Virtuoso, the second novel by the Paris-based Ukrainian-American Yelena Moskovich, traces the trajectory of two Prague schoolfriends and one-time lovers, Jana and Zorka, as they move to the west and shape lives for themselves there.
Like Moskovich’s powerful debut, The Natashas, this is a book about the last generation to be born in the Soviet era and how the fall of communism shaped their social, sexual and artistic engagement with the world. Towards the end of the novel, we meet Erki, an Estonian fashion designer living in Paris who establishes a group called “the EB” (the Eastern Bloc), “the romantic cowboys of their countries’ cultural and economic isolation… [who] put their childhood disparities into fabrics, cuts and fashion statements”. It feels like Moskovich is seeking to do something similar with the novel – to find a voice and narrative form that captures the peculiarity of this generation’s existence as flotsam carried on the great political currents of the past three decades.
About halfway through the book, when Zorka has been taken by her unstable mother to stay with her brother Gejza in Wisconsin, there’s a passage that demonstrates both the novel’s interest in the intersection of the personal and the political and Moskovich’s subtlety when conveying this to the reader. Zorka and her mother are watching a film in English: “Zorka understood that phrase ‘I love you’, from the rest of the mumbling, and would snuff ‘bullshit’ under her breath whenever she’d hear it, because she had never in her life, ever, seen a man and a woman say ‘I love you’ to each other when it wasn’t a threat or something you do in the hallway to show your neighbours you are reliable tenants.”
The Natashas was remarkable for its frank treatment of sexuality, but also for its singular use of language. Moskovich’s mother tongue is Ukrainian, and while her English is faultless, there’s a pleasing otherness about her syntax and word choice, a sense that there are different languages operating just beneath the surface of the text. It makes for a reading experience that is always strikingly original, if occasionally baffling. How you feel about a sentence like “Dominique’s mother was a vigorous altruist with a shy polyglot hobby from a Catholic parish just outside of Lyon” will largely dictate how you respond to the novel as a whole. This linguistic strangeness is reflected in Moskovich’s use of chronology – the novel makes regular leaps through time – and the highly strung emotional register of the book.
The story of Jana and Zorka is interlaced with another narrative – the marriage of Aimée, a young Parisian translator, to Dominique, an older actress. There’s also the burgeoning online relationship between o_hotgirlAmy_o and Dominixxika_N39; the former a midwestern schoolgirl, the latter a wife trapped (at times literally) by her boorish husband in her home outside of Prague. The novel’s ending brings together all of the narrative strands in a denouement that Moskovich handles brutally and brilliantly. Virtuoso is a fine, fraught, strange novel that builds impressively on the model Moskovich established with The Natashas. It will be fascinating to see what she writes next.
• Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich is published by Serpent’s Tail (£14.99). To order a copy for £13.19 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
