★《The Week》雜誌選為2016年18本最佳小說之一
★已售出英、美、土和中簡等版權

The internationally acclaimed author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov now returns to gift us with Forty Rooms, which outshines even that prizewinning novel.

Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women’s identity, of women’s choices, that no modern novel has explored so deeply.

“Forty rooms” is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. (He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her.

Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel.

 

Olga Grushin was born in Moscow in 1971 and became a US citizen in 2002. Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, earned her a place onGranta’s list of Best Young American Novelists and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and was a finalist for both The Los Angeles Times’ Best First Novel and the Orange Prize. Both it and her second novel, The Line, earned international accolades and made many best-of-the-year lists.

 

“It is author Olga Grushin’s tantalizing storytelling device that pulls her readers through the narrative as if wandering through an architect’s blueprint of a home still very much under construction. In “Forty Rooms” she has found an original storytelling device that should add to her growing acclaim.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“[An] ingenious and original conceit...Forty Rooms is a deft, engaging novel written with rare eloquence. But a ferociously uncompromising morality play lurks within it.” — Wall Street Journal

“Grushin is too sly to be bound by cliché. If Mrs. Caldwell fails to be true to herself—and that "if" is sincere—this is because there are real questions about who that true self is. These are questions that women, especially, will recognize. Honest, tender, and exquisitely crafted. A novel to savor.” — Kirkus, starred review

"[A]n enchanted meditation on poetry and life... Grushin best captures the nagging regrets of her tortured artist in a magically lyrical pair of conversations with her bitter and bowed husband." — Publishers Weekly

“Sly and devastating…Full of original and quoted poems, this heartbreaking novel is an invitation to contemplate whether the richness and ambition of one’s life has to correspond to the proportions of one’s landscape.” — O Magazine

“Grushin beautifully renders a riddle of our time” — Chicago Tribune

"Lyrical and poignant, this is an ideal read for artists who seek answers to life's biggest questions." — Bookish

“Forty Rooms is a sensitive and exquisitely told meditation on the pleasures of art.” — BookPage

“But this novel isn’t after perfection, either of life or work. Rather, it shows how life is built out of adjustment — dreams tempered and poetry transformed into prose.” — Boston Globe

“Sly and devastating…Full of original and quoted poems, this heartbreaking novel is an invitation to contemplate whether the richness and ambition of one’s life has to correspond to the proportions of one’s landscape.” — O Magazine

“Grushin beautifully renders a riddle of our time” — Chicago Tribune

"Lyrical and poignant, this is an ideal read for artists who seek answers to life's biggest questions." — Bookish

“Forty Rooms is a sensitive and exquisitely told meditation on the pleasures of art.” — BookPage

“But this novel isn’t after perfection, either of life or work. Rather, it shows how life is built out of adjustment — dreams tempered and poetry transformed into prose.” — Boston Globe