“‘To get to Hell,’ he says in a low voice, ‘they take you through America.
There is a door behind a door.’”
Yelena Moskovich is back with another mind-bending book like nothing you’ve ever read before. A Door Behind A Door, her third novel, tells the story of Olga Bukuchava, a young woman who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States with her family in the early 1990s. Now an adult, Olga is in a stable relationship with the woman she loves, life progressing right along until she receives an unexpected phone call. This call is from Nicky, a man who, as an adolescent, stabbed an old woman three times, murdering her in the apartment building where Olga and Nicky both grew up. Out of prison and living in the United States, Nicky calls Olga to inform her that her brother, Moshe, has been captured after stabbing a young woman three times (Coincidence? I think not!) and is in need of her help.
Olga’s journey to aid Moshe is dark and twisty, blurring the line of what is real and what is not. Mixing supernatural elements (imagine, if you will: the apparition of a dead boy and a dog that narrates part of the tale) with tangibly real scenes, Moskovich guides readers through the world of an “underground Midwestern Russian mafia,” leaving them wondering what in the actual hell just happened.
Moskovich plays with form, parsing her writing into bite-size pieces, each brief section given a heading and a staccato sentence structure which drives the story forward. There are truly no rules, the confines of any typical story framework do not exist in her world. The narrative waltzes through the perspectives of an array of characters. Time and place become hazy constructs, thus creating a world that is simultaneously mystifying and riveting.
A Door Behind A Door is a fitting title for such a layered work, one which is likely to have many interpretations as each reader explores the novel through a slightly different lens. Images of water, waves, and the sea abound, clearly holding more meaning below the surface. A poem about a boat leaving safe harbour to head into a storm is referenced throughout, which may be interpreted as a parallel to Olga’s journey from her relatively safe life into the underworld in an attempt to save Moshe. While characterised as evil, it is also interesting to note that Nicky loved math growing up, he found some peace in it despite his difficult upbringing. So it is not surprising that numbers (particularly the number three) echo across the narrative as well. Such deliberate choices are sure to rattle around in the minds of readers long after finishing the book.
Many writers reveal pieces of their story bit by bit, this is not not a new approach. Moskovich, however, does this in a way like no other. Reading A Door Behind A Door is like pulling a loose string and watching the fabric slowly unravel … except it snags and snarls upon itself, looping back over, revisiting what you think you know with a new piece of information or from a different angle. Fear not, though, brave readers. If you are willing to take a leap into the unknown, the payoff is most assuredly there in Moskovich’s extraordinary writing.
A Door Behind A Door is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore. Many thanks to Two Dollar Radio for providing me with an advance copy of this novel. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
In Yelena Moskovich’s spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of ’91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga’s past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.
