inexperienced in crafting a tale so massive.
I will definitely be checking out, "The Alchemy of the Stone", which just came out in paperback.
December 4, 2011
The name is quite an enigmatic one don't you think ? The secret history of Moscow makes you think of mythology & strange creatures, the backdrop of the Onion shaped domes of the Kremlin providing an ambience that few can match and so forth. What I have described above is true in parts when applied to this story but as a whole it is unsatisfying a dish !
At one glance it is a good mix of Gaiman's American Gods & Neverwhere . There is a world beneath our dwellings and populated by the icons,gods and symbols that time has so beneficially forgotten. Unlike American Gods , the mythology here is almost completely comprised of Slavic roots. But to the author's credit, here is where the comparison ends for she has done a good world build up and the characters that populate this underground world are quite amusing to spend time with. Most of them except the well renowned ones have their individual tales woven into the fabric of the main plot and this in itself is the fun part. As much as I liked a majority of the minor characters, I must say that the main protagonists are not the kind I would think about after I moved on to other books. They are somehow....too plain to be given second thoughts ! I think I have been reading too many books this years based in Russia. Like the ones I have read before, this one too captures the dreary spirit of Russia in the 90's & in an extremely engaging way too.
Then there is also the part about the whole structure of the story line. After going through a good 85% of the story, it all whooshes by and suddenly the tale comes to an end. As a reader I had no clue as to the intentions of the antagonists and what the whole purpose of the story was. As far as a satisfying conclusion goes, this sucked !
At one glance it is a good mix of Gaiman's American Gods & Neverwhere . There is a world beneath our dwellings and populated by the icons,gods and symbols that time has so beneficially forgotten. Unlike American Gods , the mythology here is almost completely comprised of Slavic roots. But to the author's credit, here is where the comparison ends for she has done a good world build up and the characters that populate this underground world are quite amusing to spend time with. Most of them except the well renowned ones have their individual tales woven into the fabric of the main plot and this in itself is the fun part. As much as I liked a majority of the minor characters, I must say that the main protagonists are not the kind I would think about after I moved on to other books. They are somehow....too plain to be given second thoughts ! I think I have been reading too many books this years based in Russia. Like the ones I have read before, this one too captures the dreary spirit of Russia in the 90's & in an extremely engaging way too.
Then there is also the part about the whole structure of the story line. After going through a good 85% of the story, it all whooshes by and suddenly the tale comes to an end. As a reader I had no clue as to the intentions of the antagonists and what the whole purpose of the story was. As far as a satisfying conclusion goes, this sucked !
October 22, 2012
I agree with those who expected more of this book. Let me explain what I thought was wrong with it. There's lots of folklore in this book, but it has no depth or vitality. It was like a mythology cartoon. It seemed to me as if the author herself had no real connection with any of it. The way to make it real is to show us a context in which the old Gods and Goddesses had real meaning in people's lives and weren't just folklore. Show us the way people lived with their deities. At one point, Galina asks "Was it possible to be so remote in time and circumstance that there was simply no overlap?" That's exactly Sedia's problem. She has no means of reaching or reconstructing the past. They are just quaint old stories.
October 6, 2008
A schizophrenic translator, a bored cop, and an alcoholic painter unite to discover why people are turning into birds all over Moscow. They stumble into the secret mythic world that exists side-by-side with the city. Then they don't really do anything else.
November 12, 2018
This book has its merits, but the writer's style is to ramble, introduce many sequential characters and give their backstory at once, then have them all go to the pub. I don't think anyone gets frightened during this adventure, not even when they realise that they are not in Moscow any more but some underworld. Because they are not frightened, nor are we.
The tale starts well enough in a Moscow tenement, with a young woman turning into a jackdaw - maybe - and her mother and sister searching for her, but pretty soon Moscow vanishes. I would have liked to see the city. I recommend Martin Cruz Smith's books 'Three Stations' and 'Tatiana'. Instead, we get the potted history of several varied characters, from the Golden Horde to modern thugs, and this is how we are told the history of Moscow. We also meet folk tale characters, but their histories are not told, so if you have not heard of Father Frost or Zemun the cow, or any of the small house-sprites, you'll have to go research or just accept the oddities.
Worth a read? Yes, but don't expect drama. My husband dropped it three quarter way because he was tired of reading about people in a pub and he wanted the author to have something happen or make a point. I was disappointed that our heroine Galina doesn't resolve the issue, she just asks other people to do it. Although she does help her sister... oddly.
