According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, a “virtuoso” is “one who excels in the technique of an art” or “a person who has great skill at some endeavor.” According to Yelena Moskovich in her latest novel, however, a “virtuoso” is something quite different: a high-tech mattress which provides top-of-the-line medical care for the most critical and severely ill patients. It is “the human sleep wherein science can reach its hand the farthest it has ever reached to intervene.” And, oh, how Moskovich reaches with this novel! Past traditional literary boundaries, beyond the confines of the ordinary, and out into the surreal. Fair warning, my dear readers… this one requires focus, effort, and a willingness to venture into the beautiful and bizarre!
Virtuoso is a striking probe into feminine love and friendships, an examination of the dichotomy between the individual and the bleeding of self into other which occurs in relationships. It is an exploration of how to exist and find meaning in the unbalanced world we live in; a blurring, off-kilter study of the line between belonging and just plain longing.
The narrative follows two young women, Jana and Zorka, as they come of age in Prague during the 1980s. Set against the backdrop of Communism’s decline, Zorka moves into Jana’s apartment building and brings with her light, adventure, and an unexpected love to fill Jana’s otherwise boring days. Days where the only rules she has to follow are keep from being taken or molested. Days where these two girls begin learning to navigate feelings great and small within an otherwise nearly colourless world. Then Zorka suddenly disappears.
The novel simultaneously follows the lives of Aimée, a young beauty, and her older wife Dominique, an actress past her prime, as they navigate their life together in Paris. Aimée deeply admires Dominique – who perhaps, in some ways, fills the void Aimée’s mother left behind – clinging to her with an aching desperation until an unexpected tragedy comes to pass.
Moskovich weaves these storylines together in a way which cannot adequately be conveyed without experiencing the journey for yourself –partially because so much happens within the deceptively brief 256 pages of this book and partially because readers are sure to generate a range of opinions, interpretations, and questions about what actually happens within the 256 pages of this book! The story leaps from past to present and back again, alternating between the perspectives of multiple narrators, to unveil the lives of all four women over the years in a way that is magnetic. It touches on themes of love and loss, self and other, considering the ebbs and flows of how these interact over a lifetime. Historical touchstones and cultural references are juxtaposed against an often dream-like narrative situated in unreality. Yet where Moskovich truly hooks the reader is with the incisive structure of her novel — a progression of rich prose, tightly woven and carefully blocked, which provides powerful imagery and emotion through the words as much as through the breaths taken in between. And in the end, the story escalates to a nearly hallucinatory experience which will leave you asking what in the hell just happened.
Indie publisher Two Dollar Radio has a way of putting out deliciously different works and Yelena Moskovich’s latest novel is no exception. If you are looking for a more challenging work of literary fiction that will linger on your mind and leave you replaying scenes in your head for days to come, this is the book for you!
Virtuoso is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers. Many thanks to the publisher for gifting me a finished copy of this incredibly unique read.
Yelena Moskovich was born in Ukraine (former USSR) and emigrated to Wisconsin with her family as Jewish refugees in 1991. She studied theatre at Emerson College, Boston, and in France at the Lecoq School of Physical Theatre and Université Paris 8. Her plays and performances have been produced in the US, Canada, France, and Sweden. She has also written for Vogue, Frieze Magazine, The Paris Review, TLS, New Statesman, Happy Reader, Mixte Magazine, the Skirt Chronicles, and Dyke_on Magazine. She is the winner of the 2017 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. In 2018, she served as a curator and exhibiting artist at the Los Angeles Queer Biennial. Her first novel, The Natashas, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2016. She lives in Paris.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Jana was born in Prague shortly after the self-immolating Czech martyrs Jan Palach and Jan Zajic committed their ritual protestations against Soviet influence. As Communism began to crumble, Jana’s unremarkable life becomes more remarkable when a precocious young girl named Zorka moves into the apartment building with her mother and sick father. With her signature two-finger salute and abrasive wit, Zorka flavors the girls’ days against her mother’s protestations to not “be weird.” But after scorching her mother’s prized fur coat and stealing from a nefarious teacher, Zorka suddenly disappears.
Aimee Saint-Pe married young to an older woman, Dominique, an actress whose star has crested and is in decline. After years of tumult, the couple find themselves on vacation in Portugal when Dominique abruptly passes, with Aimee returning to Paris convinced she’s being followed by a blue mist.
A quixotic journey of self-discovery, Virtuoso follows Zorka as she comes of age in Wisconsin and Boston amidst a backdrop of clothing logos, MTV, computer coders, and transgender youth. But it isn’t till a Parisian conference hall brimming with orthopedic mattresses and therapeutic appendages when Jana first encounters Aimee, their fates steering them both to a cryptic bar on the Rue de Prague, and, perhaps, Zorka.
With a distinctive prose flair and spellbinding vision, Virtuoso is a story of love, loss, and self-discovery that heralds Yelena Moskovich as a brilliant and one-of-a-kind visionary.
