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Lena GorelikMeine weißen Nächte (My White Nights)
A novel
288 pages
“If I’m unhappy, Jan puts a pan of potatoes on the boil. For my breakfast.”
Rights sold to:
Netherlands (Signatuure)
In a delightfully comic first novel touched with a trace of melancholy, Lena Gorelik, a young Russian writer living in Germany, relates the ins and outs of a young woman’s life. Her heroine’s plate would be full to overflowing having to choose between her boyfriend of now and her boyfriend of yore – but her Russian family regularly brings her back to earth with a thump, plucks her from the realm of fantasy to the solid world of fact.
What can a girl do with a very emotional, all Russian mother on the phone at least once a day checking you’ve eaten enough? What’s a girl to do with a marvellous - but terribly forgetful -
grandmother lost in the corridors of her St Petersburg past? And the most charming of brothers throwing himself into Buddhism in a fervour of determined devotion?
Anja has her hands full keeping her relationship with Jan bobbing along, and then there’s always the idea of looking for a job. Her family, however, are experts at making their presence felt, even a few hundred kilometres away.
When Anja’s ex-boyfriend turns up one day and lands her a job in a Russian travel agency she finds herself confronted once again with her roots. Memories of her Russian childhood, where a plate of potatoes served with herring for breakfast was the epitome of happiness, and later of the German halls of residence, where deep frozen pizza was heated up on a hob for lack of an oven, flood her mind. There seems to be more to living with a dual identity than drawing the attention of one’s German friends to the fact that Pushkin, as well as being a brand of vodka, was first and foremost a poet.
Lena Gorelik was born in St Petersburg in 1981. She moved to Germany in 1992 with her Russian-Jewish family, so-called “contingent refugees”. She is currently a student at the German School of Journalism in Munich. Her most recent publication was her translation from the Russian of the autobiographical novel White on Black by Ruben Gonzalez Gallego.
“Gorelik’s stories are often comic while laced with a gentle melancholic quality.”
Welt am Sonntag
[Cover: Paul Barnes, using a photo by Bettina Rheims (1999, detail)
Hardcover, 288 pages, linen with dust wrapper and book mark]
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