This is an unbiased review.
The tale starts well enough in a Moscow tenement, with a young woman turning into a jackdaw - maybe - and her mother and sister searching for her, but pretty soon Moscow vanishes. I would have liked to see the city. I recommend Martin Cruz Smith's books 'Three Stations' and 'Tatiana'. Instead, we get the potted history of several varied characters, from the Golden Horde to modern thugs, and this is how we are told the history of Moscow. We also meet folk tale characters, but their histories are not told, so if you have not heard of Father Frost or Zemun the cow, or any of the small house-sprites, you'll have to go research or just accept the oddities.
Worth a read? Yes, but don't expect drama. My husband dropped it three quarter way because he was tired of reading about people in a pub and he wanted the author to have something happen or make a point. I was disappointed that our heroine Galina doesn't resolve the issue, she just asks other people to do it. Although she does help her sister... oddly.
This is an unbiased review.
January 24, 2011
"You know how they say the grass is always greener on the other side? It is greener, because you're not there. And if you go you'll trample it and leave dirty footprints and probably spill something poisonous."
—p.112
Some people make the mistake of thinking that magic is stronger than science, older and more powerful, but we city-dwellers know that magic is a fragile thing, easily driven away or trampled underfoot by unthinking humanity. When magic is attacked, it retreats, into the high places, into faraway fastnesses, and... underground, where it tries to eke out an uneasy coexistence with the mundane world above.
All the magic of Moscow—its minor gods and colorful doomed soldiery, its rusalki (mermaids) and vodyanoy (water spirits, which I had not realized were a part of Slavic folklore; I had thought that China Miéville invented 'em)—has been retreating in this way for centuries. The pace has ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of the Czars, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, glasnost, the post-Soviet Russian Federation... but always the magic has gone deeper, deeper underground, deeper even than the Metro tunnels evoked so strongly here (also called forth by Alexander Kaletski's excellent semi-autobiographical novel Metro: A Novel of the Moscow Underground, which displays much the same lyrical appreciation for the Moscow subway system).
Naturally, there is a quest, or several quests; an unlikely and happenstance band of surface dwellers ducks through a portal into the underworld of Moscow, into its secret history, in search of an explanation for the number of people disappearing from aboveground—are they truly being transformed into birds, as the diagnosed schizophrenic Galina believes happened to her sister Masha? Or is there something else at work?
I was not as immediately engaged by The Secret History of Moscow as I was by Sedia's subsequent novel, The Alchemy of Stone, but I did end up liking this one a lot. There are the occasional hints that the author is not a native English-speaker—dropped articles, odd prepositional choices—but those are infrequent enough that they only add to the charm. Ekaterina Sedia knows about mystery and magic, and about Moscow, as this subtle and melancholy fantasy shows.
abandoned
May 18, 2012Nope, had to abandon it - 80-something pages in and no spark for me whatsoever. I think Sedia needs an editor, or one that's more attentive than whoever worked on this one. Everything was jammed together with no purpose, no pacing. The perfunctory and joyless introduction of the three protagonists felt rushed, as if she thought she had to get all of their back stories out at the very beginning. "Here is Person A and her entire history up to now. Here is Person B and his entire history up to now. Here is Person C and his entire history up to now. Okay, here's how I am going to throw them together on an adventure." It didn't work for me at all; I would much rather have had their stories and personalities come out bit by bit as the novel progressed.
Same thing for certain points like one character thinking to herself "I used to feel that the subways held a secret. I was never strong enough to stick around and find out what it was" and then literally one page later another character says, "I know the way in - it's through the subway tunnels." This kind of "oh my god we've all had the same crazy ideas and they're binding us into a group" kind of plot point needs a little space to grow, otherwise it feels very write-by-the-numbers-as-fast-as-possible.
As for the fantasy world setting, I felt that Sedia had it all clearly in her mind and then forgot that her characters (who start in the real world) were unfamiliar with it and would need to react to it. The three protagonists are pulled from a subway in Moscow down into some alternate realm, and not a one of them seems to exclaim anything, express shock, look for a way out, or even question what just happened. Considering one of the characters is a police officer you'd think at least he would have reacted in some fashion.
