Notes From An Alina Bronsky Completist
I can safely say she's one of my favorite novelists in the world
I have been seriously slacking around here lately. My apologies. I’ve been working on what will be my fifth book, and something I realized midway through the research part of it was I’ve never taken book leave. I don’t know who even gets book leave anymore, besides people who work full-time for publications with “New York” in the name, but I probably should sit down before undertaking a big project and figure out how to better delegate my time. The problem is that no matter how much I love whatever it is I’m working on, whether it’s an article or something that takes months like a novel, I will eventually need to move my attention elsewhere. I can’t stay focused on one thing for too long without risking boredom. I can lock in for days, and even weeks on a project, but my mind will begin to wander at some point, and I’ll need to do something else before I can return to the other project. I can usually deal with it, but a book that takes a lot of research plus writing on a somewhat tight deadline makes me feel constricted. That’s good for me since I love new challenges, but it makes balancing everything a little difficult.
This is all my way of saying that I’m almost in the clear and The Melt will resume its more normal schedule sometime in August. It’s also how I lead into bringing up that having my brain wrapped up in one subject for so long makes it difficult to concentrate on reading as much as I normally do, so I’ve defaulted to picking up books I’ve already read before. It’s usually a random process where I just pluck whatever off my bookshelf, and if I can get into it again, then I’ll keep going. But this time around, I went into my rereading with intention and grabbed my copy of Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine. I’ve spent the last dozen years telling people it’s one of my favorite novels of the century, so I decided reminding myself why was in order.
The good news is that rereading Bronsky’s 2011 book that was translated from German by Tim Mohr delighted me even more this time around. I can’t remember if I made this comparison the first time I read it when Europa Editions first put the book out, but there was something that reminded me of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, another book that I always bring up when mentioning my favorite novels of the 20th century and also of all-time. Bronsky’s character Rosa is as deliciously conniving as any of Wharton’s ladder climbers, except Rosa is just below the lowest rung living in the Soviet Union of the 1980s, but reading it now opposed to the other side of 2016, I see her scheming differently. Without giving away everything about the book, I’ll say that reading a book about an underdog antihero hits differently now than it did in 2012 or whenever I last read it. Even if they don’t always have the best or wisest intentions, I kept thinking Rosa isn’t as bad as the system or the people in charge who make life difficult for her and everybody else.
If you haven’t read The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, then none of this makes much sense to you. The reason I’m even mentioning it is because the reread got me wanting more of Bronsky’s work. I’d read her debut, Broken Glass Park, before The Hottest Dishes… came out, but that was it. I decided to give my mind something new, so I went with the slim 2016 novel, Baba Dunja’s Last Love. Just like The Hottest Dishes…, I had to keep reminding myself the book had been translated into English because the humor pops so well in a way that doesn’t always make it over from the original language. Baba Dunja, like Rosa, is an underdog. She’s poor, lives near Chernobyl, and just wants to live out her days in peace. Everything is going as well as it possibly could in the radiation-drenched ghost town she lives in, then it all takes a sharp, crazy turn.
Again, I don’t want to give away much, and this isn’t a review of her work. Instead, it’s a chance to mention that now I’m onto Bronsky’s 2021 novel, My Grandmother’s Braid, and as I make my way through it, I keep thinking that if there’s any writer I want to convince people to read, it’s her. Part of it is her perfect balance of humor and humanity, but also because her work takes me away from 2026 America, but the absurdity in her books feels familiar enough that I don’t have to go that far.
My guess is that I’ll be back to reading pretty regularly in a few weeks. When I do, I’ll probably be wrapping up my Alina Bronsky completion tour, and I’m actually a little sad about that. I don’t remember the last time I binged an author’s work, and I’m enjoying every second of it.