Likewise when they encounter a pub in this new underground realm and they're told that the person / god that they're looking for drops by sometimes, no one bats an eyelash. A few pages later one of the protagonists even says, "Oh, I just want to sit here and watch the gods and people come and go." I'm sure Sedia had in mind that multiple gods would come and go, but how does that character know? How can they all be so blase about their experience?
FInally, the writing itself needed work. Example: "the white arch cupping above them and a dim road stretching in every direction." It's not a huge error but it stands out nonetheless. Repetitive description was a problem as well: a paragraph later the same road was referenced: "the road they stood on stretched before them." Apparently this road goes everywhere and it stretches the entire time it does it. Got it.
I see a lot of other reviewers referencing a great fantasy story; I just couldn't get through the writing to find it.
Same thing for certain points like one character thinking to herself "I used to feel that the subways held a secret. I was never strong enough to stick around and find out what it was" and then literally one page later another character says, "I know the way in - it's through the subway tunnels." This kind of "oh my god we've all had the same crazy ideas and they're binding us into a group" kind of plot point needs a little space to grow, otherwise it feels very write-by-the-numbers-as-fast-as-possible.
As for the fantasy world setting, I felt that Sedia had it all clearly in her mind and then forgot that her characters (who start in the real world) were unfamiliar with it and would need to react to it. The three protagonists are pulled from a subway in Moscow down into some alternate realm, and not a one of them seems to exclaim anything, express shock, look for a way out, or even question what just happened. Considering one of the characters is a police officer you'd think at least he would have reacted in some fashion.
Likewise when they encounter a pub in this new underground realm and they're told that the person / god that they're looking for drops by sometimes, no one bats an eyelash. A few pages later one of the protagonists even says, "Oh, I just want to sit here and watch the gods and people come and go." I'm sure Sedia had in mind that multiple gods would come and go, but how does that character know? How can they all be so blase about their experience?
FInally, the writing itself needed work. Example: "the white arch cupping above them and a dim road stretching in every direction." It's not a huge error but it stands out nonetheless. Repetitive description was a problem as well: a paragraph later the same road was referenced: "the road they stood on stretched before them." Apparently this road goes everywhere and it stretches the entire time it does it. Got it.
I see a lot of other reviewers referencing a great fantasy story; I just couldn't get through the writing to find it.
May 9, 2018
This review can also be found on my blog
The blurb makes it sound like a relatively ordinary fantasy novel: protagonist sets out to find a disappeared loved one and discovers a magical world. But it’s not quite. Usually, in these kinds of set-ups, the protagonists take a long time to accept that there is really something supernatural going on. Here, it takes Galina, Yakov, and Fyodor three chapters until they decide that all the disappeared people must have turned into birds and crossed through a portal that appeared in a puddle to a different world. Then they come to the obvious conclusion that they are too large to fit through the puddle-portal and that they need a larger one. Fortunately, Fyodor knows just the place and a few pages later they are in an underworld in which they don’t just meet old Russian Gods and spirits but also humans – from the time of the Golden Horde, the pogroms under Alexander III, the Decembrist revolt and the Stalinist Terror – who also passed through a portal and now live in this underworld. They don’t question any of those things. In fact, it doesn’t take them long to discuss which spirit would be the most likely to be helpful or trust solutions that appeared to them in a dream.
And because they didn’t question these things, I didn’t either. Often enough I do get frustrated when characters just know things or just accept something extraordinary without complaining but here I just rolled with it. More than once I was reminded of Peter S. Beagle’s The Innkeeper's Song, another book that doesn’t bother much with complex worldbuilding (or going deep into the characters’ motivation) but I felt that it wasn’t necessary for the story. And similarly, when Galina and the others go and question a celestial cow about the missing people’s whereabouts I just shrugged and went ‘Yeah. Seems a reasonable thing to do.’
What did bother me was that the book doesn’t make much difference between the main and the side characters. Once they appear for the first time, we get their backstory of how they ended up in the underworld but each gets the same amount of detail. It doesn’t matter if the person ends up being important for the plot or just appear this once. It feels like some of the backstories are just there to give the reader a small history lesson about a certain era. I would have preferred to get to know some of the other characters better, especially since there were loose ends in some of the storylines.
I saw that a lot of people didn’t enjoy the book at all and I can understand that. The ‘just roll with it’-attitude won’t work for everybody but for me it did and so I got a charming and magical story.
The blurb makes it sound like a relatively ordinary fantasy novel: protagonist sets out to find a disappeared loved one and discovers a magical world. But it’s not quite. Usually, in these kinds of set-ups, the protagonists take a long time to accept that there is really something supernatural going on. Here, it takes Galina, Yakov, and Fyodor three chapters until they decide that all the disappeared people must have turned into birds and crossed through a portal that appeared in a puddle to a different world. Then they come to the obvious conclusion that they are too large to fit through the puddle-portal and that they need a larger one. Fortunately, Fyodor knows just the place and a few pages later they are in an underworld in which they don’t just meet old Russian Gods and spirits but also humans – from the time of the Golden Horde, the pogroms under Alexander III, the Decembrist revolt and the Stalinist Terror – who also passed through a portal and now live in this underworld. They don’t question any of those things. In fact, it doesn’t take them long to discuss which spirit would be the most likely to be helpful or trust solutions that appeared to them in a dream.
And because they didn’t question these things, I didn’t either. Often enough I do get frustrated when characters just know things or just accept something extraordinary without complaining but here I just rolled with it. More than once I was reminded of Peter S. Beagle’s The Innkeeper's Song, another book that doesn’t bother much with complex worldbuilding (or going deep into the characters’ motivation) but I felt that it wasn’t necessary for the story. And similarly, when Galina and the others go and question a celestial cow about the missing people’s whereabouts I just shrugged and went ‘Yeah. Seems a reasonable thing to do.’
What did bother me was that the book doesn’t make much difference between the main and the side characters. Once they appear for the first time, we get their backstory of how they ended up in the underworld but each gets the same amount of detail. It doesn’t matter if the person ends up being important for the plot or just appear this once. It feels like some of the backstories are just there to give the reader a small history lesson about a certain era. I would have preferred to get to know some of the other characters better, especially since there were loose ends in some of the storylines.
I saw that a lot of people didn’t enjoy the book at all and I can understand that. The ‘just roll with it’-attitude won’t work for everybody but for me it did and so I got a charming and magical story.
April 25, 2010
The Secret History of Moscow was like a cross between Neil Gaiman's American Gods and The Inferno.
The premise: Galina's sister turns into a jackdaw after giving birth. Her pursuit of the truth leads her into a mystical underworld where Russian legends, fables, and ordinary citizens have wound up after being forgotten or detached from the world.
Every character has an interesting history, and this provides some of the best storytelling in the story. We get to meet characters of Russian folklore and myth, political refugees, social dissidents, and others that symbolize Russian history or its people. The rest is basically Galina working with this crazy cast of characters to figure out what happened to her sister.
The last third of the book was a bit disjointed, and everything happened rather quickly in order to get to the end. Still, it was fun to see all these crazy characters and to read into the subtext of Russian social commentary. I'm not well-versed in Russian history or symbolism, but I felt like I had a pretty good idea of the author's symbolic intentions, especially since some of it is explained by the characters (probably with an American audience in mind). Someone a bit more familiar with Russia would probably get more out of it, but I still didn't feel out of the loop.
Though some of particulars of how the end came together were a little fuzzy, I still had a great time reading this book. A lot of great fantastical elements really propelled this story. Though it was a race of a ride to get there, the final pages don't disappoint. I finished this book with a lot of underlined passages.
The premise: Galina's sister turns into a jackdaw after giving birth. Her pursuit of the truth leads her into a mystical underworld where Russian legends, fables, and ordinary citizens have wound up after being forgotten or detached from the world.
Every character has an interesting history, and this provides some of the best storytelling in the story. We get to meet characters of Russian folklore and myth, political refugees, social dissidents, and others that symbolize Russian history or its people. The rest is basically Galina working with this crazy cast of characters to figure out what happened to her sister.
The last third of the book was a bit disjointed, and everything happened rather quickly in order to get to the end. Still, it was fun to see all these crazy characters and to read into the subtext of Russian social commentary. I'm not well-versed in Russian history or symbolism, but I felt like I had a pretty good idea of the author's symbolic intentions, especially since some of it is explained by the characters (probably with an American audience in mind). Someone a bit more familiar with Russia would probably get more out of it, but I still didn't feel out of the loop.
Though some of particulars of how the end came together were a little fuzzy, I still had a great time reading this book. A lot of great fantastical elements really propelled this story. Though it was a race of a ride to get there, the final pages don't disappoint. I finished this book with a lot of underlined passages.
March 21, 2008
It is the early nineties in Moscow, and reality seems to be thinning and winding down along with communism. People are disappearing, transformed into birds before the eyes of their loved ones; strange passages to another world are opening around the city, glimpsed in reflections and dark buildings; and legends seem to be coming to life. Three people are drawn through one of these passages: Galina, whose sister gave birth and then turned into a jackdaw; Yakov, a policeman who wants to believe only in the rational; and Fyodor, a drunken street artist who has a love-hate relationship with gypsies. Which of the dark, dangerous legendary figures they meet is responsible for meddling with the world above, and how can they reset the balance between the two worlds?
This book bears a superficial resemblance to such "other city" narratives as Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and China Miéville's Un Lun Dun , and the publishers even got Gaiman to write a blurb for it ("A lovely, disconcerting book that does for Moscow what I hope my own Neverwhere may have done to London . . ."), but Sedia's début, besides being very un-English, is much more reminiscent of Gaiman's American Gods in the way it explores the dark and primeval myths that lie behind and beneath everyday life.
This book bears a superficial resemblance to such "other city" narratives as Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and China Miéville's Un Lun Dun , and the publishers even got Gaiman to write a blurb for it ("A lovely, disconcerting book that does for Moscow what I hope my own Neverwhere may have done to London . . ."), but Sedia's début, besides being very un-English, is much more reminiscent of Gaiman's American Gods in the way it explores the dark and primeval myths that lie behind and beneath everyday life.
February 7, 2008
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The idea of an underground world populated by fantastic and folklorish creatures has been done before to great success (Neverwhere by Gaiman comes to mind, among many others), but I didn't find too much that was particularly distinctive or engaging about Sedia's prose. This is set in Moscow in the 1990's, and the goings-on in the book are very tied to Russia's atmosphere of the time. That was very interesting to me, along with the various Russian fairy tale figures that flit about in underground Moscow, the underground that collects creatures and Muscovites from all eras and traps them like flies in amber.
The problem for me was the characters. I had a really hard time getting into their heads and figuring out what motivated them. Ostensibly, Galina is looking for her sister Masha. But as a reader, I don't particularly care about Masha, because she's got such a brief presence in the book. Yakov helps Galina, because he hasn't got anywhere else to go and he's pinned his identity on his being a police officer. Fyodor is stuck selling his artwork, fearing the world and loathing himself.
This was interesting, but ultimately unrewarding read.
The problem for me was the characters. I had a really hard time getting into their heads and figuring out what motivated them. Ostensibly, Galina is looking for her sister Masha. But as a reader, I don't particularly care about Masha, because she's got such a brief presence in the book. Yakov helps Galina, because he hasn't got anywhere else to go and he's pinned his identity on his being a police officer. Fyodor is stuck selling his artwork, fearing the world and loathing himself.
This was interesting, but ultimately unrewarding read.
September 10, 2009
What a great idea! Moscow has a hidden underground world, populated with many mythic figures as well as some lucky people from the surface (our world). Something is going on though, people have started to disappear...
Unfortunately I couldn't get into the story. First of all I didn't like the way how the background of the characters is told. It's not cleverly interwoven into the story, no, there is always a clear cut and the reader is presented with all the facts (usually closely related to some pieces of the Russian history). This alone wouldn't be a problem, but the author does it for many characters. Many, even the minor ones. I felt completely bored after reading yet another short biography.
The story itself starts interesting but felt too disjointed. Little parts that didn't connect and too many people who have been added to the mix but failed to spice up the story.
To be honest, I can't imagine who might enjoy this book and I am surprised about the many positive reviews.
Unfortunately I couldn't get into the story. First of all I didn't like the way how the background of the characters is told. It's not cleverly interwoven into the story, no, there is always a clear cut and the reader is presented with all the facts (usually closely related to some pieces of the Russian history). This alone wouldn't be a problem, but the author does it for many characters. Many, even the minor ones. I felt completely bored after reading yet another short biography.
The story itself starts interesting but felt too disjointed. Little parts that didn't connect and too many people who have been added to the mix but failed to spice up the story.
To be honest, I can't imagine who might enjoy this book and I am surprised about the many positive reviews.
January 26, 2008
Could have used better editing - it felt a lot like trying to read a long Mad Lib. Maybe I'll try it again sometime when I'm feeling more patient, as it's gotten a lot of good reviews.
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